Another Eden Begins Review
Back to the Past, Present, and Future
Wright Flyer Studios’s free-to-play RPG Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space has enjoyed good success since its release on mobile in Japan in 2017 and internationally in 2019, still ongoing and receiving new story updates at the time of writing. Seeking to make the most of the game, Wright Flyer Studios has partnered with Studio Prisma to convert it to a premium release on PC and Switch consoles as Another Eden Begins. The conversion is at least successful in parts, resulting in an enjoyable traditional RPG experience that holds up through its thirty-hour runtime, albeit one that doesn’t quite manage to excel in any particular area.
Another Eden Begins contains the contents of the first story arc of the mobile title, spread across slightly over two dozen chapters. It follows Aldo, who is found apparently abandoned just outside the village of Baruoki as a young child along with his baby sister Feinne. After being raised by the mayor, Aldo joins up the village guard, but soon the village is attacked by beastmen, with the kidnapping of Feinne their apparent objective. When looking to rescue Feinne, Aldo is sucked into a rift and finds himself seemingly eight hundred years into the future.
Aldo’s adventure takes him forward and backward through time.
The resulting adventure takes Aldo and his allies across three time periods, and dealing with conflicts between humans and beastmen, hostilities between humans and synths, and mysterious timequakes. The story works on the whole, thanks largely to an endearing set of main characters, but has a habit of jumping back and forth, with the initial premise of setting out to rescue Feinne seemingly becoming oddly forgotten about for a lengthy period of time until it suddenly becomes important. There’s lots of bits of small worldbuilding here and there that helps give some character to the setting, but it never really forms into a properly cohesive whole, especially towards the end as it darts between plot points with little apparent care or reason. One important element to note about Another Eden Begins is its approach to New Game+, which it interestingly blends into the narrative, adding a new character and associated story elements as a result. However, despite the promise of ten new possible endings, it’s debatable as to whether the narrative additions are enough to make it worth revisiting the game’s events again.
Gameplay follows the general template of visiting locations and defeating bosses in order to advance the story. Outside of the city locations and the fields linking them, this means advancing through various dungeons. There are numerous fast travel points to make getting around easy, which is just as well as the game happily sends players all over after a certain point. All of the locations in the game are 2D and primarily built from a number of side-scrolling channels that players can move up and down between, with encounters visible on the field. Most dungeons have a camp at around the halfway point that can be used to heal, and as an extra fast-travel point if players need to go elsewhere for a time. The locations are all quite easy to navigate; puzzles are rare and those that exist are quite trivial, with players generally just needing to find the path forward while deciding whether they want to seek out the treasure chests that lie in the various offshoots.
Environments are largely the side-scrolling type, but with channels to move between and encounters that can be avoided by moving up and down.
Battles see up to four party members engage against a number of opponents in turn-based combat, each turn granting a single action to each participant. The player and enemy’s turns play out at the same time, with the order of action based on each combatant’s speed. Each party member has a regular attack and up to four skills that cover any number of effects from elemental attacks to heals, buffs and debuffs, causing status effects, and more. In addition, each party member has their own Chain Skill, which is triggered after meeting its condition enough times, such as using a fire-based attack, doing a critical hit, or healing an ally. Being able to trigger Chain Skills proves to be a very useful tool in both making regular encounters end more quickly and for taking down bosses.
Another distinct element of Another Eden Begins‘s combat is the Another Force party-switching system. As players pick up optional party members, they can assign them to three additional parties in addition to the current active one. This partly makes up for the fact that there are no healing items — nor healing opportunities outside of combat aside from resting at a camp or inn — and effectively no way to revive a KOed party member during combat, though any who end a battle knocked out have a small bit of health restored afterwards. It also gives players the opportunity to create different parties for certain situations, such as being able to handle when the opponent heavily favours a particular element. Finally, a gauge in the top-right corner builds up and gives players the opportunity to unleash an uncontested series of skills with no MP cost considerations. Ultimately, the combat works really well at keeping things easy to understand and learn, while still offering a lot of strategic options in their party makeup. It’s overall fast-pace also works nicely in the game’s favour and keeps its gameplay ticking along.
Players will take on a mixed variety of foes and have plenty of party members to do it with.
Another Eden Begins does a decent job removing any gacha elements and roadblocks from the original version and more naturally integrating playable characters and upgrade systems into the game, albeit not so much into the main story. Outside of the main story characters who do appear in the event scenes, players can also pick up a variety of optional party members. Collecting additional party members is a simple job of completing the relevant side quests, which the game readily lists out to players when they become available.
Virtually all of the game’s side quests are related to the party members, with each having their own individual story arcs that progress based on the very light bonding system. All side quests generally involve the same formula, where players will need to revisit prior locations to view event scenes and have to take part in one or two event battles, with the balancing and lack of scaling enemies means that players will more often than not be overpowered for the foes encountered within them. At times, these can hinder the momentum of the game, particularly as the game likes to use certain chapter completions as the time to unlock new side quests. The character stories are themselves varied in their effectiveness, and at least run a gamut of themes while giving each of the characters time to shine. However, all of the optional party members prove to be ultimately irrelevant to the main story, rather undercutting the effectiveness of their individual arcs.
Upgrading characters is pretty straightforward; there is a standard experience system, with experience shared across all parties, ensuring that the roster remains fully balanced and players can readily swap around party members as they wish. New ability points are gained by each character every three levels, which can be spent in two linear upgrade paths that provide passive bonuses and new or upgraded battle abilities. In addition, each party member has a weapon and an armour equipment slot, with a rudimentary shop and crafting system available to provide upgrades. There are also two slots to equip “proofs” dropped by bosses and highlighted powerful enemies that usually protect treasure chests, which provide passive bonuses that can be used for party synergy or to help cover up potential weakness. It means that players have perhaps a bit of a limited customisation scope for individual characters, but there is a decent amount of flexibility on strategy when it comes to the party and its individual groups as a whole.
Another Eden Begins has a lot of plot points, but doesn’t really manage to link them together cohesively.
Visuals are generally pleasing, with its puppet-like character models working well with the general character art style and quite colourful environments. Combat also moves along at a decent clip, preventing the game getting bogged down during regular encounters. The UI is largely effective, though the game doesn’t offer much complexity that it needs to deal with. The music, primarily composed by Shunsuke Tsuchiya and Mariam Abounnasr, is catchy and enjoyable to listen to throughout, even if there’s a bit of repetitiveness as players find themselves listening to the same location themes again and again. Voice acting is a bit more variable between the English and Japanese options. The main story scenes are fully voiced in both; however, there is no English voice acting in the side quests. The English voice acting is also a bit stilted, though it’s harder to judge how much of that comes from the script or the voice direction.
Another Eden Begins does well enough at making for an experience that will keep players engaged for its runtime, but not really enough to stand out from the crowd. Combat is enjoyable and the base gameplay loop moves things along to prevent things from becoming too tired, though its side quests can drag things a bit. However, despite the promise of additional narrative elements in the New Game+, what’s currently there isn’t really enough to entice diving back into it right away. It’s ultimately a solid RPG with lots of scope for improvement.
Disclosure: This review is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.
Strong combat makes rewarding use of party dynamics
Great music
Some enjoyable character stories
Nearly all side quests follow the same basic template
Static enemy balancing causes frequent triviality
Certain areas lack depth
Recent Comments