Boo! I still haven't done anything of note, though the emoticon project for my blog has been chugging along. So... guess I'll make a blog post about Cross Channel and why I dropped it? Because I have a lot of feelings about this game, and while I normally feel no shame in dropping things like a hot potato, it was difficult to fully accept that I wasn't going to finish it for a few reasons, and I may as well try to make sense of them. I told myself I would make a longer review at some point, which doesn't really happen all that often. Normally, I can unwind my tangle of thoughts on a piece of media much easier. This may get a little messy, content warning for discussions of self-harm, tried to be as spoiler free as possible.
I fucking love denpa. I love unreliable narrators who are just the worst and who have complicated relationships with gender. I love not knowing where reality begins and ends in a work. I love radio towers, and rooftops, and blue skies, and loneliness, and cute girls, and timeloops, and difficult-to-parse text with multiple meanings. You would think, given all these factors, I would absolutely love Cross Channel. And that's what I thought, too! It seemed almost custom made for my personal tastes. I finally decided to play it after thinking I should for years but never officially adding it to the queue. It skipped to the front of my list when I finished installing it. This isn't a common occurance. I have a fairly long backlog, and most things don't automatically skip to the front once I decide to play it.
It felt... half-baked, I think, is the best way to describe it. Like it wanted to tell a serious story, like it wanted to be taken seriously, but as soon as you take it seriously, it stops working as a story.
"Take me seriously!" Cross Channel seems to say, while holding a box cutter to its wrist. And so you take it seriously, ask them why they're doing this, ask them not to hurt themselves, ask them to please just hand over the blade, you don't need to do this, but it begins to cut into its soft skin anyways. Instead of blood coming out, it's a bunch of handkerchiefs tied together, and you look closer, and they're in a clown costume, and you smell popcorn and cotton candy and freshly roasted peanuts and you look up to see some trapeze artists doing a cool trick, and you faintly hear some animal welfare protestors outside the circus tent.
It is hard to take something seriously when the thing you're trying to take seriously, the thing that is begging to be taken seriously, is constantly deflecting from how serious it is. Cross Channel was like the Joss Wheadon of denpa to me. It couldn't figure out how to set a tone, how to use tension, or anything like that. Never7, for example, shares a lot of similarities to Cross Channel with regards to timeloop shenanigans. But Never7 was able to handle them much better than Cross Channel. Never7 knew how to set a much tenser tone, even after more light-hearted scenes.
(Quick aside: part of the issue with tone with regards to Cross Channel is because of the MC, Kurosu Taichi, being Like That. But you can have a protag be Like That and still be able to set the tone well. It's just that it doesn't work however the fuck Cross Channel tried it.)
This isn't just a problem with the translations, it seems to be a problem inherent to the game itself. You can scream "this game is great, it just has three bad translations," from the rooftops until you feel needles scratching your throat and taste iron in your back of your mouth all you want, but that won't make the original game any better.
Maybe I didn't play far enough in, sure. You could argue that the good qualities of Cross Channel only become apparent once you've played through it more times than you can count. But after going through two full "routes" through the game, and not seeing any improvement, any hooks, or any reason to continue playing other than "it gets really good, apparently," I'm sure why you can see why it wasn't very compelling.