Most known as a manga and second as an anime, KONAMI has taken it upon themselves to make a video game out of EDENS ZERO, the second of Hiro Mashima’s works to make the jump into gaming. Woefully, like Fairy Tale 2, EDENS ZERO has an immense amount of source material to work with, but refuses to take the jump into video game land seriously.
EDENS ZERO
Developer: KONAMI
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PlayStation 5(reviewed), Xbox Series X|S
MonsterVine was supplied with a PlayStation 5 code for review.
EDENS ZERO starts with our protagonist, Shiki Granbell, who is living on a planet reserved primarily as a theme park. He maintains the robots that make up for almost the entire population of his city when Rebecca Bluegarden shows up with her kitty cat android, Happy, to make content as a B-cuber. Seeing the opportunity to get Shiki off the planet and onto an adventure, the robots turn on him, and he leaves with Rebecca.
The story is fine. It’s about what you’d expect from a shōnen manga, and while there are a few good twists and turns, it’d be better experienced in literally any other medium. Everything you’d think would be enhanced by the story being made into a video game, interactivity, exploration, and customization, is weighed down so heavily by the slip-shop experience EDENS ZERO offers.
Primarily, EDENS ZERO is weighed down by an extremely boring and rigid combat system. Lacking anything close to fluidity, the player is left to bang away on buttons, hoping to chain together attacks only to have the characters themselves stop and start over whenever a different button is pressed. The combat system is one of the least cohesive I’ve ever played in an action-RPG.
Combos do not chain together well at all. Everyone has a signature action, which is probably the highlight of the entire game. Unfortunately, performing a signature action stops all combat, so the characters can get a little cut scene to show off their Signature Action. Rebecca turns Happy into an assault rifle and stops time to wail on the enemies. Weisz pulls one of four different types of turrets out of the ground that persist if you change characters.
Signature Actions are not the same as Special Skills, which are most similar to EX skills. Tap R2 on the controller and you’ll get a longer cut scene that, while looking nice, doesn’t really do that much damage. The lack of damage is actually my biggest beef with the combat system. Nothing seems to do much damage unless you’re 10+ levels above the enemy you’re fighting. Combat in EDENS ZERO is an absolute slog.
Enemies have a purple bar around their portrait, and your attacks whittle down the bar. Once empty, the enemy enters a ‘break’ state and… what? You don’t really do more damage. It might explain why the break state lasts for around six seconds. Implementing a shield followed by a break state, but without any actual change in the combat, is diabolical.
There’s an entire perfect dodge system that is difficult to navigate because there’s a clear signal that the enemy is going to attack, but it varies based on the attack. If you trigger the perfect dodge, you can follow up with an attack that deals double damage and knocks the enemy out of their attack. However, the attack can miss, putting you in an even worse position, and the attack telegraph can be imperceptible depending on the attack.
As such, just about everything in the game becomes a big time sink. The home base planet for the crew is Planet Blue Garden. This is a large city area with the Shooting Starlight Guild that gives Shiki and his crew side-quests to advance exploration guild ranks. Right out of the gate, Shiki can fly around, and that makes things both convenient and fun. Unfortunately, most of what you’re flying around is big empty areas.
Planet Blue Garden and a lot of the open areas are vast and empty. You’ll be loaded up with side quests (with an artificial limit of 20 for some reason) that have you do things like collect items for a delivery, talk to someone, fight a monster with way too much HP, and take pictures in photo mode. As a side-quester myself, I found myself looking at the list and just sighing. The quest setups are fine, but the content, the meat, what you’re actually doing, is extremely tedious.
EDENS ZERO, which is actually the name of the spaceship Shiki and his friends fly around in, acts as a more intimate hub for the crew. Although, like much of the game, the spaceship is enormous and somewhat desolate. There’s a lot of space and not so much to do. You can build accessories for your team and play dress up, which is neat, but ultimately does nothing tactile.
There are precisely two minigames in EDENS ZERO, punishment and massage, and they are the exact same minigame. Buttons appear on the bottom of the screen, and you have to hit them in the order they appear after a circle closes in on the buttons. It makes one wonder why they included two minigames if they weren’t going to change them up whatsoever.
Something that may have been a bigger issue if it didn’t have so many other negatives to contend with is the translation and localization. When you hit the main menu after loading up the game and there’s an autosave, the ‘continue’ button is simply labeled ‘retry.’ This is one of many examples of the translation being 1:1 instead of being localized. There were many examples in the text between characters that just outright didn’t make sense.
EDENS ZERO seems like it has great and fun source material with interesting characters and worlds that are just bogged down by every single gameplay system within the game. I kept hoping the game would start to unlock more abilities that would give me a more fluid experience, and as I got closer to the end, I realized it just wasn’t coming.
The combat system tries to add some verticality to its design by offering Ether Gear Enhancement, a talent/upgrade system that requires a lot of work to unlock. The items required to unlock portions of the tree are locked behind side-quests that don’t become available until main story progression is achieved. Despite the upgrades, though, it doesn’t give the combat any more fluidity. You’re just adding extra steps onto the ends of existing combos.
The Final Word
EDENS ZERO might have something for fans of the manga or anime, but I would struggle to recommend this game to anyone. No one thing it does makes it a bad game, but EDENS ZERO manages to consistently reveal its issues with every system introduced.
MonsterVine Rating: 1.5 out of 5 – Terrible
