Heavy cross (spoilers)
Attracted by the art...
...driven away by the characters, story and dialogue.
Visuals
The artwork is excellent.
Characters are beautifully drawn with various facial expressions and gestures.
The backdrops are partially animated and dynamically illuminated.
Sound
Fitting music and sound effects - both ingame and in the menus.
Characters
The MC is likable, but comes across as a tough acting brat rather than a truly strong female lead.
She's lacking character depth - and seems to get constantly pushed around.
Many other characters are also too shallow and one-dimensional for my liking.
The dev should have focused on fewer and more complex characters.
One of the main protagonists (Egon) shows no qualms in using physical violence against women (at one point beating up his sister to a pulp). These acts are never really scrutinised.
And of all things, he's one of three LIs. Yeah, I'm so not into domestic violence - so it's a hard pass for me.
Writing
The English is flawless - I don't recall noticing any typos.
The story is... alright?
It's a typical sci-fi story about a female Han Solo and a bunch of outcasts fighting against the odds.
At the beginning lots of alien sounding terms get thrown your way - which helps to immerse yourself in the universe of Cardinal Cross, but also easily leads to confusion.
I'm not too fond of the lighthearted tone where at one moment people try to kill each other - only to do a backflip and become allies 5 minutes later.
There are parts of the story and dialogue I really enjoyed (some even funny), but many others I loathed.
A lot of times I had to force myself to sit through seemingly endless dialogue where people kept on rambling about various topics (technologies, organisations, procedures and conspiracies).
I ended up skimming through the lengthy parts of the dialogue to proceed to the more interesting story bits, but somewhere in chapter 8 I got so bored with Cardinal Cross that I quit for good.
At one point the MC also gets kind of guilt tripped for trying to save her partner - which felt... odd.
Choices
There's a good amount of choices:
Choices have a default timer which can be altered or disabled in the settings.
Previous choices are highlighted, which helps keeping track of them in consecutive playthroughs.
User Interface
The UI is very stylish, but also a bit sluggish (small delays when using certain menu elements like load and save).
The font is well readable (and even scalable!).
There's both a gallery and and a codex (to look up custom vocabulary).
Unfortunately, there's no windowed mode (at least in the Mac version).
Every time you want to switch to desktop you have to manually opt-out of fullscreen in the settings - otherwise the client will crash.
Conclusion
Cardinal Cross is a lovingly crafted sci-fi visual novel with some serious story and dialogue lengths.
I think it would have benefitted from a stronger lead character and a tighter narrative.
I'd rate my overall enjoyment with 3 stars.
The outstanding art is the saving grace here - that's why I simply can't give Cardinal Cross a lower rating than 4 stars.
Attracted by the art...
...driven away by the characters, story and dialogue.
Visuals
The artwork is excellent.
Characters are beautifully drawn with various facial expressions and gestures.
The backdrops are partially animated and dynamically illuminated.
Sound
Fitting music and sound effects - both ingame and in the menus.
Characters
The MC is likable, but comes across as a tough acting brat rather than a truly strong female lead.
She's lacking character depth - and seems to get constantly pushed around.
Many other characters are also too shallow and one-dimensional for my liking.
The dev should have focused on fewer and more complex characters.
One of the main protagonists (Egon) shows no qualms in using physical violence against women (at one point beating up his sister to a pulp). These acts are never really scrutinised.
And of all things, he's one of three LIs. Yeah, I'm so not into domestic violence - so it's a hard pass for me.
Writing
The English is flawless - I don't recall noticing any typos.
The story is... alright?
It's a typical sci-fi story about a female Han Solo and a bunch of outcasts fighting against the odds.
At the beginning lots of alien sounding terms get thrown your way - which helps to immerse yourself in the universe of Cardinal Cross, but also easily leads to confusion.
I'm not too fond of the lighthearted tone where at one moment people try to kill each other - only to do a backflip and become allies 5 minutes later.
There are parts of the story and dialogue I really enjoyed (some even funny), but many others I loathed.
A lot of times I had to force myself to sit through seemingly endless dialogue where people kept on rambling about various topics (technologies, organisations, procedures and conspiracies).
I ended up skimming through the lengthy parts of the dialogue to proceed to the more interesting story bits, but somewhere in chapter 8 I got so bored with Cardinal Cross that I quit for good.
At one point the MC also gets kind of guilt tripped for trying to save her partner - which felt... odd.
Choices
There's a good amount of choices:
- Regular choices which determine how to interact with a character (polite, sarcastic or abrasive).
- Romantic choices which determine if you get romantically involved with a character (or not).
- Moral choices which determine if your MC is a goody-two-shoes or a villain.
Choices have a default timer which can be altered or disabled in the settings.
Previous choices are highlighted, which helps keeping track of them in consecutive playthroughs.
User Interface
The UI is very stylish, but also a bit sluggish (small delays when using certain menu elements like load and save).
The font is well readable (and even scalable!).
There's both a gallery and and a codex (to look up custom vocabulary).
Unfortunately, there's no windowed mode (at least in the Mac version).
Every time you want to switch to desktop you have to manually opt-out of fullscreen in the settings - otherwise the client will crash.
Conclusion
Cardinal Cross is a lovingly crafted sci-fi visual novel with some serious story and dialogue lengths.
I think it would have benefitted from a stronger lead character and a tighter narrative.
I'd rate my overall enjoyment with 3 stars.
The outstanding art is the saving grace here - that's why I simply can't give Cardinal Cross a lower rating than 4 stars.
