An Utterly Average Gacha Experience - Cross Summoner:R Review

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In some ways, I feel bad for Cross Summoner:R. It’s not a bad game, but it really never had a chance at seriously impressing me.

Yesterday I posted a review of Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, a new gacha-based mobile RPG from Square Enix. If you read that review, you’ll know that I was really impressed with that game, going so far as to call it the best-written mobile JRPG I’ve ever played. If not for some annoying technical issues, I would easily have given it a rare five-star score. It’s that good.

But at the same time that I was falling in love with Octopath Traveler, I was also spending a lot of time with Cross Summoner:R, the newest gacha-based mobile RPG from Damo Network. If the title seems strange, it’s because the extra “R” at the end is meant to infer “remake,” because this is technically a remake of the original Cross Summoner (released in English as Final Sky) which hit mobile devices way back in 2014. The first version of Cross Summoner had a relatively small but passionate fan base that sang its praises, so I was excited to try out this modernized version. But even without the unfair comparisons to Champions of the Continent, Cross Summoner:R is just...okay.

Cross Summoner:R tells a fantasy tale that comes across as profoundly generic even by the relatively low standards of gacha games. Players begin by taking on the role of Fortis, a knight in the Hallowed Kingdom. The Hallowed Kingdom and the surrounding realms—home to angels, demons, elves, gods, and all sorts of monstrous creatures—have been at peace for decades, but as the game begins, that period of calm is shattered, and long-simmering political rivalries and social tensions boil over.

As is typical of the genre, these earth-shattering events push Fortis into a world-spanning journey to figure out who or what is behind the sudden unrest and how to achieve peace again. Along the way, Fortis must recruit a variety of characters to help lead him through dangerous areas and tackle increasingly difficult enemy forces. And how does Fortis (and the player) recruit those allies? Through everyone’s favorite money-grabbing mechanic: the gacha, of course!

To Cross Summoner:R’s credit, its gacha system does not seem particularly greedy. I’ve played gacha games that are more generous, sure, but I’ve played gacha games that are much worse too. This one at least offers multiple avenues for earning the premium currency used to buy gacha pulls, and there’s also only just over thirty characters to pull at launch, which is a fairly low number for the genre. Annoyingly, however, the majority of your gacha pulls will just earn you shards that can be put toward purchasing or upgrading a character rather than the full character themself.

However, it’s not the gacha that’s the real source of free-to-play mechanics annoyance here: It’s the time-gating. As with many games of this style, Cross Summoner:R utilizes an annoying stamina system where players must spend stamina for each level they play. You can bank over two hundred stamina at a time, but each run at a level, even replaying ones you’ve already completed, costs twelve stamina. With levels lasting no more than a couple of minutes at the most, your energy drains fast; I didn’t even play particularly lengthy sessions and still found myself completely running out of stamina almost every time I opened the game.

And once that energy is gone, you’re left either spending your precious premium currency to refill a miserly portion of it, or just waiting...and waiting...and waiting. Completely refilling your stamina from zero takes over twelve hours, an absurd length of time that really makes the stamina system feel like it’s designed to push impatient players to spend real money.

One of the reasons stamina usage is such a problem in Cross Summoner:R is that the game requires lots of grinding out levels you’ve already been through for upgrade materials. Each individual hero in the game has upwards of half a dozen different ways to increase their power—from traditional leveling to armor upgrades to skill boosts—and many of those methods require resources farmed from levels. Those levels can be instantly farmed via a mechanic called “sweeping” once you’ve completed them with a three-star rating, but you’re never guaranteed to get the materials you want.

I often found myself blowing through fifty or a hundred stamina in less than a minute, just sweeping an old stage enough times to get the one or two upgrade items I needed. More than once, I finally pulled together everything I needed to perform a “hero breakthrough,” which provides a big boost in power for a character, only to realize after doing it that I didn’t have enough stamina left to even take that newly improved character into a new level and test out their upgraded stats.

While the multiple paths for character and party upgrades can be overwhelming, especially when paired with that awful stamina system, I must admit that the overall sense of progression these different paths afforded was the best hook Cross Summoner:R had for me. I’ve said before that part of my love of RPGs is getting to see numbers go up, and this game provides that in spades. Any time I hit a wall where my party couldn’t progress, I got to mull over numerous options for getting them more powerful, any of which could work, and I really enjoyed that. If you’re someone who plays gacha games because they like slowly building up characters and getting them to the highest possible state of performance, Cross Summoner:R could easily keep you busy for months or even years.

It’s a good thing the character planning and progression is engaging too, because the gameplay absolutely is not. As the aforementioned sweeping mechanic may have suggested, Cross Summoner:R is very much an auto-battle-focused game. It’s not just in replaying old levels, though; even in new levels, even with the “auto” button switched off, players have extremely limited control over the party. Essentially, you get to watch your crew of up to four characters hack and slash and spellcast at bad guys, and the only thing you can do is choose when they use their special abilities. That’s it. It is one of the least interactive battle systems I’ve seen outside of idle games that are specifically designed to downplay interaction of that type.

From the gameplay design to the story to the gacha implementation, every element of Cross Summoner:R feels like it just barely rises above mediocre and then stops. The character design is solid, the art during battle is crisp and looks good, and as mentioned before, the progression mechanics have a lot of depth that can be satisfying. But it feels like the game is one standout feature away from getting a much more enthusiastic recommendation.

Cross Summoner:R is...fine. Aside from the truly aggravating stamina system, it’s not awful. If you can deal with that flaw, and if you love this type of game, it’s worth giving a shot. But if you’re already wary of gacha titles or overloaded on generic fantasy RPGs, there’s just nothing here that’s going to make it worth your time. And I don’t think that’s just the high from Octopath Traveler talking.

SCORE: 3 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• King’s Raid. As one of the longer-running and most popular auto-battle-heavy gacha RPGs out there, King’s Raid is direct competition for Cross Summoner:R. If you’ve played the former to death and want something that fills a similar niche but is new, give Cross Summoner:R a shot.

• Watching numbers get bigger. For whatever its weaknesses, Cross Summoner:R is very good at activating that Pavlovian part of the brain that provides a shot of happy feelings whenever you press a button that makes the number go up.

💬 Have you played Cross Summoner:R? How do you think it stacks up against the gacha game competition? And even if you haven’t played it, let me know what you think of the trend of auto-battle focused mobile RPGs as a whole. Do you like them, or do you wish every RPG would give you full control? Leave a comment below, and I’ll be sure to respond!

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