I came to Edens Zero completely fresh-faced, only knowing the source manga from glimpses of Weekly Shōnen Jump covers at 7-Eleven. Starting the game, the vibrant, fantastical, and goofy sci-fi setting immediately appealed to my longing for lighthearted adventure and seemed a perfect counterbalance to the constant dourness science fiction often falls into. Then, the game gave me control of its protagonist. My stomach dropped. I was mashing repetitive three-hit combos against lifeless squid-armed enemies who stood vacantly waiting for their turn to be punched. The map was one huge, empty rectangular prism after the next. Within minutes, I had a premonition that this mundane sub-Dynasty Warriors 3 beat ‘em up was all there would be for the next twenty to forty hours. I was not wrong.
Most people would know the mangaka Hiro Mashima from his hugely successful series Fairy Tail (2006–2017) and its anime adaptation. Edens Zero, Mashima’s more recent sci-fi/fantasy manga, ran about half the length, with thirty-three volumes published between 2018 and 2024—never as popular as its fantasy older sister, but by no means a slump. This game covers eleven and a half of those thirty-three volumes, which is enough to introduce players to the eclectic, boneheaded, and buxom main cast of humans and androids and to take players through a series of planetary story arcs. Fair warning to players: if you’re new like me, you should close your eyes when, in the opening minutes, the game chooses to flash through snippets of the entirety of its plot, half-teasing and half-spoiling everything. I’m truly baffled by this directorial decision, but at the time, I thought the game was simply skipping over nonessential story beats, given how plain and half-baked the snippets looked. In retrospect, those half-baked portions would turn out to be the whole game.
The gist is that Shiki, the sole human boy raised by machines on the planet Granbell, is pushed out into the broader universe by his malfunctioning machine friends when Granbell receives its first human visitor in one hundred years. Rebecca, a young, bubbly “B-Cuber” (an intergalactic wannabe content creator), takes Shiki from his planet, and the two embark on a universe-spanning adventure to make friends, make content, and search for the wish-granting Mother of the cosmos. Its conceit and vibe are very similar to the original Dragon Ball, and longtime shōnen manga/anime fans may become exhausted by how readily Edens Zero plays into the ugliest and easiest tropes in forty-plus years, namely over-reliance on dirty humour at the female cast’s expense and lazy story beats. (An endless universe to explore, and they limit themselves to a fighting tournament? Sigh.) I was charmed by the earnest positivity of the story, though the random directions it took were illogical as often as they were spontaneous. After the game stretches out some monotonous early plot, there’s a sudden barrage of unexplained events near the end, mainly character introductions and transformations, that guts the goodwill earned by the solid penultimate arc.
From the hub of your battleship, the Edens Zero, you can take a preset party into the next of ten story chapters or pick a party of four and freely roam the huge world of Gran Blue. “Exploration Mode” involves collecting quests from the adventurer’s guild in the central city and using Shiki’s gravity-control Ether (read: Magic) powers to fly around a la Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot. Unlike the main story, which features completely flat and linear zones, Gran Blue has rolling hills and tons of verticality, though it suffers a loss in framerate as a result. It’s not like this game is a visual feast demanding the most from the PS5, either; the bright colours and smooth textures are serviceable but nothing we haven’t seen since Namco Bandai games on the PS3.
Gran Blue has somewhere north of 250 quests to undertake, including beating up random monsters and baddies, delivering packages, taking photos of the world, and, uh, more beating up baddies. There’s a lot of that. Managing the quest log is a bit of a pain if you don’t want to travel back to a hub to turn them in after each battle. You also have to return to the Edens Zero if you want to change your party or upgrade your weapons and equipment. Most notably, the enemies in Gran Blue are tuned up to a very high level, meaning it may serve better to play straight through the twenty-hour story and collect all the playable characters. The problem is that half of each character’s skill trees are locked until after certain quests in Gran Blue.
Enemy levels may be high, but they are by no means difficult—aye, there’s the rub. Everything in this game has a huge health pool, yet mob enemies simply crowd around you and only occasionally wind up a telegraphed attack that can be interrupted with a single hit. You endlessly whittle down health bars of helpless enemies caught in your three-to-five hit combos. Should they manage they get a hit out in return? You also have a huge health pool, or you can easily walk or dodge away. I never once had to use a potion—not once!—and that was before I equipped vampire-attack items that sap enemy health. At one point, my wife (who hasn’t touched a game since Mario’s Super Picross) took the controller and, without knowing how to turn the camera, defeated a late-story boss encounter with full health. At least musou games let you blast through enemies quickly—this game was a mind-numbing test of my endurance in pressing square.
Bosses in the game are also simplistic, usually with only two or three highly telegraphed and easily dodgeable moves. There are a handful of exceptions, particularly the last couple of boss encounters in Chapter 10, but even the string of bosses leading up to that were painfully dull and tanky. There is no difficulty selection, and even if there were, the last thing I want is more health to drain. Not to mention, there’s no indicator for quest or enemy levels until you begin battling them, so at one time, I fell into a grind of a boss battle that took me thirty minutes without taking a hit myself. Ugh.
The cast of seven playable characters over the story’s course (with more hidden in Gran Blue) is the one saving grace. All the Japanese voicework is lifted straight from the anime, with no English dub selectable. Lionhearted protagonist Shiki is a brawler who uses gravity-imbued finishers to draw enemies in. His naivete about the world outside his planet leads to some funny moments, and his passion for befriending even his archenemies is infectious. Rebecca dual-wields blasters and can occasionally switch to a third-person shooter to stun enemies. The pervy Professor Weisz, unstuck in time after fifty years of his planet’s history was eaten by a time-eating space dragon, fires an arsenal of guns recklessly around as if he’s comboing in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, though it’s frustrating fighting solo enemies with him. Homura, the stoic samurai girl, unlocks late in the story but became a favourite of mine, particularly with her story arc and ability to slash wider mobs and switch to focus on single targets. There are also the android sisters, including Witch, the resident sorceress; Sister, the dominatrix-nun; and Hermit, the cutesy hacker.
Some shōnen fans may disagree with me, but the overt sexualization in the game truly put me off. Even compared to the anime and manga, every single woman in Edens Zero is ridiculously proportioned and never stops jiggling while the camera lingers on them. There are around 700 pieces of armor to unlock, with jackets and pants and boots for the two male characters and increasingly skimpy outfits for the many female characters. Rather than being playful and *ahem* titillating, it felt gross and as if the developers were dangling giant boobs in my face to try and distract me from the awful gameplay and level design. Well, I’m not latching.
Musically, Edens Zero is fantastic. It features a grand and optimistic orchestral soundtrack that borrows from and expands on the anime score, and it does well to elevate the adventurous tone in ways reminiscent of the Dragon Quest series. The voice acting lifted from the anime is thoroughly solid, even if voiced conversations outside the main story rely on canned phrases played over the text boxes. You will likely get tired of the same shouted Japanese battle phrases repeating with each combo, though, and there’s not even subtitles for them (you ain’t missing much beyond “Take that!”). Strangely, there are moments when the sound levels are uneven, either drowning out some dialogue or, in the case of Rebecca’s ultimate attack, suddenly rising in volume. Once more, players can get the best this game has to offer from the anime.
Speaking of which, I did go and watch a few episodes of the anime after finishing the game, and I was immediately impressed by the quality of the animation and action choreography. It stumps me, then, why anyone interested in this universe would want to experience the exact same story truncated in key moments and needlessly bloated with boring battles in other moments. If you want boobs even more giant, and if you have a vendetta against your square button and your free time, then I’d heartily recommend Edens Zero. If you’ve played any anime action game since the PS2, then you should know there are many better options out there.
