Another Super Mario RPG Clone?!: An Another Crusade Review

By JT

Players: 1
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, XBox, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC

Another Crusade is a 3D puppet-style, turn-based RPG set in a terrarium-like fantasy world. A hero has just returned from a major war between humans and monsters, having just beaten the Dragon King, when suddenly he spots something in the distance. Rai Reysend, our main protagonist, runs to see what is happening. There are barriers popping up all over the world and, in an effort to make it back home, Rai must bring down these barriers and figure out what has caused them. Along the way Rai will befriend a range of characters, from a past enemy to someone who is considered a traitor amongst his own people. The difference between religions of the world become blurred, and human and creature tensions are at an all-time high. Not just one hero, but this time a group of heroes must save the world and return their lands back to their former glory. The price is steep, both literally and figuratively. Is Another Crusade another Super Mario RPG clone, or is it enough to stand on its own as a potential love letter to the game? Well, we will have to find out in Dragon Vein Studios’ first ever video game: Another Crusade.

Please take note that there will be more leniency due to them being a new development team; however, that doesn’t absolve them from any mistakes made while developing Another Crusade. Everything expressed here is open and honest, and just like many other reviews I’ve done nothing will be off the table. Another Crusade isn’t Super Mario RPG, and there will probably never be a game that stands apart from Super Mario RPG enough to not just be called a clone. There are some elements of Another Crusade I enjoy, and there are some that I find really annoying.

Another Crusade is an self-identified action turn-based RPG on paper. Similar to Super Mario RPG there are both timed attacks and timed defensive blocks, with each timed attack dealing significantly more damage than a regular attack. With a well-placed timed block damage dealt is dropped drastically, and in some cases reduced all the way down to zero. There is a small window of opportunity to time a button press just right, and a perfectly executed button hit could mean the difference between staying alive for one more turn or death. This is actually one element I really enjoy from this game. It’s somewhat reliant on skill, because oftentimes the window is so small that execution can be near impossible even for the most attentive gamer. With each level you’re given a choice where to spend random points, some offering +1 or +3 to attack and defense or magic attack and magic defense, or even a +10 to HP sometimes. In this game HP added can be just as important as attack and defense. As you level so do your skills, such as SP and learning spells.

With Another Crusade, the grind is real. If you don’t need to grind, you must have mastered all the timings. Without mastering the timing the game is just a grindfest all the way through, from the first boss to the last boss. The first boss has an insane amount of HP from the beginning and hits hard. You’re almost expected to grind to a certain level before reaching him. Some boss fights can be much easier than others, but each thereafter require additional minutes to hours of grind to the point where it may take 30 to 40 battles in order to level. Not 30 to 40 minutes, but 30 to 40 battles, which can last several minutes per battle. This is due to giant fluctuations in experience needed for leveling. By only level 21, you are beginning to go into the million experience range. From 600k to over 1 million within one level. I’ve never seen another RPG go that hard before. The grind wouldn’t be as bad if there were larger varieties of monsters to fight, or even within an open world Action-RPG, but turn-based just makes things slow to a crawl. Super Mario RPG did this as well, and it was just as annoying then if you were unable to defeat a boss your first attempt. Luckily death takes you to a checkpoint, but with the side effect of items having been consumed permanently lost to battle, meaning a lot of time and money lost if you’re not careful. Collecting Crystals and Chests throughout the world help, but some require different puzzles that can take up much of your time. The brain teaser puzzles towards the end were really clever in execution though, and I really liked them. I struggled with one and was unable to look up any guide on how to do it, but I’m glad I rested and came back to it the next morning. It felt good knowing I did that, and in return I was able to help another player figure it out on a forum as well. More of those please! Sadly there were only really a handful of those types of puzzles, and Another Crusade could have really gone elsewhere with it, but it was fun while it lasted. The hopping minigames where you had to hop from one mushroom or rock to the other were painful, and didn’t offer anything really fun, causing many restarts of the same area due to an isometric perspective.

Usually when you hear of war in a game, most often it’s “many years ago”. Not for Another Crusade. It’s been a week since the Dragon King’s defeat, when two sides fought this huge war. Everyone talking about how the hero Rai is so great and a “slayer of dragons”. If the story would have begun with war and shifted to this trail of thought, I would have been completely on board with it. There wouldn’t be such a glaring issue with the game’s direction and story. With Super Mario RPG you first fight Bowser, then you befriend Bowser. Imagine that same game telling you that you’ve beaten Bowser, but befriending him without any actual confrontation during the whole game. He would have been such a forgettable character and probably wouldn’t be in as many parties as he was. Hint: The Dragon King got kicked out of my party because I realized he wasn’t even among the top three strongest characters, likely due to him being underleveled. It only takes one level difference in this game to show it. If Zhion, yes that’s the dragon’s name, was actually an interesting character with effective magic attacks and not just this "meh" character, I would probably have kept him throughout the entire game. We never got to fight in the battle, or even witness it, so Zhion is very forgettable. Perhaps some future free DLC could give us a real war we can see with our eyes. Have us as the hero actually fight the Dragon King himself. That would have become a nice enough demo to show people and get some sort of backstory, and keep people engaged most of all.

Is Another Crusade another Super Mario RPG? No, it isn’t. There are no memorable characters, and it feels as if they’re all just going through the motions. Battle, go through cringe monologue, some dialogue, break 4th wall on occasion, battle some more, rinse, and repeat. There should be a lot of heart within the story, but there isn’t. There is a lot of heart put into the models themselves and how they interact with the environment, such as people fainting after battle or after I’ve just destroyed their cake. Every plot of land in the overworld appears to be utilized well to the developers’ credit, but that doesn’t mean it all makes sense. Adding a town just for it to be there really made no sense, and could have been easily replaced by a peddler at the entrance of the next castle or dungeon. Aside from grabbing some chests and crystals, that’s the only thing it was really used for. Just replace that with a war-torn battlefield or burned down village or something and have the hero come back to it at the end of his journey only to discover the town rebuilt by both humans and creatures alike. Something not particularly new, but something fresh and compelling enough to even complete the story, which was no easy feat to complete either. There was a lot of grind involved, and if you were to max your level you might find yourself way too overpowered with the amount of wealth accumulated on top of how battles work incongruent with your level. There's also the literal Game Breaker item you’re able to acquire right before your battle with the final boss.

Often when you’re fighting a boss in Another Crusade you're fighting a Fusion Shard or Meteorite, which in my mind are still one and the same. They both break down barriers needed to advance, whether it be one breaking down an actual barrier or the barrier of the plot. In the end it’s supposed to all make sense, and most of it does. There are two Gods, Celes the Devine and Maham the Savior, Celes being a god of the people and Maham being a god of the creatures. Heavily inspired by religion, this game cleverly takes the two religions and pits them against each other, but it’s all a misunderstanding. Gods don’t tend to favor one another, so they fight. Both gods want to control the world, so they fight for it. Gods don’t like to encroach on each other’s territory, but they both just happened to pick a planet at the same time. One side just happened to pick human form and the other took the form of a creature. That’s how the original war got started, but of course it would have been nice if the player was actually able to see what went down during the war. The entire game would have made much more sense. However, how they do religion within the game makes a lot of sense at the very end. 

While nothing really pops like Super Mario RPG’s sounds do, Another Crusade does have pretty good sound effects and music. I don’t know if they made their own sound effects or if they got stock sound, but it all envelopes the game very nicely in a neat little package. Music is often calming, but because the music isn’t a real focus there was no need to turn up the volume on my speakers, unless I planned to do a high stakes battle. Sound was key to a lot of how I did battles, with many cues signaling me to block an attack or carry one out. In that sense the sound design actually worked in favor of the game.

Character models often look very low-res because they are. When I say Another Crusade takes a lot of inspiration from Super Mario RPG, it does so in much of the literal sense, and it’s not always translated well to paper. The models are similar to that of Geno’s character model, but they’re all that way. From all the characters in your party to every single villager, and even most bosses. There is no background, only walls and the void, whenever you enter a dungeon or town. Sometimes the scenery of land looks beautiful, as with the swamp and Luminous Castle, but half the time things are unpleasant to look at and can really break immersion.

Now people may not want to talk about price, especially developers, but let's cover that. Another Crusade is sitting right now at $19.99, which feels overpriced to me. If the game added more to the story and characters, sure. If the game wasn’t so grindy and the exp to level curve wasn’t so steep, then I could see that. I would even say that because of those two elements, the game could have taken my money for beyond that price. The value isn’t quite here, but it could be. There is some groundwork that needs to be completed for Dragon Vein Studios to become a powerhouse of RPGs. I see it, only because I’ve seen moderate foundations for RPGs grow into full franchises over the years. It begins with story because RPGs need a good story to thrive. If the developers can set the mood and lay out a very compelling story, then it’s already an above average game. Add in good custom music for a banging soundtrack and a great artist, and a game could go into my top 10 RPGs. So far the content to value proposition tips the scales on the lower end. The game almost forces you to grind for levels in order to beat the next boss, the main story just passes you by and can fly right over your head until the very last bit, and most everything about the characters are forgettable. I even had to look up Zhion’s name while writing out this review because he was so forgettable. If Rai wasn’t the hero of the story he would have been forgotten too. The one cool thing the game did was give you literal game-breaking mechanics that you can purchase for the end game. Aside from that I enjoyed myself with the sections that were just puzzles without any enemy intervention. Those were the best parts of the game in my opinion. Collectibles actually become worth it to collect, whether it be equipment or powerups from crystals, and the CAKE thing really surprised me. There were some legit funny moments, but they're few and far between.

Another Crusade doesn’t do enough to stand out from Super Mario RPG, and in fact does some things worse. The game should have stood more on its own, but have a story that keeps people engaged. Instead the game will probably always be seen as just a clone rather than a spiritual successor in any meaningful way. I really did enjoy this game for what it was trying to be, but found a lot of the grind to be more time consuming than worthwhile by the end. There are a lot of better options than forceful grind that takes unnecessary time out of the day to get through. Unfortunately there are a lot of RPGs that do grind differently, including the Final Fantasy series. Many RPGs right now on Steam cost half the price, and are twice as fun and expansive. Still it was a nice first attempt. Not to mention Another Crusade started life as a Kickstarter project...

Check out Another Crusade on PlayStation:
https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP6893-PPSA10972_00-5741735161827344

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Story: C
Gameplay: B-
Graphics: C+
Sound: B
Value: D

Overall: C+

Pros:
+ Timed attacks and blocks bring skill to turn-based combat.
+ Good sound design.
+ Good puzzles that change up the gameplay.
+ Crystals and CAKEs were fun to collect.

Cons:
- Grind was a real challenge, and it felt like too much padding on an otherwise decent game.
- Characters are not memorable.
- The story isn’t realized even partially until the very end.
- Not a large variety of enemies, which make even the least-subtle parts of the grind a slog.
- The puppet aesthetic don’t do the graphics taking inspiration from Super Mario RPG any justice.
- The game will be seen by most people as a Super Mario RPG clone.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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