Developer: Midgar Studio
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Switch (cloud)
Tested on: PS5
Edge of Eternity – Review
Edge of Eternity started its journey through crowdfunding campaigns in 2013 and 2015, but didn’t really generate enough interest to be successful. After the second campaign in 2015, it grew on people and it finally released through Steam Early Access in 2018. After three years of hard work, lots of updates and more, the game finally left Early Access in June last year and has now arrived on consoles. Surely, this isn’t a game created by a big studio with a lot of resources at their disposal, but the guys at Midgar Studio still delivered a fun JRPG with an intriguing story in a mostly beautiful world.
Story
As with most JRPGs, the story is one of the main reasons to start playing them. This also applies to Edge of Eternity. The game has a very expansive story with a great narrative not only found in the main quest, but in many side quests as well. Edge of Eternity takes you on a journey through the lands of Heryon as the game’s protagonist Daryon, with his sister Selene, to cure the awful sickness called Corrosion that is taking over the world, and even their mother who has fallen ill to this awful disease. As you travel and meet new people, others will aid you on your quest and your team will grow larger. There are also a lot of interactions between the characters, which really makes each character’s personality shine.
Graphics
For this section, our opinion is divided. At the first glance, this game looks beautiful and you wouldn’t even expect that this game is made by a small developer, but when paying more attention to details further into the game, you’ll be noticing the developer’s limited budget to create the game. you’ll see cutscenes turning into a black screen when rocks are about to hit your party, with the screen only returning with everyone on the ground, but also janky movement animations and poor lip-syncing. Nevertheless, for a small developer like Midgar Studio, they sure did a hell of a job creating this game. Sadly, the game does suffer from some bugs. At times the enemies on our minimap would disappear when opening a menu or when starting a battle, only to reappear after we have talked to an NPC. The map itself looks nice, and you can clearly see that it’s drawn by hand, but it doesn’t match with the world itself. Most buildings aren’t even visible on this map, plus roads and obstacles like mountains are very inaccurate on the map.
Sound
From the moment you start the game, a great soundtrack starts playing. There are a lot of different types of music in this game that are suitable for each and every occasion. The game also features voice acting, but this is only for small portions of the dialogues and thus the game mostly relies on subtitles. Even in the main quest line, a lot of conversations are not voiced, which feels like a missed opportunity, because the voice acting that is present is great. For example, the first time you meet a strange talking flower, it was kind with a gentle voice, and the next one you meet only gets its lines delivered via subtitles. This was quite disappointing as we were expecting another vibrant conversation between humans and plants.
Gameplay
Edge of Eternity is a JRPG in a world where a mysterious sickness called Corrosion is threatening all human existence. Daryon and his sister Selene are tasked with finding a cure for this awful disease and this quest will take them to a lot of places in the world of Heryon. With a good turn-based combat system and a very interesting story, this game is sure to keep you busy for quite a while.
Edge of Eternity uses an ATB-based combat system similar to the one in the Final Fantasy game series and for the layout, they’ve used a hex grid. During each fight, you will gain control over a character when they’re ready to perform an action. At this point, you can choose to attack with a normal physical attack, use a spell, or a skill. You can also forward the time to switch over to another character to coordinate your attacks in unison, or you can skip your turn, which switches that character into a defensive stance.
In typical JRPGs, your characters will learn new skills and spells as they level up, but in Edge of Eternity, they’ve gone for a different approach. Instead of just learning attacks, you have to equip gemstones to your weapon which will allow you to use skills and spells. There are six different colored gemstones that each have one or multiple spells or skills on them. These gemstones can be found by looting chests and killing enemies. Whenever they are dropped, they will have some random stat boosts, which won’t always fit the character you want to equip them to. Luckily, you can combine these gemstones into more powerful ones at a crafting table, and you can reroll them infinitely to get those stat boosts you want. This can be very satisfying but the process will take up quite some time before you made all those equipped gems a perfect match for your character. As you progress, you’ll find higher tier stones that will offer better stats and multiple skills instead of only one.
You can acquire weapons by getting them as quest rewards or by crafting them. Each weapon starts at level one, and will level up as you fight with it until it reaches its level cap. The craftable weapons can become even more powerful when you find plans to upgrade them. As mentioned before, you can equip gemstones to your weapons to acquire skills and spells for use in battle. Each weapon has a field of colored sockets for these gems and you start at the center. You can then create a route across your preferred colors of gems. As you create a route, you’ll be unable to use the sockets on the other side of the field, but you can remove them infinitely to respect your skills and stats. Aside from the weapons and gems, you can also equip armor for your team that offers some extra stat bonuses.
Conclusion
Edge of Eternity leaves us with mixed feelings. A lot of things are great, like the story, the voice acting, the crafting system and the socketing system, but the emotionless cutscenes that get cut short, combined with the many flaws in graphics and the unvoiced dialogues create a stark contrast in quality. We realize it’s still a JRPG created by a small team of developers with limited resources at their disposal and Edge of Eternity will definitely keep you entertained for quite a while with its interesting main story and its beefy number of sidequests. Nonetheless; we do feel things could have been a bit more polished.
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