Fun with lots of content, but a replay with carried-over levels and items is required for the True Ending(s) and nearly all postgame optional challenges

This review is for the 2021-2022 remake of Exe-Create’s Asdivine Cross for consoles and PC. I played the Nintendo Switch version.

The Asdivine Cross remake has some improvements and additions, and is probably the best version to play. Console/PC versions of Asdivine Cross give the player some Shop currency at the beginning of the game, and allow the player to grind Shop currency more easily than mobile versions.

Grinding is facilitated by how Asdivine Cross gives the player complete control over the encounter rate. A menu option lets the player set the rate to Half, Normal, or Double at will; an accessory from the Arena will force encounters with every step; and special armor earned from an endgame/postgame damage-dealing challenge will turn encounters off.

Asdivine Cross is the fourth game in the Asdivine series; the first three are Asdivine Saga (which finally has a remake available outside of Japan), Asdivine Hearts, and Asdivine Dios. Asdivine Cross is not part of either Asdivine duology (the duologies are Asdivine Hearts + Asdivine Hearts 2, and Asdivine Dios + Asdivine Menace). Since the story of Asdivine Cross has no direct link to the stories of other Asdivine games, Asdivine Cross works fine as a starting point to investigate the series… mostly.

Why “mostly”? Because Asdivine Cross has a questionable design quirk present in some older Exe-Create games, including Infinite Dunamis and Journey to Kreisia. A full second playthrough is required to access the True Ending(s) and nearly all optional postgame challenges.

Carried-over levels and items trivialize 90% of the second playthrough, and the player can choose to skip past any story cutscenes they have seen before, but the second playthrough still requires navigating all of the story dungeons a second time. A battle shortcut in the options menu can be toggled to instantly win any random encounters that the party greatly outlevels. There are new story scenes exclusive to the second playthrough, but these are few and far between until the endgame.

In addition to the True Ending(s), the reward for a second playthrough is access to a LOT of optional endgame/postgame content: extra quests, an ultra-hard Secret Arena, an ultra-hard bonus dungeon with an ultimate superboss, several previously sealed areas made available, access to a dungeon that requires 100 Shop currency to enter, and access to an infinite training gauntlet of infinitely scaling enemies, which is essentially an unlimited source of optional superboss challenges.

The battle system of Asdivine Cross is Exe-Create’s refined turn-based formula, with four difficulty levels that can be changed at any time out of combat. Combat is naturally a little slow, but can be sped up by turning animations off and using autobattle when possible. A tactics system allows the player to refine their formation and autobattle options.

There is a weapon fusion and enhancement system that lets characters magnify specific battle statistics up to 100%, inflict bad status, or gain other benefits. Getting enemies to drop weapons that can be fused to improve weapon enhancements is mostly random luck, although some accessories and Lucile’s “trust gauge” ability can induce enemies to yield better loot. Since each weapon can only hold four enhancements, the player must think carefully about which enhancements to build up, transfer, or delete. Customizing weapons and selecting accessories with care is vitally important on the highest difficulty of Expert!

One limitation of Asdivine Cross is that physical skills require charges from each character’s BG meter, which replenishes very slowly during combat. Spells and items to replenish the BG meter are easy to get, but can only target a single character. The BG meter has a maximum of nine charges, and always resets to 0 if a character is KO’d.

This means that most physical skills, especially hard-hitting physical damage skills that require 5-9 charges, are difficult to use frequently. The protagonist Harvey has lots of physical attacks that he will hardly ever get to use unless the party spends way too many combat turns feeding him items.

A more interesting feature of the combat system is the unique powers of the party member Lucile. Lucile can learn (almost) any skill or spell by being hit with it, including the skills and spells of all other party members, and including many unique monster skills and spells! Some monsters will use certain abilities only in specific situations, and figuring out how to get monsters to cast their learnable abilities on Lucile is a fun set of mini-puzzles for the player to solve.

No monster skills are missable. There are Skill Bag items that teach Lucile a random, unlearned monster skill – but Skill Bags cost 200 Shop currency each (only a few Skill Bags can be obtained outside of the Shop), and there are VERY many learnable skills!

If the player doesn’t want to bother teaching Lucile monster skills and spells, then they don’t need to. Lucile can get by with just her own abilities plus abilities learned from other party members.

Since the party may need to attack Lucile or manipulate enemies in order to teach Lucile skills, Asdivine Cross allows the player to cast (almost) any spell or skill on (almost) anyone. The only limitation is that some abilities are ineffective when used against bosses (these are marked with “Boss: X” in their description). Do you want to heal a monster, nuke your own party, or give a party member’s turn to a monster (with the “Substitute” spell)? You’re free to do it – just be prepared for the consequences, or even a self-inflicted Game Over!

Lucile has an even more astonishing special ability that makes her temporarily able to heal ALL damage from ALL attacks, at the cost of being temporarily vulnerable to damage from any source of healing. She also has an innate passive ability to attract monster attention when she’s the party leader, and active abilities to make monsters focus their attacks or even their support skills on her. Lucile is potentially both the ultimate immortal tank, and a supremely flexible skill specialist!

Lucile’s powers are a much-needed counter to the brutally punishing challenges of Expert difficulty. Figuring out the optimal balance between the near-immortal Lucile and the not-so-immortal rest of the party can be tricky, especially when enemies have way too much HP, and party attacks are quite weak unless powered up with weapon enhancements.

A soft level cap tied to the area the party is in makes it nearly impossible to outlevel enemies on the first playthrough, unless the player knows exactly where and how to grind on high-level enemies (without dying too much). If (and only if) the player takes full advantage of Lucile’s powers, then outleveling enemies is not required even on Expert.

Asdivine Cross also has a “trust gauge” that can unleash a devastating attack, paralyze bosses(!) with debuffs and bad status, or steal every dropped item an enemy can yield – but the player must choose carefully! The “trust gauge” takes many rounds to fill in combat, decreases if a party member is KO’d, and can’t be restored by items.

The overall gameplay package of Asdivine Cross is quite fun despite its bias against physical attack skills. The story is… more limited.

Asdivine games in general are a cross between save-the-world fantasy and lighthearted “harem” romantic comedy. In Asdivine Cross, the male protagonist Harvey is somewhat dense and clueless, and romantic relationships with his female teammates only develop in certain endings.

Asdivine Cross has multiple Normal Endings on a first playthrough, and multiple True Endings on a second playthrough. Ending variants are determined by how much trust Harvey has with each of the young women in his party. Trust is gained (or lost!) through Harvey’s responses during “free time” story scenes, or by giving gifts that can be found in-game, earned from the Arena, or purchased from the Shop.

There are a few questionable moments in the story and in sidequests, but the occasional weirdness is clearly intended for comedy relief and not meant to be taken seriously. There is also a shocking amount of death and destruction (mostly visited upon generic NPCs) for such a lighthearted game. Worse, very little accountability is demanded from the perpetrator(s), who never face any threat of court trial or sentencing from any kind of justice system, at all, ever.

These aspects of Asdivine Cross’ story ultimately become eclipsed by the much bigger problem of the world’s impending doom and how it can be saved, or if it can be saved. Overall, Asdivine Cross’ story is engaging and funny, but Bellisario’s Maxim – “Don’t examine this too closely” – applies full force. It’s the gameplay, championed by immortal tank/monster skill specialist Lucile and enriched by lots of postgame content, that really makes Asdivine Cross stand out among Exe-Create’s catalog.

I love this game. For one,it’s nice and long. I like that in a kemco game. I love it. I just wish it had a sequel.

Very good game

The story for this game is pretty good. The characters are fine, though they could definitely be better. In particular, while they do get occasionally annoying, there is some depth to them, and unlike some other Asdivine games, none of them seem to be overly flirtatious with the lead character. The plot is one of the game’s strong points. While it starts out as a pretty generic “Kill the evil guy” kind of plot, and the first plot twist is rather obvious, I really like how they integrate the New Game+ feature of the game into the plotline in a way that not only makes sense but also makes an engaging story.

While most of the mechanics are rather generic, two things do stick out about the mechanics. First, the fact that one of the characters can learn almost every skill (and magic) in the game is rather neat and something you don’t often seen. Second, Kemco limited the skill guage to 9 bars rather than making it into another MP-like resource. You actually have to think about how to use the skill guage, which is a good thing in my opinion.

The game is pretty long, and the balancing is pretty good with the exception of one skill combination that completely breaks the game’s balance. It took me about 48 hours to do 95% of the content in the game (including True End and the Timewarp Tower) on Expert difficulty.

Overall, Asdivine Cross is a solid game, and while the price tag is up there, it’s worth considering. You can also play the free version, which is what I did originally. (I later bought the paid version because it was a good game.)

This game is

Best game ever

Immediately became a Fave Despite Any Irritating Factors

I absolutely love this game; and I have played it a few times. It has replay value, and it has many hours of gameplay. The post-game content is like another game in itself.

As already written in another review, the post-game is dum-dee-dum since you have to repeat the entire story before you get to the juicy new stuff. You keep everything you earned, (except Arena achievements). Because of that, the enemies are just a nuisance to have to battle since they are no challenge. Fortunately, you’re able to earn items from the Arena to improve that experience. You can earn equipment that increases the chance of Metal mons appearing. You can also “attract” enemies to help Quests go by quicker. Post-game does offer perks such as speeding up text you already saw in the previous play-through. Quite a few new areas unlock. They are fun and challenging. The new areas add a whole new dimension, depth, and feel to the game.

Cross is a classic-style RPG with turn-based combat, leveling-up, and grinding. The story has a linear design, but as the game progresses and you gain more travel options, you are able to explore other areas as you choose. That feature is what adds to the ability of this game being re-playable. There is never any question about what-to-do-next; and the world is open to explore.

The dialogue is the only real complaint I have about this game. Much of the dialogue propels the game forward and adds to character development. However, there is too much dialogue that is unnecessarily long, juvenile, extraneous, inappropriate, and redundant- sometimes to the point where it becomes just too much and too annoying.

Throughout the game, we learn, and feel, many of the emotions of the three main ladies. Their background stories are well-written and poignant. For Harvey, the exact opposite is true, even though I found him to be the most likable and lovable character. The ending with Harvey and Olivia is the most realistic and acceptable. The other endings were silly and childlike in some ways. Some dialogue is tear-jerking. (Maybe because I’m a sappy girl.) Some dialogue is incredibly funny. For a game to cause that gamut of emotion for a player, that proves the writing style and ability to improve the game’s dialogue exist. It should have been that style all the way through the game. Since some of the dialogue is shallow, it is like the storyline is written by two totally different people. In summ, I have love-hate feelings for the dialogue.

Weapon crafting and amalgamation are always winners with me. In Cross, we get to amalgamate some really strong weapons into unfathomably stronger ones. The strong weapons are perfect for bonus events and areas. But for storyline gameplay, those weapons make your team OP to the point of becoming boring. When that occurs, every enemy presents little-to-no challenge, and you one-shot the final boss.

The best of "customize weapon" Kemco game (as of right now)

Recently, there’s been quite a lot of Kemco games where you customize some of the effects of the weapon. You know, adding HP, Str, Recover HP, inflict status, etc etc etc. I’ve played a lot of them (not all), and from what I can tell, this is the best one. There’s no crazy mechanic that you can abuse, and more importantly, there’s no mind-grinding things you need to do, since post-game equipments will do that for you. Specifically, later accessories will level up your skills without you actually using them. All of them. That is so nice. Something Asdivine Menace lacked.

And then, there’s a character who can learn enemy skill. And, you can take the easy way out by purchasing gem-only items. Gems are relatively easy to come by. Yay.

SUPERB

Asdivine Cross was something that surprised me a lot. First of all because the company that made it was nothing more and nothing less than KEMCO, this company here in Brazil we idolized it for having made one of the best racing games of all time, which is the series TOP GEAR.

I did not think that this company still existed and even more, doing RPG’s in Old School style, and at a level as beautiful as Asdivine Cross, that game if media had been properly recognized, as it is better than many RPG’s known. the story about Harvey and his friends is told very smooth, no winding, dynamic and very funny.

Point to KEMCO

Good Game

Originally played this weeks ago and finished everything…
Almost everything!
But I got sick walking of the same dungeons and I really have to retrace my previous footsteps…
Currently on level 999 max and still having trouble on beating Neo-Maidame Curie …
P.S. didn’t spent a penny on this game …

inkwarrior saved this game

Or rather, his post on Forum about Fairyland grinding did.

======== First Impression
Originally I hated this game, because Trust Charge is dependent on Harvey (the only male hero), and because you only have 9 BG, and mostly because my low level. (Protip: Forget you can set encounter to half, unless you’ve the premium version.)

======== Comments After Playing
But after starting anew, following the tips and walkthroughs here, this is in overall a pretty cool game. In fact, most of it was because on Fairyland I got level 53 (you know, battle shortcut is a great thing to have…) and because I got a Rune Sword – so Harvey killed Void elemental monsters without a sweat.

It’s Asdivine, and in fact, if you’re seeking for something very different than Asdivine Dios or Menace, you’re looking at the wrong place. But if you liked Dios and Menace, you ought to like this one too.

New Game+ is required for reaching True End, however, as the only thing which is reset are chests (so I got to open the same chests twice!!), you should be back at the place where normal and true end diverges within very few hours.

I do have one complaint, though: Some maps are enraging. While most maps are well-drawn, and there’s a huge diversity for gameplay (like minecarts puzzles, and such), when going from a place to another, sometimes, you’re forced to revisit a dungeon – and this does not happens only once. In fact, walking on the same dungeon, doing the same path, back and forth, to progress on main story is what took a star off Gameplay.

======== Rating Summary
Already explained about gameplay above, I simply got sick walking back and forth the same dungeon. No problems with controls, they were easy to use (but finding a couple of chests was walkthrough-only), story is well written/presented, and I like battles on Asdivine. And while I didn’t like having only 9 skill points available for each character, I probably wouldn’t use magic in battles without it, so it was a smart gameplay move, which made more difficult fights interesting.

======== Monetary Worth
I would consider buying the premium version of this game.