CrossCode's Fake MMO Puts Sword Art Online And .Hack Games To Shame
The indie game CrossCode has a premise that may sound familiar to gamers, as a single-player game within a simulated MMORPG where the events of the game have real-world stakes. Both the .hack series as well as various Sword Art Online game adaptations cover similar ground, but CrossCode arguably outdoes these more sprawling franchises in a single lower budget title. CrossCode combined a well-crafted and unpredictable story with likeable characters, fast-paced action RPG combat, and brutally hard puzzles. It accomplished all of this in one game, where the alternatives either required multiple games to deliver their stories, or experience with anime and manga content in order to appreciate them fully.
[Warning: Spoilers for CrossCode's story follow.]
The story of CrossCode casts players as Lea, a character with amnesia who is instructed to play CrossWorlds, an MMORPG with an odd narrative conceit of being based in a physical space with characters and monsters made of physical matter, all controlled by distant players. Lea’s mentor figure, Sergey Asimov, states that her physical body is in a coma and playing CrossWorlds might help her recover. Lea is initially mute, and the setup provides a play on the classic JRPG tropes of an amnesiac lead character who is also a silent protagonist. The initial story beats involve Lea advancing through the game and making friends, later joining the First Scholars guild, one which is more focused on following CrossWorlds’ in-game lore than others.
Lea later learns that she is an artificial intelligence, not a human, and a copy of the mind of a player named Shizuka Sakai. The AI copies, called Evotars, are similar to the notion of Cookies from the series Black Mirror. Just as Black Mirror went to some very dark places with the abuse of AI copies of human minds, CrossCode’s story involves a corrupt investor named Benedict Sidwell who intends to use the Evotar copies for personal gain by torturing them to extract sensitive information. While both Sword Art Online and .hack focused initially on narratives about players who were trapped in MMORPGs and whose lives were in peril, CrossCode’s stakes are more nuanced. The Evotars are every bit as self-aware and capable of emotion as their human originals, as with Black Mirror’s Cookies. For the humans, it is their private data that is threatened in CrossCode, but players are given reason to empathize with the plight of Lea and the other AI copies who suffer under Sidwell’s plan.
CrossCode opts for a throwback 2D art style that apes the 16-bit era look. Sword Art Online and .hack games are 3D titles, visually similar to the majority of actual MMORPGs, but CrossCode’s old-school aesthetic gives it a timeless quality. Battles can become extremely frantic but are still readable, allowing for the strategizing needed to succeed. Puzzles start out similar to those in classics like The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, but quickly escalate in scale and complexity. Most rely on firing bouncing spheres to interact with unreachable objects, later adding a chain of cause-and-effect environmental elements. The final puzzle challenges are an intricate series of such reactions, and possibly some of the more complex Rube Goldberg machines ever depicted in gaming.
Though the onscreen images are 2D characters dealing massive number strings of damage, and the fiction revolves around hacked code and artificial bodies, CrossCode makes its final confrontation feel epic and meaningful, where many RPGs that have the fate of the world at stake somehow fall short. Perhaps it's the fact that it tells a more personal story, where an AI character is developed with such humanity as to give players reason to invest emotionally in her fate. In any case, CrossCode may be on its way to becoming a cult classic, as it allows players to experience a simulated MMORPG in a single, self-contained game, while delivering a complete story that touches on the themes of artifice, reality, and personhood versus human bodies.