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Asura Cross is a strange fighting game / visual novel hybrid created by a fascinating Korean gent who goes by the handle of "Byulbram", who has almost single-handedly developed and designed games for many years stemming back to the early 90s. Most of his game's have gone through various stages of "development hell", gone under various names throughout development, appeared and disappeared in peculiar fashion, and he has gone on to become a cult-classic Korean game dev. While Korean game development spent many years trying to catch up to Japan and the West and varied wildly in their quality and composition (as it was not uncommon for the games to have game-breaking bugs), Byulbram's journey is exceptional even among devs in the country as he towed the line between indie and professional/commercial works and continues to work in the field today teaching others in Korea about game development.

Asura Cross is one of his more well-known titles and is also considered his "cursed" game, as it's gone through so many iterations and revisions which had little to no exposure outside of tight-knit press groups, affiliates / vendors who dropped the ball, and release on short-lived platforms through various forms of completion, and took about a decade to fully come to fruition. It's also known as "Bloody Cross", "Asura Cross: The First Contact" "Hyeolsipja / Hyeolsibja FC" and 혈십자 : 퍼스트 컨택트. The "definitive" version currently was released for iOS and Android phones in 2012/2013 and is obviously no longer supported, though the game can still be ran in a limited fashion offline and Byulbram (Kim) still expresses interest in revisiting the game to this day.

The game involves eight fighters of varying backgrounds who get swept up in a life-or-death tournament ran by a shady organization as a test to form the ultimate fighter. This plot is told from the perspective of several characters, but mostly through our proud Korean fighter, Jinsu Jeong, who (not coincidentally) fights like a certain famous Korean SNK fighter. That aside, several fighting styles are represented pretty well here from Muay Thai, Wrestling, Karate, and more, and the game further expands your options due to points you can earn to raise a character's parameters as well as unlock ultimate attacks. Animations are pretty fluid and the game runs pretty well with some satisfying hit effects. The music is also serviceable, though the quality is compressed quite a bit, but this wasn't uncommon of mobile titles of the time. The localization is a little haphazard but comprehensible and the "International" version has some botched censorship (mainly on the busty female characters who are covered up in some illustrations but still exposed during battle).

Combat is a bit tactical in nature as zoning and stats, in theory anyway, play a pivotal role in the game's balance; each character is proficient in different areas from maximum health to stamina to recovery speed, and if the game's scope was more ambitious, this would've been a very cool addition. However, the computer is not bright and even on the highest difficulty, it's possible (albeit difficult) to win against the CPU even with their hugely inflated stats with just your base characters. The game is also quite stingy with points needed to unlock things (which was MEANT to be used for paywall purposes) but it was still possible to unlock everything through playing anyway.

The game wasn't a bad effort, especially coming from a single guy during his spare time, but as it was released on a mobile platform, it might be misinterpreted as a "casual" experience -- we have to remember that the game was not originally developed with just mobile in mind, but it was ultimately the route the game went through. Nevertheless, the game in its current form was adapted for mobile devices pretty well and is a bit of a cult classic. If you're looking to play the game these days, your best bet would be to get an emulator like Nox or Bluestacks and an apk to run it. This is a video of the game in action showing different things. Enjoy.

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