I have some strong feelings about CrossCode. I absolutely adore the premise, aesthetics, and gameplay.
The puzzles are good and the boss fights rewarding. The platforming and exploration is complex, if infuriating- as you mentioned.
The reason why I abandoned the game after maybe 20 hours was because of the pacing. Both in story and gameplay loop.
The overworld grinding and exploring and dungeon puzzling and boss fights are all good to great, but once you start a dungeon, you're stuck in there for the next few hours. Once you're done with a dungeon, you're not going to see another one for even longer. When you want to explore a new area, you'd better kill robot rabbits for 30 minutes first and maybe craft some armor
I didn't like the dungeon vs sleep time mechanic in the persona series- it was always to your advantage to burn through a dungeon in a single game night- but it at least gave you a choice
There are about three or four different games in cross code (grinding and crafting, dungeon puzzles, dungeon bosses, exploration "puzzles") , and I don't get to choose which to play when I boot it up
Lastly, and this is a design choice meant to simulate the doldrums of mmo play, the story is just too slow moving for me.
Everything is pretty interesting for the first few hours. It sets up a premise and a lot of mysteries. The organization of the theme park's history vs the real planet's history vs all the players' real lives vs the protagonist's predicament is intriguing.
But at about 2 hours they dump you in the mmo and say "play", and nothing related to the main plot happens for the following 15.
Maybe I quit at just the wrong time, or I'm at the wrong stage of life to get sucked into such an involved game, but I felt like the game was not respectful of my time and agency
Man, I want to love the game. It gets a lot right and is rough in these few ways. I'm really glad it exists. It's the modern adaptation of getting lost in a SNES fever dream where you're six years old and only allowed to play an hour a day and the game just goes on forever and you wish you could burn through the game faster because you like the characters and world and want to see where they go.
This is the risk of big, complex games like this. Pacing is the easiest thing to sacrifice.
I will probably go back to the game someday and hack my save file to skip the grinding and crafting. I'm just not ready yet
If you're in the desert area I will say that that is the slowest part of the game and you're not far from some really major stuff going down. Plot-wise, everything is a pretty slow burn from the start of Bergen Trail through the end of Autumn's Fall, but after that it really kicks into high gear and I don't think lets up very much afterwards (aside from one very long segment of dungeoning).
I do think these complaints are valid - I spent 60 hours on this game but I generally will do every optional thing I can see available to me before continuing on with the main thread of the game, and this was one where I WANTED to spend 60 hours. I think you could do it much faster if you rush through it, I'm not sure how much grinding is necessary (and if it is you can just drop the difficulty slider, there's no shame in doing this imo)
I do think the game's pacing is a bit weird because while I did enjoy the dungeons and the puzzles, they're a lot. I fortunately really enjoyed every phase of this game (except perhaps the exploration puzzles) so it didn't bother me too much, but I did put the game down once or twice because I just wasn't mentally prepared to take on the dungeons. Once I actually took them on though I enjoyed the hell out of them.