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By Manuel  Players: 1 Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC CRYMACHINA is an Action RPG that comes by way of FuRyu and NIS America. I actually mistakenly thought it was somehow related to FuRyu's earlier title CRYSTAR, a game that I really enjoyed in its NIS re-release. This game is related only in style and themes, and really does its own thing. It actually is quite unique in terms of story, art style, and just general atmosphere and feel of the world. Actually, calling it simply an Action RPG truly does it a disservice as it really changes up the gameplay formula; not always for the best. I'm getting ahead of myself though. Let's back up, and take a long look at CRYMACHINA and see if this a world that you're going to want to dip your feet into. CRYMACHINA takes place in a world where humans went extinct thousands of years ago. Humans being humans, this was mostly due to war, but there was also a plague that thinned out the numbers just prior to that. On the brink of extinction humanity had one last hope, to blast off into space and try again. That's right, a mysterious set of creators gathered up all the personality data of humanity and launched it into space on a space station (?) called "Eden". Besides carrying the memories of all the dead humans, Eden also houses AI robotic beings known as the Deus ex Machina who are to recreate humanity in the vastness of space using the vast wealth of personality data at their fingertips. Things go a little sideways when the main Dei ex Machina, the First one, goes missing. Apparently all the Deus ex Machina were on a precipice of outright war, as the others fall into a state of in-fighting and chaos. Two main factions form as both Enoa, the Eighth Dei ex Machina, and Zoe, the Seventh, stand against each other and even seek to influence the other surviving Machina into helping their cause. Both Enoa and Zoe create E.V.E.s, special human-like robots who are created from the Personality Data of those deemed to have "high humanity", to help them in their cause. Unfortunately Enoa's faction is on a bit of a losing streak before the start of the game.
Now, enter the player. You are placed into the role of Leben, a so-called "Chosen One" who fights alongside Enoa's other E.V.E.s, Mikoto and Ami. Your goal is to retrieve all the ID data from the rogue Deus ex Machina and restore Enoa to her full power. Standing in your way are the E.V.E.s of Zoe, the so-called "Trinity". The Trinity are made up of Hayat, Vida, Hayim, and Can. Yes, there are four of them, but there is a story reason for this. Let's not forget that Eden's ultimate goal is to revive humanity. While Enoa and Zoe both claim to still be reaching for that conclusion, not all the Dei ex Machina are quite so sure. While Zoe is a constant thorn in your side, and the reason why Enoa and her E.V.E.s were in a weakened state for so long, you have to also deal with Machina who simply think that humanity had its chance and should exist again. So while you fight for humanity in a new synthetic body, you hope to slowly become more human and unravel the mystery behind why this war in Eden started in the first place. There's actually quite a bit more I can get into regarding the story, but it's all rather complicated, and full of even more terms that will take too long to explain. Suffice it to say that story is front and center in CRYMACHINA, and arguably the sole reason you're going to want to see this journey to the end.
Besides going through lots of cutscenes, and tea parties, you'll mostly be fighting robots or robot bosses, so let's talk about the combat system a bit. Well, as it so happens the combat system is such a complicated mess that I'm not even sure where to begin. I guess I'll try to walk you through what a normal encounter plays out like. First off you have a main attack that you can use to hopefully weaken a foe. Once they are weakened you then have a launching strike that knocks an opponent in the air. You can use that launching attack whenever you want actually, but it's only really effective when the enemy is weakened. From there you can perform a finishing move, that doesn't actually finish anything, and repeat the process again. Simple right? Well, there's quite a bit more to it that I left out. You also have a long-range attack that's unique to each of the E.V.E.s that has limited ammo that respawns over time. This is often used for level puzzles, but it can be used to attack enemies too. I never once bothered with it though since the animation where you switch to it is so awkward that a jumping strike usually gets the job done faster. Oh yeah, you can jump and dash to move around the battlefield, and the latter move also allows you to perform perfect dodges where time slows down a bit and you can get in a few extra hits. Unfortunately you're not invincible during this slow down period and I often found that I'd accidentally placed myself into the past of the attack that I had just "perfectly" dodged. I'm not done yet by the way. There's also two auxiliary weapons that you can equip that float near you on your left and right. These are powerful attacks that require a cooldown period before they can be used again, so I often only used them as a last resort and forgot about the otherwise. Also, there's special abilities that you can use that come from Enoa herself. These are mostly buffs that are more meant for you than for attacking. These include healing, raising your attack, etc. What's crazy is that there's actually a few more things that I'm just not going to mention here, like charged attacks, but I think you get the point that it's quite a needlessly complicated system that will either confuse you, or have you mashing every button in a feeble hope of securing a win through luck. Or you can take to it perfectly and do perfect boss runs. I don't know if that perfect run person exists, but I guess anything is possible. My honest suggestion is that you turn on "Casual Mode" unless you're a hardcore action gamer as it just gets to be too much after a while.
Now with all that talk about combat you might assume that you do a lot of it. Well... not exactly. It's actually impressive how short most of the game's stages are. Some of them only feature a grouping of 2-3 enemies and then you're off to fight the boss. Later levels might have two waves of enemies, or more than one enemy encounter room, but they're all very short. The underwater area you explore early on has long stretches where you're grinding on a wire. While these parts do look cool, they make up about half the time you spend in the level before reaching its boss. That's not the last time that happens either, and I started to find going through the levels was more of a chore than anything else. Oh, and this lack of non-boss combat is also why I had so much trouble grasping the combat system at first. There just weren't enough times I got to actually use it. Even though you're only fighting a tiny handful of generic enemies per level, they're extremely weak and go down in a few hits. This made me think that this was going to be an easy game and then the first member of Trinity you fight, Hayat, mopped the floor with me until I mastered the combat system through pure attrition. It can be argued that this kind of thing might be intentional, but I can't imagine developers thinking that having to replay a boss battle 5-10 times is anyone's idea of fun. Also, the difficulty is all over the place. I had no problem with anything again until I fought Logos, a whale-like Dei ex Machina several stages later. Since it's a big whale that you can't directly attack, you have to sever these wires while dodging projectiles and defeating summoned enemies. I still don't know what kept killing me here as I swear I was one-shotted each of the 8+ times I saw a Game Over screen. I eventually got through the battle by random chance, and I don't think I'll ever go back to that level ever again. Once again, learn from my mistakes and just turn on that Casual Mode. The frustration of this game's uneven difficulty just isn't worth it.
Whether you're going to enjoy this game or not depends on how you feel about a rather repetitive gameplay loop. Just about every stage follows the same pattern. You enter, fight a lackey, fight a member of Trinity, fight the Dei ex Machina, have a cutscene that wraps things up and sets up the next stage. In-between you have to go through several tea break cutscenes that flesh out the characters and unlock the next stage(s). There are some optional areas and levels, but everything is extremely linear. Think Final Fantasy XIII linear and you'll get the idea of what I'm talking about. Those tea scenes though are something else. I get the developers wanting to make these scenes required since they're pretty much the only place where characterization happens, but it feels so random when a new stage unlocks after a rather silly conversation. I don't want to make it feel like I didn't enjoy those scenes, as I had to stop myself from making every screenshot in this review be lines from them. Like the constant playing around of the characters relationships, Enoa constantly giving everyone a "gold star", Leben fawning over Enoa and hating humans, and Mikoto and Ami's constant movie references, are just so great. That's pretty much the game though. Add in the fact that the levels are pretty short for the most part, and you realize that you spend more time sitting around talking and/or preparing for your next boss encounter than actually "playing the game". Things do change up a bit partway through, but overall it's all repetition until you rush towards the end. If you're so inclined you can read through the many (and I mean many) in-game entries, change outfits if you've purchased the overpriced DLC, or play around with character models and music too, but that all came off as too much considering you spend so much time in those tea breaks. Ultimately, CRYMACHINA feels a little hollow at times if you stop and think about it too much, but thankfully things move along at such a breakneck pace that this rarely happens.
Graphics are going to be a hard thing for me to critique here. You may have noticed that my screenshots in this review look a little rough around the edges, well, there's a reason for that. I played this game on the Nintendo Switch, solely in Handheld Mode. It looked great when I was playing it, but I couldn't help but notice how low-res everything looked when going over the screens. Now I don't want you to think that this is a Mortal Kombat One on Switch situation, as there is nothing like that here, it's just that there's no way for the Switch to stand up to the PlayStation 5. It also didn't help that I tend to exclusively play in Handheld Mode. With all this said, I have seen the game running on more powerful hardware and I can say that it looks even more amazing that it did on the Switch. That's not exactly a big feat though is it? Setting platforms aside, I have to say that game has a very "epic" feel to it, with some areas just seeming extremely vast and sprawling. Scenes like riding the wire with Logos' whales near you, and stepping into the wide open liars of any of the Deus Ex Machina, just look impressive no matter what you're playing on. There were several times that I almost gasped when I dropped through a deep pit into a new area that was even more expansive than where I just came from. It's something that is extremely hard to describe, or even capture in pictures. Also, while the graphics did get a little blurry during heated boss battles, I can't say that I experienced any slowdown during my entire time with the game. It may not be the most impressive outing on the Switch, but it definitely is optimized. I want to talk character designs a bit as there's some interesting stuff to note here. Just about all the characters are female, with the "male" characters pretty much only coming in the form of the robot enemies. There are reasons for this in-game that I don't want to reveal here, but it might put off some players who aren't too keen on playing with an all-female cast. Personally, I don't mind it in the least, and there's nothing near the level of silliness that one would see in something like Final Fantasy X-2. That probably owes to the fact that the story is so overall dark, and the characters themselves are rather tragic and flawed, but there's probably more to it than that. I actually might not even have noticed the all-girl cast if it wasn't directly pointed out in-game. A bigger thing to talk about regarding character design is HOW the all-female cast looks. Most of the characters wear very revealing clothes, the "male gaze" is all over the place with the Trinity girls, and everyone has the longest legs you'll find this side of a CLAMP anime. This is probably where most people will be lost, but the sheer beauty of everything will hopefully get most people past the awkward bits. It's definitely a bit of an acquired taste, and there are times when everything comes off a bit creepy, but it just somehow works within the context of the game and its world. It's hard to explain, but I wanted to both address the obvious points with the designs, while also saying that they really aren't as bad as they might seem at first. Oh, and the animated opening and CG cutscenes are just perfect.
There are several things I loved and hated when it came to sound, but one thing I didn't mind at all was the voice acting. All the characters are spot on, with the performances for Enoa and Leben standing out particularly. Just about everything is voiced, and there wasn't a single character that didn't grow on me after a while. Even characters like Vida and Enoa, who deliver their lines with very little emotion, manage to somehow imbue character into what could've been a lazy performance. It has to be mentioned that the dialogue is only available in Japanese as CRYMACHINA does not have an English dub of any sorts. Seeing as how I didn't care much for FuRyu's other game, CRYSTAR's, English-language dub, I'm going to mark this as a positive. I will admit that the lack of an English dub a bit bothersome when it comes to the many voiced bits that take place during action scenes, but they're largely unimportant and you're not really missing anything if you're unable to read their subtitles way in the corner of the screen. The music fares a bit less well when compared to the voice acting, but the sound design here is good in general. While there aren't any tracks that stood out to me, and I probably won't ever care to check out a standalone soundtrack release down the line, every piece fits in as needed. I guess my big problem with the music is that it goes for more for an atmospheric score as opposed to more song-based compositions one usually finds in JRPGs. Everything here though, so while I don't have a lot of praise for the music, I also have no complaints. I originally was going to just fold my talk on controls in the bigger gameplay section, but there are some things I wanted to talk about here. Everything that I'm about to complain about is easy to eventually get used to, but the learning curve is so big, and the choices made are so odd, that I felt I wanted to single them out a bit. First of all the "A" button (I'm referring to the Switch here, but it's a similar "main" button thing on other platforms.) isn't what you use to interact with things. For that you use the "Y" button, or whichever the game uses for your main attack. This is an odd choice as you still use that main button (once again "A" in my case) to make choices in menus, and advance dialogue. It reminded me of the whole "jumping in place" thing when you tried to talk to people in Final Fantasy XV, but the control scheme here didn't have to be this complicated. Also, fighting in general uses way too many buttons, and there were entire forms of attack I just never used. This may be why I had such trouble with certain sections of the game, but I shouldn't have to press literally every button on the controller in each boss battle. My last complaint has to with jumping. There are a few sections that have platforming, and I swear the game was not created with this in mind. Each character barely jumps any notable distance, and even when you add the dash to them it only helps you barely clear some of the tricky sections you're required to. Seeing how everything is just a bit clunky overall, I was flabbergasted whenever platforming sections popped up. Thankfully they're few and far between. All my complaints aside, the controls are pretty responsive, even considering the problems I mentioned above.
CRYMACHINA has a lot of content, but most of it is extra stuff that is only there for completionists. There are lots of log entries that are available if you're willing to replay the same levels over and over again, and there are some optional sections in each level that lead to optional bosses and equipment that are extremely hard. That being said, the game moves really fast and the average player can probably see everything it has to offer in about 20-25 hours depending on how lucky they are on those tough boss encounters. I personally liked the story and visuals enough that I didn't mind the overall lack of depth to the game, but I find it hard to say that its current $59.99 price tag is justified. I don't want to make it sound like I don't think it's WORTH that price point, but it understandably might put some off. Also, the general short gameplay makes learning all the ins and outs of combat sting all the more too. I mean, unless you're planning on doing some sort of challenge run, you'll find that you've mastered the difficult sections just in time to see the credits roll. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that you're best off not expecting this to be a game that you come back to again and again. It's more of a strong core experience, like reading a good book, rather than a game that is as replayable as CRYSTAR was. Then again, it can also be argued that CRYMACHINA is a very neat and trim game that doesn't waste your time. I'm not sure if that's something I agree with, but it's worth keeping in the back of your mind while playing.
Do I recommend CRYMACHINA? That's the big question here, and I'm not sure how to answer it. The short answer is "yes", but the longer answer is "yes, but...", and that's where the important parts lie. If you check out the game and are a fan of its art style, or want to play an Action RPG that has a rather dark, dystopian, sci-fi story, then this one if for you. If you're looking for something more upbeat, or even a more standard representation of the genre, then you're better off skipping this one. I for one think that the story is more than worth it alone. I tried my best to explain it at the start of this review, but rest assured that my failed synopsis does it no justice. If you can overlook a mixed bag of gameplay for story, then pretend I only said "yes" in answer to that recommend question. If you do get it though, be sure to stick it out to the end, and don't be afraid to turn on that Casual Mode if you're having trouble. This game is too good to just give up because of its high difficulty. And if you beat it? Well, you've definitely earned a gold star! For More Information on CRYMACHINA: https://nisamerica.com/crymachina/ Story: A Gameplay: C+ Graphics: B+ Music/Sound: B+ Value: B- Overall: B+ Pros: + Action RPGs with dark, dystopian, sci-fi storylines are pretty rare, and this is a pretty good one all things considered. + The voice acting is really spot on and I didn't find myself minding the lack of an English-language dub. + While they are quite limited on the Switch, the graphics are very impressive and set the stage perfectly. + CRYMACHINA has a very small cast, but you really get to know and care for them over time. + There are Tea Time sections! +/- Not at all related to CRYSTAR despite what some may think. Cons: - The difficulty can be very uneven at times, with very easy sections immediately followed by near impossible ones. - Combat can be somewhat clunky with a control scheme that's more complicated than it needs to be. - Levels themselves feel almost pointless at times and it seems like it might've been better as just a series of boss encounters. - While the story and experience are excellent, the overall experience is pretty short without much reason to come back to it. 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.  Another gold star for you! |
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