Welcome to FURYU Corporation’s Crymachina, a high-concept science fiction story that is in true anime fashion, populated only by buxom android high-school girls who talk about their feelings, A LOT. To its credit the story is well conceived and reasonably consistent, and brings to mind old movies like The Sixth Day and Total Recall where reality, humanity and one’s place in the universe is questioned, its all very existential. My questions are more mundane and I ponder questions like: “What the hell are they talking about?” or “Why is there a space whale?” and “Did Erik drink all the Jamison?” Anyway have a seat and lets talk about Crymachina.

Publisher: NIS America

Developer: FURYU Corporation

Platform: Nintendo Switch(reviewed), PS4/5, Windows (Steam)

Release Date: October 24th 2023

Price: $59.99*

* Deluxe Edition

OMG look at the line for the Salon, it’s out past the Orange Julius. I’ll never get my bangs cut now. Also, WHY AM I AN ELF!!!?

We begin with a menu screen that mutters to you in a breathy Japanese voice that is not at all saying what you hope its saying. Anyway, once you move beyond the sultry menu, you do get a (VERY) complete introduction in Japanese that thankfully includes decent subtitles. On the surface it’s pretty much what you expect, an anime style JRPG with all the usual physics defying girls and their out of place fashion choices. (When I say “physics defying” I’m of course referring to their hair)

Your POV character, Liben, is a young lady who dies sometime in the near future, presumably after talking herself to death. Anyway, she wakes up in the far future on a space habitat, apparently having been saved onto a flash drive or some other plot device, and reinstalled into a teenage android body. There, Liben learns all the things you were already told in the introduction, humanity is extinct, there is a plan to resurrect it and there is only one other person to talk to, Enoa, another teenage girl robot who is the remaining sane member of an eight-part AI system that was to prepare the creatively named Eden habitat for humanity's resurrection. Her purpose is to restore proper function to the AI, so that the resurrection of humanity can proceed. To do this they must subdue the other components of the insane AI, who are also teenage girl robots, because that’s apparently the only kind they make. Once these are defeated they can then be sat down, talked to and convinced to continue with the resurrection. Along the way, additional data will be recovered, helping them recover their humanity and become Truly Human™ which sounds totally like a sex doll but in this game it’s some kind of atomic chatbot.

To it’s credit, the story is ambitious; it tries to deal with a lot in terms of human extinction, and the humanity of the post-human characters. Having said that, it's mostly delivered as simple exposition as it also has to explain what the heck is going on in the moment. This is annoying because whoever did the Japanese-English translation is trying way too hard to sound like what they think sassy western teenage girls sound like. This manifests as a pattern, Exposition via dialog, lots and lots of dialog, delivered with inane psudo-teenage sass followed by a bit of exploration and combat. What I mean by this is that Game-play alternates between two distinct phases. A “mission phase,” where you are out exploring Eden and fighting enemies, and a “socializing phase,” literally hanging out blathering about the end of humanity and how you feel about it. I speculate a lot got literally lost in the Japanese to English translation because this has a pronounced “half-bubble off plumb” feeling. If you are going to localize a game then do it properly. One might have had some fun with this here, It would have fer sure been totally tubular if they like hung out at the mall and, like, used Valspeak and then fought gnarly robots in front of the Waldenbooks, but like whatever, nobody asked me.

There are also some real game-play issues, missions are linear with little variation between them each featuring a predictable boss at the end. (I was expecting the hosts of The View) There isn’t much reward, and the game-play feels half finished. Combat is fine, but nothing new. You can spam your way through a lot of the enemies and bosses, only needing to worry about an occasional prompt to dodge or counter. You run down some corridors, spam a handful of enemies, and find out you don’t have enough talking points or whatever this thing runs on and have to go back and grind through it all again before you can proceed. After you finally get done, your reward is another insipid high school girl blather session. For every minute spent in combat these girls spend three minutes talking about it.

On the positive side, the artwork is very well done in true anime style with bra-bursting girls who for once, at least aren’t identical except for their hair color. Their hair and fashion choices make zero sense for combat or anything else for that matter but given the genre and setting this is par for the course. Music is also well done and appropriate if a bit subdued even during combat. Animation is by and large fine, there were some stutters, but I suspect this has more to do with the Switch’s modest hardware than anything else.

Bottom line, it looks good, it sounds good and the concept is pretty deep but this only goes so far untill the characters bury the story with dialog, only to immediately dig it up and talk about it some more. It’s got a competent combat system, untill you realize you can get around it by spaming your way through the game. The visuals are striking until you run through yet another dungeon that looks exactly like the last three you finished. Crymachina has a lot of really good ideas going for it and the creative team is to be complimented for a lot of truly good work but, it needs a lot more polish, particularly on dialog and level design.

The Good:

Ambitious story
Good music and art
Decent combat system

The Bad:

Interminable dialog
Underdeveloped game-play
Repetitive

Crymachina Review (Switch)