As the invading Archelites ravage the planet of Heryon in a deadly war, set out on a personal quest across a beautiful world in this new turn-based RPG out of Early Access at last.
Edge of Eternity
Developer: Midgar Studio
Price: $30
Platforms: PC
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
Edge of Eternity has left Early Access, making this long-awaited RPG available in its completed form. You play as Daryon, a young soldier in humanity’s war against the Archelites, alien invaders who attacked the planet years ago. After a sequence of terrible events wipes out his team, Daryon deserts in response to a letter from his sister Selene saying that their mother has caught the devastating illness known as the Corrosion, but that she has a lead on how to stop the seemingly incurable disease.
The flow of the opening hours is a little rough, most likely due to its original Early Access nature, since two additional sections were added ahead of the game’s original starting point. This provides a nice introduction to the story, world, and gameplay, but also means that I saw the tutorial on how to use an inn twice, had a combat tutorial pop-up every time I did certain actions in the early hours, and got a tutorial on how to open treasure chests far enough in that I’d already earned an achievement for the number of chests I’d opened. This improves significantly once you get into the game proper and things really start opening up. While sometimes described as open world, Edge of Eternity instead features several large areas that you gain access to as you progress through the story. These vast areas are absolutely gorgeous, with breathtaking scenery to travel through along with numerous materials to collect, treasure chests to open, and occasional puzzles to solve.
To aid your traversal of the world, you unlock a mount known as a Nekaroo. Who needs a horse when you can have a giant cat instead? I can’t overstate how adorable the Nekaroo is. It purrs, it washes its face in its idle animation, and yes, you can pet it. Your Nekaroo can also dig up treasure as you run through the world. An early quest hints that you can build up your own Nekaroo farm, but this sadly never goes anywhere. I believe the developers intend to add this as part of the post-launch content, so it’s just a pity that it wasn’t ready in time for the full launch. More Nekaroo content can only be a good thing, and running through the world on my Nekaroo never failed to make me happy. Of course, it’s not all about purring Nekaroos and collecting shiny materials. The world is also populated by roaming monsters. If you come into contact with a monster or strike first to trigger a preemptive attack, you’ll enter combat.
Combat is handled on a grid-like battlefield that takes place right where you encountered the enemy on the field, which generally worlds well but leads to some amusing glitches if the terrain isn’t set up right for such a battle. It is a turn-based combat system with ATB bars that fill up to determine your turn order. Time pauses when you’re choosing what to do, although you can manually force time to pass if you want. The combat grid adds light tactical elements to combat, which mainly comes into play through character positioning. Some areas include additional elements, such as environmental hazards and weapons to activate, and a few sections feature waves of enemies to fight. Battles start pretty simple, but grow more complex as you gain additional party members, since each character has a distinct combat style. For example, one character has a weak attack that strikes all enemies on the targeted nexus, while another is designed around ranged attacks and traps. Optional combat goals provide you with additional rewards if you meet them, such as defeating an enemy in a specific way or taking a certain amount of damage. All in all, combat ends up being a lot of fun. Despite the tactical nature suggesting you might be able to have many characters on the field, however, your active battle party is limited to four members.
As you earn experience and level up, your equipped weapons will also level up. This unlocks nodes you can place crystals in, which is a critical part of combat. You gain stat boosts from both the chosen node and the chosen crystals, and many crystals also come with combat abilities. This lets you customize which skills are available to you in combat. The downside is that every time you get a new weapon, you’ll spend a few battles without your favorite abilities until you can level up the weapon enough to unlock more slots. Some weapons are found in chests or given as quest rewards, but you can also craft your weapons, armor, and items when you find crafting recipes. Unfortunately, the crafting system is unnecessarily tedious. Some materials are found on the field, dropped by enemies, or bought from vendors, but then you’ll need to use them to craft other crafting materials (after finding or buying the recipe for that material) that are required to craft the item you actually want. I eventually ignored crafting entirely, since the equipment I found worked fine as long as I didn’t let myself get too underleveled. You also can combine crystals for a chance at getting a better crystal, which I also ignored in favor of simply using the new crystals I found.
Numerous side quests become available as you progress through the game, and they come in three basic forms. Regular side quests are offered to you by NPCs. While most of them are basic fetch quests, they often provide world lore or funny dialogue and tend to have decent rewards. World events are random quests that show up in the game’s larger sections and must be completed before you leave the area. I did a few of these, but they started to repeat pretty quickly. Finally, hunts can be accepted from hunting boards and task you with defeating certain monsters. They just add a little extra incentive to fighting the monsters you’ll run into along the way of your main quest. There’s also one long-term collection quest to reward you for thorough exploration as you journey through the world on your mission to find a cure for the Corrosion.
The story blends together the personal stakes of Daryon and Selene searching for a way to save their mother with the epic scale of the war with the Archelites, and they meet several other characters along the way. Daryon himself is unfortunately a weak link in the story. I get it, he saw terrible things in the war and now he’s jaded and cynical, but his attitude grated on me even at points where I agreed with him. Fortunately, the rest of the cast is much better, with one in particular being a shining gem of a character whose dialogue always made me smile. Everything besides NPC dialogue features full voice acting, and it’s pretty solid outside of a couple of quibbles. First, the dialogue and the written subtitles don’t always match up–sometimes with notable differences. Second, there seems to be no consistency for the pronunciation of several names, with the funniest instance being when one name was pronounced three different ways in the same conversation. With that aside, the rest of the presentation is fantastic. The graphics might not be on par with today’s big hits, and there are occasional oddities like a cutscene showing the party walking into a city only for gameplay to resume right where you triggered the cutscene outside the city, but the scenes are generally cinematic and feel like a throwback to a previous era of JRPGs. It also features a wonderful musical score, with beautiful songs for exploration and intense tracks that perfectly match the story’s epic moments.
Unfortunately, the story falls short of its full potential and feels like it’s setting up for something larger, to an extent that goes beyond a mere sequel hook. There was a point partway through when I worried the game wouldn’t be able to bring all of its numerous plot points to a coherent conclusion. Yet as I got further and everything started to come together, I saw the direction the story was going to take. Except… it didn’t. The party’s plan to reach a particular place is entirely abandoned, mysteries are teased but never addressed, and several critical parts of the main plot are left unresolved despite the immediate conflict being wrapped up. Post-launch content is planned for the game, and maybe that will include an expansion to address some of these matters, but right now Edge of Eternity ends with more questions than answers.
The Final Word
Edge of Eternity is a beautiful turn-based RPG, but it left me with mixed feelings. The world is beautiful, the combat is fun, and there’s a lot to love about the story and characters. At the same time, it feels like it’s missing something… or like it’s still incomplete. Despite spending almost 40 hours with the game and enjoying most of that time, I reached the final cutscene feeling as though this was a game that really needed to be longer to truly feel like the epic JRPG it wants to be.
-MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
