Lackluster Motorboating.
While my first experience with Azur Lane is this very title, the series started its life on mobile devices as a side-scrolling shooter decked out in the trappings of what you normally get with a gatcha system. With its move to 3D combat with Crosswave, the game still adapts much of the same look and feel, yet offering a drastically smaller cast and far fewer features than what the mobile game currently offers. While the trailers may sell it off as an action-packed spectacle, most of your time will be spent through dialogue and visual novel moments that can often spend far too long over-explaining the story and introducing characters that rarely matter in the grand scheme of things. Crosswave is tiresome, often boring, and its combat lacks the depth of even the most shallow body of water.
Told across approximately 15 hours, Crosswave’s story is convoluted, over-explained, and often nonsensical. While the four nations; Sakura Empire, Royal Navy, Iron Blood, and Eagle Union, all come together to combat a faction known as the Sirens, much of the story is based around mysterious cubes that may or may not be dangerous artifacts. It’s not until the final chapter where the story picks up, and while fans of the mobile game may be excited to see some of their favorite characters show up during the final showdown, none of them are here for more than just a line or two of dialogue before you never see them again. Now, I didn’t struggle through the entire story, some narrative beats are solid enough, giving you an idea about how each faction truly sees each other, and that the Sakura Empire had specific motives for bringing in the other nations for a mock series of combat exercises, all while trying to understand just exactly what purpose these cubes serve.
Azur Lane is largely about a group of boat girls, anime waifu’s that are based around real-world ships, aircraft carriers, and various other aquatic vessels. They are nation-based, often having the name of their vessel, or based on a geographical place like Portland or St. Louis. It’s never made exactly clear on the ages of certain characters, but nearly every single one of them has extremely apparent cleavage shots, upskirt angles, or something else to sexualize them, even despite how young several of them can look. Now, I’m all for fan service; I’m a huge fan of Senran Kagura, but some of these designs can go a bit too far in many cases. It’s also unclear just exactly what these characters are. Are they part boat, part girl, or just an anime girl that has some sort of boat backpack or attachment? While there are several ways to research this away from the game, with an anime series that is available as well, the game itself just skims over much of this, resulting in you just going along for the ride.
Now, while the mobile game has dramatically more characters to choose from than what Crosswave offers, this smaller cast does allow you to get to know them a bit better, at least some of them. This is either through the main story, the side events, or the dialogue-only episodes that unlock as you earn more characters. However, with there being four factions, it’s a shame that it’s so hard to tell who belongs to which faction, apart from knowing those in Japanese garb are likely part of the Sakura Empire. While knowing who belongs to who wouldn’t have made the story any better, it would have been nice to at least maybe seen an icon or banner color adorned to their name to remove a lot of the confusion when characters just simply appear out of nowhere.
Azur Lane: Crosswave is roughly 85% visual novel and 15% 3D combat on the high seas, in environments that are only different depending on the time of day. You may have a landmass in the background, but more often than not, you’ll duke it out on a generic body of water, moving left and right as you dodge incoming fire. Each character has two basic attacks via R and ZR, varying on their weapon type, and then two special attacks that are mapped to A and Y. Characters will either have weapons that can be held down to rapidly fire, or weapons that require a charge to build up before you can fire them. Given how many characters there are, it’s a shame there isn’t more variety other than finding a few mix-matched styles, rather than creating more unique weapon types.
Each combat encounter follows one of four types: Ships, Ships then a boss, Ships and a boss, or just a boss. As you defeat the waves of enemies that you’ll be initially confronted with, you’ll follow a green arrow to fight more. To add to this navigating, there are countless zone walls that come out of nowhere, only indicated by a yellow line on the water’s surface that tends to only show up as you near the boundary. Now, each fight usually lasts around two minutes, and often less as there is a challenge to defeat the encounter in less than 120 seconds. I’ve actually had more than a dozen missions end in less than a minute, only to come back to the hub world and sit through a 15-minute visual novel cutscene, before heading off to tackle another half hour of these before another two-minute battle bookends that chapter.
Battles are rarely exciting, offer no unique mechanics to any of its bosses or ships, and you rarely get to use your special attacks for anything other than bosses as most missions can be over well before they are even charged up. While there are flying enemies taking to the skies, they rarely affect your combat focus on the water, making them more part of the background than any real threat. During combat, you’ll bring two additional boat girls with you, and three that offer off-camera support in the manner of buffs. While I’ll get to support characters shortly, it’s shame that they don’t feature a 3D model of their own and are only regulated to a static piece of artwork that flashes up on the screen when they come in to aid you.
Azur Lane: Crosswave allows you to customize your boat girl with equipment that boosts their stats. You are not swapping their weaponry, but rather just making them more effective, or able to take more hits with increasing their health. You’ll upgrade certain equipment to a point, and swapping it out as you earn more, or find better stuff in the shops. You’ll earn resources that allow for these increases, and skill books, which I still have yet to find, that allow you to increase their combat effectiveness even more. There is also a way to boost them even further when you hit level 100, but as I’ve pushed through everything the game has to offer, apart from grinding away for hours and hours, my highest character is only level 82, so It’s unlikely that I’ll even see what that truly offers.
As you head into battle, you’ll have your three main characters set for the mission ahead, and that of the trio of your supports. While main characters can enter into being support, support characters themselves are unable to join you in your main team. This is because support characters do not have 3D models, and are only represented in 2D artwork. I’ll also point out that very little new art was made for the game, as every character here that was in Azur Lane mobile, is back with their mobile game artwork. While the new artwork that is here is really impressive, largely regulated to a splash-image for its story, as seen above, it feels very lazy to not see these characters here in all-new artwork, especially as a $49.99 CAD release and that of the cast being dramatically smaller here. Actual support characters only have limited customization available to them, where you have a lot more freedom in what your main class of characters can have equipped.
Now, combat is only partially enjoyable because of the speed you can have as you move around, but since battles are incredibly easy and quick, there is simply no need for strategy. Characters like Shimakaze, who is effectively the main character, fires so fast and quick that you’ll often load your party up with whoever you want to level up and simply just play as Shimakaze the entire time. I would unlock a new character or two, grinding away currency to earn multiple at a time, place them in my squad, and see them go from level 1 to 22 in a single battle, and then rinse repeat until everyone I had was leveled up enough to swap them out. Nearly 90% of my time with the game was as Shimakaze, mainly because she is so efficient in her speed and combat, that it made no sense to explore other avenues of characters, other than to just try them out.
In between battles and the visual novel approach to telling its story, you’ll be moving around an overworld that is often at odds with the pacing and action of the two types of gameplay you get here. You can hover over some parts of the map but are blockaded by others. You’ll move around rather slowly as you track down events, story beats, or items that you can find scattered about. It would have been nice to have a mini-map in the corner to alert you to any pickups, but this overworld map feels largely pointless and uses the same chibi artwork found in the mobile game. As you move around, you’ll find green missions that act as side events, and red missions that continue the main story. Many of these events do not have combat, as most chapters only have a few short battles here and there.
Collecting the items that are around the map, as well as the rewards you earn during missions, you’ll also be able to purchase items from a shop, and use the available warehouse to strengthen your team, applying those parts to make them that much more effective. Now, the game only has a few missions that are difficult in the slightest, so you won’t find yourself tinkering with your characters between every mission unless min-maxing is your aim. The shop will have a few items that are discounted here and there, and you’ll use your currency to purchase items that then bleed into others, similar in ways to how most mobile games work. It’s not as mobile-heavy as some games tend to be, but the depth here can often feel useless in several regards with just how simple most of your missions actually are.
Azur Lane: Crosswave can often be a good-looking game from certain points of view. The anime artwork is great, featuring a wealth of very cool designs but the newly added 3D elements only look good in action. During the introductions of each chapter, these lifeless and very-basic animated characters simply don’t impress and there is a great deal of repetition in the presentation here that most missions feel like you’re simply swapping character models and passing it off as something new. There is also a ton of small text in the menus that is incredibly hard to read when playing portable. The game is also subtitled only, with only a few characters that actually sound different from one another; enhanced by too many characters having almost the same personality.
As it stands, Crosswave isn’t the upgrade to the mobile game that many likely had hoped for. It’s a very bland and uninteresting experience that is drastically overpriced for the level of content you’re actually getting here. Had the game been free to play with the same level of gatcha-mechanics as the genre is known for, then maybe I could have gotten on a bit more with it. If you are a fan of the visual novel genre and can use the combat as a means to an end, then there is an ok game here to trek through, but as a whole, the two sides of this coin don’t compliment each other well enough to recommend and this adventure is better left out at sea.
Developer - Idea Factory. Publisher - Idea Factory. Released - February 16th, 2021. Available On - Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Windows PC. Rated - (T) Fantasy Violence, Language, Suggestive Themes. Platform Reviewed - Nintendo Switch (Portable and Docked). Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.