Edge of Eternity Review
Anyone who has read my reviews is likely to know my love for Final Fantasy Tactics, mostly because I won’t shut up about it. The way it combined RPG elements like different classes and equipment with three-dimensional movement and strategy has rendered me a life-long fan of the tactical RPG genre. So far, I haven’t enjoyed any of the games that have tried to emulate it quite as much as FFT but many are still good. Because of this, and because I never want to miss what could be a potential successor, I’m eager to try any new tactical RPG that comes out. This week I got another chance thanks to developers Midgar Studio and their newest game Edge of Eternity.
Edge of Eternity has one of the more creative and scattershot settings I’ve seen in a long time. Ages ago, the planet of Heryon was visited by an alien race known as the Archelites. These Archelites soon became interstellar patrons of Heryon, providing advanced technology in exchange for labor and resources. Eventually, the Archelites grew tired of dealing with the humans of Heryon and decided to invade. After hundreds of years of war, the Archelites’ lack of success prompted them to unleash The Corrosion, a plague that mutates the animals and humans of Heryon before killing them. The game’s story begins when Daryon, a soldier drafted into the Heryon resistance army, defects to return home after learning his mother has become infected with The Corrosion. Teaming up with his sister Selene, a priestess of Heryon’s chief religion, they set off to find a cure to The Corrosion, to save their world and their mother.
There’s one undeniable fact about Edge of Eternity and that is it has a lot of interesting ideas. The world is fascinating right from the start. In most other games, the alien race colonizing a world full of rare resources and technologically inferior natives would be told from the invader’s perspective, probably in a 4X game like Endless Space. But on top of the sci-fi invasion, Edge of Eternity also has magic, which creates an interesting blend of genres. The only other setting I’ve seen this merger is the Shadowrun franchise but in that it’s much bleaker. One of the coolest examples of this union of technology and mysticism are the crystal ballistae scattered around the world that fire magical bolts. It also creates an interesting class disparity. Though Heryon is at war with the Archelites, Archelite technology is both useful and rare. This leads to the advanced machines being hoarded by the aristocracy and clergy, while commoners have to use medieval means to solve their problems. Possibly more interesting than that are the natural features of the planet Heryon. I don’t know what deity created Heryon but they were clearly a sadist. Instead of chickens, Heryon has pilitches, squat birds the size of a husky that only lay eggs in the presence of negative emotions such as fear or sorrow. In place of wolves, there are croctas, canines with a secondary mouth between their shoulders that can speak well enough to cast spells. Likely to be the fan favorite is the nekaroo, horse-sized cats with two tails and feathered ears. Beyond fauna, Heryon is also littered with massive crystals that have remarkable effects but, presumably because they are so common, no one comments on them much.
Where these creative ideas really impressed me was how they effected the gameplay. The nekaroo, being horse-sized, are used as transportation mounts, allowing players to travel farther and faster once they’ve gotten far enough in the game. They also have a scent-based item radar, which allows players to find extra items as they ride towards their next destination. Eventually, some of these “items” turn out to be monsters, presumably to give a sense of risk and uncertainty to the item hunts, but the monsters are such pushovers that they’re only an annoyance. If players start fight near the many massive crystals, they can be included in the fight’s tactical plan. If an ally or enemy occupies the same hex as a crystal, they can get a bonus like being healed every turn or boosting their spell power. I was surprised to see that even the weather affects the game, with different times of day and weather changing the power of different elemental magic. During the day, the sun empowers fire and plant magic, while at night, the darkness strengthens sneaky poison magic and the chill of night enhances ice magic. My personal favorite are the crystal ballistae, because nothing helps you win a fight like a magical siege weapon.
Characters can insert crystals into their weapons, gaining one bonus from the slot filled and a second bonus from the crystal that was inserted.
Unfortunately, though Edge of Eternity has a truck load of cool ideas, very little about the game is well executed. The first thing most people will notice is the game’s visual design. For whatever reason, Edge of Eternity has three different art styles. The title and loading screens have a very traditional anime look, dialogue boxes are accompanied by character portraits in a different, more western illustration style, and the rest of the game is 3D renders. I don’t know if the studio was inexperienced with 3D models, if their budget was smaller than necessary, or if some other stressor caused it, but the animations for the models just aren’t good. Characters’ faces hardly emote and their lips barely move, hair, pauldrons, flowing robes, and tassels all clip through characters’ bodies, and limbs move at such inhuman extremes everyone would have torn tendons after a few minutes. But sometimes players won’t be able to notice these flaws because the camera is fairly unreliable, often clipping through the ground or focusing on the wrong thing. And there may be similar problems with the enemy monsters, but they’re obstructed by the game’s incredibly tall grass as often as they’re not.
Not to pile on, but the game’s visuals aren’t the only thing poorly done in Edge of Eternity. For whatever reason, the developers decided to include a crafting system. This means players can collect resources for and build their own weapons, armor, potions, and more. It feels out of place and constantly diverts the player away from their quests to pick up ore from one of the games excessively numerous gathering points. The armor players can craft is only slightly better versions of armor they can buy and it’s easier to buy the potions players need from vendors than to make sure they’ve got the right materials to brew their own. Even the crystals players can craft to use in the game’s fusion of Final Fantasy 7’s materia system and Final Fantasy 10’s sphere grid system are much less interesting and effective than those the player gets as quest rewards. Only the weapon crafting is interesting, but I would much rather be getting money from the monsters I defeat instead of hoping I get the right kind of bone I need to make my new sword. It feels like this whole idea was included because other successful games had it.
There are other miscellaneous issues with the game on top of everything else. A good portion of the game’s writing suffers from inaccurate translation and spelling mistakes, including one side character whose dialogue is entirely in Japanese. There is a system that assigns players a random side objective in most combat situations, but it doesn’t seem to have any idea what will and won’t be feasible in each fight, meaning sometimes the bonus prizes are locked behind impossible tasks. Because characters only gain new abilities through the aforementioned crystals system, leveling up characters feels totally pointless and leveling up the weapons in which you put the crystals happens way too quickly, so completing missions and seeking extra combat feels pointless. This isn’t helped by the fact that the game is supremely easy, at least on “normal” mode. All characters fully heal at the end of each fight and the system that is supposed to substitute for the entropy of perpetual fighting, the party energy system, depletes so slowly it never becomes a threat. If you do decide to play this game and want any sort of challenge, set the difficulty to hard or even nightmare mode.
I haven’t had a lot of good things to say about Edge of Eternity but I honestly do think that developers Midgar Studio have a very good core idea and creative setting. Their website says they’ve been in the games business about ten years, mostly as a secondary studio, so I’d bet they have the ability to polish this game to a more enjoyable level. Since release, they’ve already published two updates to smooth the game out, so they do care enough to fix it. And, while roadmaps aren’t a guarantee of improvement, the fact that the developers have pledged they will be working into 2022 on the game is heartening. Though this game is currently available for “free” to Xbox owners who have Game Pass, I think everyone, regardless of platform, is better off waiting for a sale because it will give the devs time to bring the game up to snuff for the $30 price tag. Unless something terrible happens to either me or the devs before the end of the year, this game seems like a shoo-in for my end of year Russell Revisits article, so make sure to check back in December.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
