Bringing the mystic to mobile – Interview with Tae Hoon Oh, director of Xross Chronicle

Xross Chronicle has been in service for a while now, the world of a unique cast of Humans and Yokai brought to life and available for the world to play! We took an opportunity to have an e-mail interview with Tae Hoon Oh, CEO of Floppy Games, as well as director of Xross Chronicle (pronounced Cross Chronicle).

For a bit of background, Tae Hoon Oh has previously worked on projects like YokaiSaga/Phantom Chasers – the predecessors of Xross – as well as Dragon Nest, Kingdom Under Fire and N3. From his days in ESTSoft’s Last Laibers from 1994, he’s been in the games industry for quite a long time now! Naturally, we needed to ask him about his start in games.

He talks about starting from arcade game centers, like it probably would have been for people in his time. Playing games gave him ideas, leading him to study on how to make the ideas into said games. He’s developed for PC, console and online games, with Xross Chronicle being his most recent work.

Playing these games gave me more interesting ideas and I began studying on how to make these fun ideas into games.

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As mentioned, YokaiSaga/Phantom Chasers is Xross‘ predecessor. The previous game was more focused on powering up characters rather than the “role playing” part in an RPG game, and they wanted to improve on that, taking some lessons from there. He points out the Scalar Tower update in Xross, a 100-floor tower that players can work to conquer. He emphasizes character roles and synergies – including Fusion partner placements – as being key to successfully climb this tower, rather than relying on pure stats. More content similar to this is planned to encourage experimentation with team compositions.

Considering Xross has had a base in its predecessor games, some may wonder why they decided to make a completely new game instead of updating the old one. It’s a back to basics, he explains, building it from the ground up: from making the scenario and characters more believable, the voice over work, and the illustrations, then moving on to the game systems. The final forms in YokaiSaga/Phantom Chasers has not differed too much for Xross, but Xross has more variety in these ‘final forms’, through Item Forging, Fusion Rate and Potential Reinforcement.

As we serviced Phantom Chaser/Yokai Saga, we noticed how we could improve on this and went back to basics. First of all, we revised the scenario to make the characters more persuasive, and at the same time worked on voice overs and illustrations to make them more attractive. Next, we improved the game’s character growth system.

People are probably familiar with games like Onmyoji featuring characters based on myths, as well, but there must be something that drew Xross in that direction too. Tae Hoon Oh mentions the work they put in to differentiate the game from others, talking about how medieval fantasy and Wuxia backgrounds are popular, so it wouldn’t be a good choice to follow the trend. Hence, the decision was made to bring in myths and folklore from around the world to make the characters both familiar, yet unique for Xross, applying interpretations from Floppygames.

Having recently come off playing the closed beta for Genshin Impact, which will be available on console as well, it would be interesting if Floppy could do something similar. Tae Hoon Oh considers it a dream to publish a multi-platform title, speaking of Dragon Nest and the development team working on game controller support. For now, though, they’re focused on making Xross an established IP first, with consoles a possibility if there is interest, but currently the game is optimized for mobile with no other platforms planned yet.

N3 was a full console title, but Tae Hoon Oh currently has no plans for a console project yet, but he hopes he’d get the chance to as Unity also supports console development. As for now, he points out the mobile boom, while acknowledging console platforms are doing well too.

Presently, Xross Chronicle is the current focus in terms of projects, working on scenario updates and new characters. One handy thing about the game is that it has a reroll function built in-game, which is explained as allowing players to obtain characters they may not otherwise obtain considering the nature of gacha. Speaking of game updates, two or three characters are planned to be added every month, with more as the story updates.

Last but not least, the idea of collaborations! It’s revealed that Xross is inspired by the Japanese animation, Ushio and Tora, and they certainly would like to collaborate with many IPs. Dr Slump is named, for one, because of the adorable characters.

Whew! That was quite a bit! If you haven’t already tried Xross Chronicle, then what’s stopping you? The team has their plans for future content, pivoting more to strategy than brute force, which is encouraging. As with many character collection games, there’s many characters in Xross, each coming with their own stories based off the myths they are inspired from. Look forward to the future content, we’d certainly keep an eye out!

Download

Xross Chronicle

Publisher: LINEGAMES

Release Date: 2020-02-20

Android, iOS

The Dimension of Yokai has opened! Yokai Fantasy World A long time ago, an opening in the dimension brought alien beings to the world. Humans called these aliens beings the Yokai.

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