This is not a review I want to write.
It’s not because I’m opposed to writing a negative review. No, it’s something much more selfish: I want developers to keep adapting mobile and free-to-play titles to full-blown releases. I can’t stand playing games on my phone, and gacha mechanics are probably dangerous for me. Octopath Traveler 0 proved it could be done well, and the upcoming Final Fantasy Resonance seems similar. And I still sit over here, hoping against hope that NieR Re[in]carnation will get some similar love.
If it does, I hope it gets better treatment than Another Eden Begins, a game that might have been better served staying in its free-to-play format.
To be clear, I’ve never played the original Another Eden, so I can’t say what has been adapted or changed with certainty, but what exists in this version almost universally doesn’t work.
That’s maybe most surprising with the story, penned by Masato Kato of Chrono and Xenogears fame. Not everything he’s written totally works for me, but if nothing else, it had ambition, something to say. That couldn’t be further from the truth with Another Eden Begins. I bet this premise sounds familiar: Aldo and his sister Fienne are found in the woods as children. Many years later, the Beast King attacks their village and kidnaps Fienne. Of course, Aldo goes after her, but on the way he’s pulled into another time. Of course, Aldo must get back to his own time and rescue his sister!
The story never goes anywhere interesting beyond that, at least in this version, which only adapts the opening arc (or first 25 chapters) of the original. You’ve seen all the plot beats, maybe in Chrono Trigger, maybe in another RPG. And I can live with that, but it’s disappointing coming from Kato. Maybe even worse is the way the story is told. The game is split into chapters, and I assume those chapters were meted out slowly in the original. Here, you get them all at once, and almost every chapter, especially in the late game, feels like it shifts gears dramatically, ignoring the stakes of the previous one in favor of something different, almost like the characters forgot about what just happened. It’s weird, disorienting, and takes any wind the narrative might have out of its sails.
Compounding that is how the game dumps characters and side quests on you. You have roughly 20 characters to choose from, and you only grab about five or six as part of the main story. The rest you need to recruit via side quests. Each character has five separate quests associated with them after you recruit them. I don’t want to do the math, but if you’re going to fully recruit every character and see their arc through, you’re looking at over 100 quests in a game that I cleared in fewer than 25 hours.
I assume this is an effort to adapt gacha pulls from the original, but the translation doesn’t work. It quickly becomes overwhelming, and worse still, the side quests are excessively long and boring, positively filled to the brim with tropes and the bland writing that populates the rest of the game, and only further kill the momentum of the paint-by-numbers story, especially when it seems like a dozen more open up after every plot beat in the late game. Unfortunately, the quests are important because they unlock special accessories for characters and, eventually, their ultimate weapon, so you probably want to do them, at least for your main party.
Maybe the worst part of Another Eden Begins’ side quests is that they take you back through the same areas over and over again without ever introducing new locations. I think I ran through the marsh at least ten times, and I didn’t even come close to completing every side quest. And they weren’t fun to navigate the first time, either. Each town and dungeon is a series of narrow, connected paths. Every once in a great while there might be a puzzle, but otherwise, there’s no variety. This is particularly damning in a game that loves backtracking so much and wears its built-for-mobile, ugly and distracting visuals on its sleeve.
Those narrow paths make the enemies that you find on the field pretty hard to avoid, too, which is unfortunate because combat is also disappointing. On its face, it shouldn’t be. Sure, what we have is a fairly simple turn-based system, with your standard buffs and debuffs. But there’s a ridiculous amount of flexibility and customization built into these systems. Each character has two unique skill trees, and you get points to move through them as you level up. In combat, you can chain together additional attacks if you meet certain requirements, like hitting weaknesses, getting crits, etc. You can also set up three additional parties when you have enough characters, and they get a temporary buff when you switch them in.
Lining up your party for ultimate synergy seems like it should be a fun challenge, especially with so many characters and ways to build them at your disposal. The problem is, you absolutely don’t need to do that. For 99% of the game’s run time, I had absolutely no trouble obliterating every enemy with my one critical-hit-focused party. It only adds to the monotony present in the rest of the game, and is truly disappointing when there is a lot of depth that Another Eden Begins could plumb here.
The monotony even extends to the one thing I genuinely like about Another Eden Begins: the music. The opening theme, composed by the legendary Yasunori Mitsuda, is rousing, and the rest of the tracks are strong. But eventually you start hearing the same tracks far too many times, and the lustre wears off. It’s pretty frustrating because there are a whopping seven volumes of tracks to pick from. It seems they didn’t want to dip into anything after the opening arc that we get in this release, to its detriment.
I think that’s the ultimate problem: this title doesn’t feel like a complete product. It feels like the developers didn’t want to let go of enough of the gacha release’s DNA to let it stand on its own. The weird plot structure makes the story feel disjointed and low stakes. The side quests are doled out at an absurd rate. The combat, while good on paper, feels like it’s built for a different set of challenges. Add to this that everything takes so long to get going, and Another Eden Begins feels like an overstuffed, poorly paced, and unbalanced intro to a much larger, more carefully calibrated game. The added voice acting is so wooden that it does nothing to move the needle, either.
So, you know what, maybe I’m not so upset about writing this review. I don’t know if bringing more of the gacha game’s story, rebalancing battles, or streamlining sidequests would fix all of Another Eden Begins‘ problems, but surely the team could’ve done more. As much as I want to play more games originally developed as free-to-play, I don’t want it like this.
