Asdivine Cross (Android) review "It's a pretty decent game, but don't make my mistake and play the free version or that positivity will vanish."

I have to admit it was a bit tricky for me to determine my score, or even what my overall opinion was, for Asdivine Cross. Why? Because of how I played it.

Many Kemco-released RPGs — especially those created by Exe-Create — are released with both premium and free versions. As someone who believes these games do provide some form of entertainment, but not the sort I’d be willing to pay full price for, I only buy the premium version if it’s heavily discounted. Otherwise, I go with the free version and typically only have to deal with sporadic ads. A small annoyance for keeping my dollars in my wallet, or to be more accurate, spending them on something else.

Asdivine Cross is a different beast. This game was released in 2016, which — if memory serves — was pretty early on in Kemco’s offering of those free versions. And in those early days, they occasionally made playing those free games a fair bit more inconvenient by doing one simple thing. As a reward for spending money on this one’s premium version, you’d get a bunch of points for the in-game shop. And in that shop, you’d find stuff such as an item that provided you with double the experience for each battle won.

And guess what? Asdivine Cross is designed to be played with that boost activated. Now, to make up for me only getting half the experience I should be acquiring, I was able to alter the battle frequency to engage in fights twice as often. Of course, that also met I was in combat all the damn time, making it take twice as long to get through dungeons or to cover ground on land or sea. As a result, it took a bit over 40 hours to beat this game and, as I’ve said before, RPGs released by Kemco tend to be best when they’re 10-to-20 hours long.

Boy, this was a grueling experience and one that gave me a lot of trouble when it came to describing my feelings. Overall, I’m pretty sure I felt this was a better-than-average Kemco game, but because everything took twice as long as it should have, I was more than ready for it to be over long before I’d reached the final boss due to the usual Kemco issues. You know the drill: limited monster designs, so you see the same enemies over and over; a large number of dungeons that all wind up blending together and the simple fact that so many Exe-Create games recycle each others’ plot elements that a person who’s played a fair number of them can accurately predict what’s going to happen from a mile away.

But like I said, this is one of their better games. If you’re not familiar with Exe-Create’s stuff, starting with this one would be a solid option. You’ll control Harvey, one of the top members of one of those groups of family-friendly thieves you occasionally come across in fantasy settings. You know — the ones who might steal stuff, but have hearts of gold and will go out of their way to protect women and children. I’d say they’d basically be saints if not for the whole “stealing” part, but since that’s what starts Harvey out on his quest to save the world, well…

He, along with mentor Isaac and rival/Isaac’s son Zig, are out for a casual burglary of one of the local castles when Zig sets him up and he winds up in jail. Now, that’s not a problem for a trained thief who happens to be in a gang of them, but while he’s breaking free, he discover’s the castle’s chancellor is implementing a purge of anyone who’s anyone in the ruling hierarchy. Since this includes Amelia, the youthful daughter of the now-former rulers, and Harvey is all about that chivalry, he’s sure to rescue her and then work with her to dispose the would-be tyrant. After completing that task, they’ll move on from local intrigue to that on a world-wide level, as a rival nation seems to be planning for war. And, according to the local deity of light, her shadow counterpart seems to be the source of the imminent conflict.

And so, Harvey and Amelia join up with two other characters — a mysterious girl connected to Amelia and a shadow priestess who’s in the dark as to her god’s plans — to get to the bottom of things. Meanwhile, while robbing the castle, Zig found some sort of artifact that’s putting him in touch with the shadow deity and granting him the sort of power that’s making him think it’s time to put an end to his rivalry with Harvey by whatever means necessary.

I’d say the main thing that worked about the story is how it actually defied my expectations in one very important way. A lot of Exe-Create games that feature a male lead working with three females devolve into him playing the straight man to three one-dimensional goofballs whose main quirk is played for laughs. They all develop crushes on him, which often seems more important to the game’s writers than the plot. I get annoyed because the game’s turned into a romance story written by someone who seems totally unqualified for that sort of thing.

Here, while the first part of that expectation was true…so true, the rest wasn’t. Instead, those individual quirks regularly became points of contention between the three women, leading to quarrels and, late in the game, nearly puts an end to their alliance. Yeah, the writing could have been better and, much like every other Exe-Create game, all it took was the main guy giving a few rousing speeches to get everyone back on the same page, but it was a nice change of pace to play one of their games where the hostility party members developed towards each other was as much as a threat to their success as any number of gods or other adversaries.

The game itself is a pretty standard RPG that at least lacks the annoying gimmicks that a lot of Kemco games possess. You go from town to dungeon, you get vehicles to reach new parts of the world, you buy equipment and accessories, you get magical spells and skills and you fight in lots of turn-based battles. There is a lot of back-tracking at certain points of the game, which got a bit tiresome, but I’d class Asdivine Cross as a solid throwback to an era where these games were simple and to-the-point.

And sometimes, that’s what I want. No hours of cinema, no extreme padding to make a quest last 100 hours when it could be resolved in half that time; just a quest with a couple plot twists and basic turn-based combat to unwind with for a little while before going to bed. Just try not to play the free version or Asdivine Cross will wear out its welcome.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (July 21, 2026) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.