Crash Fever Revisited: Potential.exe has crashed (iOS)

(Originally created 8-4-17)

    It’s been several weeks since I first reviewed Crash Fever. At the time, I felt pretty on the fence about whether it was good or not, so I finished off by stating it might need some time to fix itself up and do some translating, among other things. Well, I’ve seen some more of the world of ALICE, and now it’s time to pass a real verdict. Since I don’t have a gavel or a snarky white cat, I’ve gotten myself pumped for judgement by putting on a fake wolf head and playing some ‘All American Badass Mastered.’

Note: I do not own a wolf mask and I am not a post-apocalyptic warlord. As far as I know.

    I finally have to come out and say it: I’m not liking Crash Fever anymore. I still play it, for some reason, but the more content I see, the more I become irritated about the decisions that went into the game. There are some real problems with the game that could be fixed, but are still around after all the time the game has been out.

     Let’s start with one of the main issues mentioned last time: the translation. I’ve mentioned how there’s still untranslated text in the game, most notably for the titles of the event missions. I was patient about it, but they had a 2 year anniversary event in-game, and two years should be more than enough time to translate that text, especially when it could be warning us of a unit restriction. Even the already translated titles need fixing, as seen here:

So... 'Solitary Phoenix' or 'Wings Ablaze?' Who knows

    It’s not just the mission titles that suffer from English issues. The description of unit skills can be very vague or even inaccurate on the effects. A good example involves effects involving damaging enemies. The scaling starts out at “low,” and the goes to “medium” and “high.” Good start so far, but then it gets vague as it uses terms like “massive,” “ultra,” and “immense.” There’s no real way to tell which of those is ‘better’ when it comes to which is better, as the non-linear manner of progression (acquiring characters through capsule machines) makes it hard to get an idea of which adjective is supposed to be the “best.”

      Now for the second big issue I had: the lore, or rather the indeterminate presence of it. I’m starting to think that this metaphorical cat isn’t dead, but has no attention span and no sense of lore permanence, so the lore it makes is quickly forgotten or ignored. “The Matriarch” that was mentioned on starting the game for the first time is most likely non-existent, as there is no mention of it/her anywhere else. The closest thing to a main villain in the game seems to be a character known as the QUEEN (queen is in all caps, for some reason.) According to the news announcement for the event where she appears, she seeks to control all of ALICE, which, given the other characters I’ve seen, seems almost par for the course. The thought of being able to fight the QUEEN, known as ‘Bonanza,’ gave a glimmer of hope that maybe there was some cohesive lore here, even if this supposed greatest evil had a pretty unintimidating name for a world where all the avatars were named after heroes, gods, mythical creatures, and scientists.

Granted, I have seen much worse last names, but still… (Censor added by me.)

    So I go through the stages, banging my head on the various challenges until I get through, presumably because I could sue for a concussion if I banged hard enough. I beat the first stage with the QUEEN, and the post-battle lore/hint box says that apparently she one (great, there’s MORE?) of the QUEENs of ALICE and that she hates humans. No reason was given for why she had this truly original backstory. I only got to floor 11, but a video someone did where they beat floor 15 gives a congratulations message saying that “Bonanza has gone to sleep for a bit in order to repair the damaged access rights.” The game, of course, never mentioned anything about access rights. Maybe this game does have lore, but it just enjoys keeping players perpetually in the dark, only giving tiny puzzle pieces...that each come from different puzzles...and each puzzle is one that is mostly a solid color.

If you hate humans so much, why do you take the appearance of one?

    What little lore the game does provide feels inconsequential due to how the game seems to take a “tell, don’t show” approach to the world. The game claims that a character named Gauss is a famous scholar, but we never see or hear about him doing anything scholarly. During a battle with a genie named Xena, the text during the battle is claiming she’s grown into a giant, but the character looks just as big as other units of similar strength and rarity (units are rated from one to six stars, with more stars representing stronger units with flashier appearances.) As such, unless my six star unit representing Thumbelina has been stealing Mario’s Mega Mushrooms, I doubt this genie is really a giant. It doesn’t help that all the action in the stages has to be described with effect textboxes and characters talking.

She's not called THUMBelllina because she's a thumb-stealing serial killer.

    These problems with the game’s manner of storytelling and world building came to a head for me with the latest crossover event with The King of Fighters ’98. I was originally highly confused as to why a company would do a crossover with a game almost two decades old when there are plenty of more recent games that would work just as fine or even better for crossovers.

Like LISA! It's got fightin' men, mutants, and, as you can see here, craziness!

    It turns out, though, that the game has been getting some virtual store rereleases, so I might just be a bit out of the loop with fighting games. Still, I checked TV Tropes because I’ve never played the game, and it turns out this is one of those fighting games that has a story with a capital S. Their story isn’t one of those that just gets characters smacking each other, no sir! This one’s got an overreaching plot, five major story arcs, and tons of characters! Still, it could have been worse. We could have gotten BlazBlue, the fighting game that was originally going to be an RPG. Just look under ‘Audience-Alienating Premise’ in video games sometime.

    For the stages in this crossover event, there were two in particular that really brought out CF’s poor world building skills. The easiest of these stages ‘Left-Handed Hysteria,’ pits the player and their units against Ryuji Yamazaki, a criminal and psycho for hire who went insane when his sort-of surrogate father, a high-ranking Yakuza boss, was killed in front of him during an ambush. That background isn’t important. What is important is that after clearing the stage, the hint/lore textbox sometimes say that “Rumor has it that Ryuji acquired a virus on the black market. You should find out whether that’s true.” Not counting the fact that the player should be told that before playing the mission, there’s a problem, and here she is now:

She was a guest unit in Battle Cats, and it had more solid lore than this stat page does. Kind of sad, isn't it?

    This is Happy 100, a sort of mascot character for Crash Fever. You can’t see it here on her stat screen, but she’s supposed to be a virus, a fact that’s mentioned a few times in other stages. There are also a few other units on the lower tier of power that are supposed to be viruses. This brings up the question: Is this virus Ryuji has supposed to be something like Happy 100, or is it more the generic computer virus on a flash drive sort? This question, like the others brought up, is never answered.

    The next stage I have to mention is “A Cocoon to a Butterfly,” one of the harder stages in this event. This stage has the player fighting a couple of other KOF’98 characters who may or may not be under someone else’s control. The answer to that question, say it with me, is never revealed. They shift between sounding apologetic and generic taunts as they try to kill you. The boss of the stage, and the problem, is the fighter simply known as Chris.

Well, at least he's polite...and honest about his intent to kill me.

    From what I’ve gathered, Chris is a 14-year-old boy from Sweden who is apparently the chosen vessel for Orochi. In KOF lore, Orochi is basically the Bigger Bad of the series, a demon who made demonic pacts with some of the fighters around that time in the series. This causes a bit of a problem when brought into the Crash Fever world because of the existence of another character:

For once, alcoholism ISN'T the problem.

    Meet the Crash Fever version of Yamata no Orochi. She’s been around for a while, although it’s hard to say exactly when new characters are added to the world of Crash Fever. As a result of this crossover, we now have two Orochi-themed characters in this game. To make things more confusing, some of the units added in the crossover also are of the ‘Orochi’ type, presumably because they’ve made a pact with Orochi or are related through bloodline, but they don’t get the ‘Human’ type although they’re clearly human (the game is a little arbitrary on it's type classifications.) So now we have multiple characters related to two different Orochis. This can’t possibly be confusing.

   One last minor note on the crossover. The news announcement for the crossover mentioned that “KOF’98 crossover units come with voiced lines and have special animations in battle during crossover quests!” While the first part isn’t important to me, since I play phone games muted, that last part is a bit notable, since no other units are animated. The only unit I could find that was animated seems to be this one:

Guess what's animated here. Go on. Guess.

    If you guessed that it has to do with the most common superpower, you’re right. Adding the first character animation to the game, and it’s for jiggle physics. Good start, team. Totally classy. In terms of starts, that's like making a whole cinematic universe and constantly plugging said universe in your first movie, when no other parts of said universe exist yet.

    Crash Fever is one of those games I really wanted to enjoy, but I just couldn’t. While the panel-matching gameplay works solidly, the insistence of providing a story that doesn’t exist keeps eclipsing the gameplay. The game’s writers, or whoever does the text for this game as the credits don’t list any writers, are providing details for a vaporware world. The more details for this supposed world are introduced, the more it seems like this world doesn’t actually exist. I get the impression that the “writers” weren’t in communication with each other and never standardized certain parts of the game’s lingo. While some will be able to get by the bad writing, this game seems to have crashed into a ditch.