While not every idea in Edge of Eternity fully gels, developer Midgar Studio gets enough right that the game feels familiar and welcoming – a fantastic classic RPG in modern clothing. With fun characters, a solid battle system, and just enough surprises to maintain the player’s attention, Edge of Eternity announces the arrival of Midgar to the top echelon of JRPG developers.
Edge of Eternity is solid attempt of being love letter to bygone era of JRPG. The well-established world and combat system could take you dozens of hours and soundtrack will please you every time. But poor pacing, weak character models and uneven difficulty could lower your enthusiasm here.
You have to be aware, that this game was created by a small team with a small budget. Therefore it won't compete with AAA titles.
For what it is, this game is awesome. Some people here criticise the characters and story, but I absolutely disagree. The characters are interesting and have more characters than in your run of the mill JRPG. A main character that is a bit sassy is a refreshing breath of fresh air, when you consider most main characters in JRPGs are either the nice guy or the quite guy, that barely talks. Also the other characters are interesting and you often whitness some funny scenes.
The overall story might not be exceptional, but it keeps you going.
The battle system is the best thing about this game. It's addictive and a wellcome change from the occasional button masher. You can try different tactics with different skills and the game even rewards you for doing so, because you have some special objectives in most fights, and you get some bonus items or money when you complete them. Also it is very important to plan ahead and pick the right build. And the variety of gems and equipment really helps. It's really motivating to try different combinations and craft gems, to get even stronger gems, with better skills.
Another plus are the multitude of customizations. It might be a bit overwhelming at first, how many options you have, to customize the game, but once you find out what everything does, you can create your own individual game experience. You can set the difficulty of the fights, how party and enemylevel scale, if saving everywhere is enabled or not, if you can teleport, how far the camera will be from your characters and of course you can also adjust the battle speed to your liking.
The downside of this game is, that it has a lot of technical limitations. For example you will experience some framerate drops, the graphic can't compete with big AAA or even AA titles. The way you interact with characters and objects is sometimes weird, because you don't interact with the thing you face, but with the nearest thing to you, even if its behind you.
If you are able to look past the technical problems of this game you will get a real hidden gem. What it tries to do, it does right. It creates an interesting world with a lot of lore, with loveable characters and a great battle system. And most of all it tries something all the big studios don't do anymore. It creates an JRPG like in the golden age and scratches an itch I've had for a long time.
And in the end what matters is, what you receive for your money. And I got a lot of great hours out of this game, for a small price. That's why I rate this game 9/10.
10 hours of gameplay! Gorgeous! We are talking about a team of 10 people who have made a product with heart and mind and a boundless love for old generation jrpg. Music, combat and sets are beautiful, colorful and inspired, even the English dubbing amazed me with its quality! Congratulations to this small team that I hope has more budget in the future to give us a perfect Jrpg. The only flaws I find concern the camera that occasionally does strange things, and the protagonists' facial animation, which at times seems a bit out of context. But for now what to say. WHAT A GREAT GAME
If the rich, dramatic and engaging intertwining, and the ingenious turn-based combat system with a strong tactical component could abundantly satisfy the palates of fans of the genre, the technical backwardness is attributable as much to the low budget available to the transalpine studio as to the years delays that this has accumulated during development, however, risk obscuring what is good in Edge of Eternity.
Edge Of Eternity has some
modern touches – you can freely
speed up battles, and a variety
of difficulty toggles can reduce
the grind. Less care, however,
has been given to optimisation.
Even on PS5 you’ll fail to get a
smooth framerate in
performance mode when out in
the field, and while teleporting
is fast, assets can’t keep up,
clipping in sometimes seconds
later. It might hold you over
until Final Fantasy XVI arrives
but it’s hard not to feel
like you’re playing, as
the French say, a faux
pas. [Issue#12, p.75]
This love letter to the JRPG genre looks beautiful and its combat is very well done. There are many problems, however – awful animation quality, a clumsily paced story, an empty world and cringey dialogue.
Edge of Eternity has heart and Midgar Studio should be proud of what they’ve achieved for a small indie team. I just wish I liked it more. Thanks to an uninspiring story, lack of overall polish, and some uneven visuals, the final product simply can’t match the developer’s ambitions, making this a hard game to recommend. If you’re curious to dive in, there’s still plenty to like. With a versatile combat system, colorful environmental design, entertaining side content, and old-school design, JRPG fans may find something to enjoy here. It’s on Game Pass at launch, so if you’re playing on PC or Xbox, you could always dip in that way, but otherwise, you’d be better off looking elsewhere.
I just did not care enough about anything that I was seeing or doing to enjoy Edge of Eternity. The narrative lacks thought and insight, the characters are bland, and each new location simply means more fetch quests and slightly higher level enemies to go through the motions to fight. Edge of Eternity is undoubtedly beautiful and the art team deserves kudos, but it is a hollow, empty, and shallow kind of beauty, and with no intelligence nor soul to back it up, the talents of the artists are largely wasted on this one.
Edge of Eternity is a game that is a love song to famous jrpgs like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean and Xenoblade. Edge of Eternity is made by a very small studio and let's give them credit here I mean they had like 10 people working on this game and looks very artistic in a way of different settings across the game map and boy it does shine here. You get sparkling woods, giant mushrooms..like Morrowind mushrooms, deserts and snow hill tops and coastal beaches. This is one of the big plus here however the game has its problems. Big towns seems to have fps drops on the ps5. I understand it was made by small dev team but the fps drops needs patching crashed on me 5 times in the first large town. However the devs seemed to abandoned the game it's been a couple years since the game came out and definitely there are a few things I want to point out. Outfits are missing for whatever reason the menu will have a outfit slot in the main menu but the game doesn't have that in the game to buy to change your clothes. Gameplay is a standard turn-based rpg. Giving the nature of it the game has decent quality here. Not flashy nor terrible its decent with magic spells.
Voice acting is a hit or miss on how you look at it.
Soundtrack is extremely well done here the familiar sounds of Xenoblade, Chrono Cross and Trigger as at work here great soundtrack of the ps1 and ps2 era. Overall the game is a great love song to many rpgs and jrpgs it's a great game with likeable characters even though the animation movement seems cartoonish. Okay voice acting, gorgeous graphics however pop ins is annoying. Despite a few and major flaws I wish the devs continued to support this game I mean outfits are a missing feature is a shame too. Fps drops in big large cities needs a fix here so much fps drops. My score is an 8 for how fun the game can be there is a hidden gem somewhere in the game.
Graphics =3 laggy and blurry inconsistent visuals with glitches that can make entire screen flash white at times. Needlessly big world that is empty and takes to long to traverse with vast empty spaces.
Character animations are substandard by indie psp game level of standards, facial animations are hideous and creepy.
Gameplay =2 allot of gimmicks none especially polished and repetitive puzzles. In battle why do you need to first press R2 then X,X to attack, when other RPGs just press manage with x, repetitive fetch quests that just mark a huge circle on the map that you need to search. Weapons and rewards from quests immediately "10 min later" become replaced making these fetching searching quests unrewarding.
Story= 3 unlikeble characters that you just don't care about, story that is kind of bland and forgettable.
Sound= 7 Great soundtrack and nice voice acting sometimes unbalanced sound levels like during load times song plays much higher then rest.
- Irritating. You do NOT need to be aware of the studios size. Get out with that nonsense.
- Good music
- Good landscape design, dungeons and mines are disgusting though. You see nothing but ugly 90's looking areas until about 3 hours in, then suddenly BAM, it's pretty shocking how the entires game graphical appeal flips from the 90s to something fitting for 2022. VERY bad first impression. Dumb decsion.
- Decent VA and mostly amazing music, some of it in ch4 is horrible.
- Sound FX's are horrible and not impacting at all. Like fallons gun, sounds like a bb gun, it should sound like a sherrifs cannon rifle from the old west. It definitely doesn't. Its pathetic.
- Story is laughably bad, except for a few scenes in ch2 ending.
- This is not a small studio issue, its a lack of intelligence in the devs issue.
- Crafting is horrible. I'm not going to 1, kill a monster for a drop, 2, hunt down a plant from a specific region, 3, buy an ingredient that only appears in 1 specific store you can't even reach when teleporting is blocked, just for 1 potion that barely even heals any HP. If you think that's a lot for just a potion? Wait til you look at armor and weapons.
I play gacha games that have worse upgrade your character methods in them. That says something.
- You spend the majority of this game with only 2 party members. Ya, not lots of tactics going on here.
- Your mount is taken from you obsessively and you rarely have access to it. I'm talking maybe 15 minutes every 10-20 hours of story advancement. To add to this issue, there is no auto-run yet the size of the world is ridiculously huge. You are literally forced to run without auto run for hours, and hours, and hours. It's really really painful. And again, a dev choice. Not smart, even a little.
For two years almost all games have been a 1/2 at best, so this game has that going for it that it isnt that low i guess. This is no ffx. Thats for sure.
Biggest problem is this game lets you unlock and recruit people then takes it all away just because you advance a chapter. You cant ever make progress in your party. You do tons of work to craft grind quest then equip them and they go poof because of the story….never to come back. Its literally the worst idea for an rpg ever. You hit endgame with only 6, yet have 12-14 join your party at random points in the story, letting you equip & upgrade gear, or waste tons of time leveling them, only for them to vanish permanently.
The graphics are good for a budget game
Bugs dont ruin it. So that's good…. Since its 2022.
The problem….. is the devs low intelligence decisions to just lock things like your mount, teleporting, or flat out take them from you, forever, like party members and tons of gear.
I cant even trust that I can PLAY the game, grind, get gear. Etc. Because in 10 minutes that person may be gone forever anyway.
The choices these devs have made for “tactical battles” is outright bad. Example. Enter battle, before you even move once, tentacles appear from no where and slam your entire turn away. This repeats until you're dead, all before you even get 1 turn to react. It's not even a mini boss. Just a normal fight.
I would put money on it right now, that if me & all 10 devs played chess, Id beat all of them within 20 moves. ZERO Logic in their decisions.
The only amazing fun things in this game are the environments, at night only, daytime lighting makes the game look old.
And the kitty mount. Which surprise, the devs decided to also take it from you every corner you turn, followed up by locking you from **** teleport blocking is major. IDK what they are thinking, seriously. If the teleporting was locked short term, ok sure, but its not short, we are talking 10's of hours, it opens up again for maybe 30 minutes, then boom, you do one part of the story and they all lock all over again for 10's of hours. No devs, No.
Game could've been good, devs decisions are horrible. I rate it a 4 because its playable and when its night, looks gorgeous on an oled tv. Beyond that, forget this game honestly. Persona 5 is still the Turn Based RPG king for this decade.
Also, the fact that this game struggles to hit 60 FPS, let alone 120 on the PS5 is a joke.
Verdict? Once you start to see all of these problems around chapter 3 and 4, you are NOT going to enjoy this game at all, not even a little bit. It has done nothing but bring out irritation in me, and definitely NO enjoyment. And I'm someone who typically plays ALL games on the highest difficulty setting.
This game is not difficult, it's a chore, and that's a major difference.
@ The art & music designers, for the outer worlds if they ever read this. Freaking amazing work with so little money, but my advice, RUN. You are clearly very talented, and the only reason this game is NOT universally rated freaking 1. Your talents are being wasted here. They put trash all over your fantastic artwork
An uninspired mess with big ambition but poor execution.
It's a largely empty world filled with forgettable characters, mediocre art direction, and confused design principles. It tries (and fails) to emulate the success of the JRPGs of yesteryear, but does absolutely nothing exceptional.
The writing is substandard, with plot holes everywhere and and refusal to push the player to feel any sort of urgency outside of the opening tutorial section. The humor is out of place, and although the developer attempted to shoehorn in some lighthearted moments, it falls flat and feels awkward when the player isn't emotionally invested enough in what's going on to need a funny one-liner to ease the tension.
Everything here just screams average, yet there's going to be a large subsection of the gaming population who is going to try to tell you that the game is great because it was made by a small team, and that people are being too harsh on it, etc. Everyone needs to remember that when you're paying for a product, you can't make excuses for someone who is providing a substandard experience and trying to take your money for it. Stop excusing lazy developers and poor work.
Les personnages sont super cool, l'histoire est sympa, mais techniquement à la ramasse. Si ce n'était esthétique ça irait, mais le boss de fin est complètement bugué : j'ai du relancer plusieurs fois à cause du système de déplacement qui ne fonctionnait plus (impossible de valider), ou d'impossibilité d'utiliser les objets, ou d'interface devenue invisible, ou de personnages morts mais toujours debout et impossible de les ressusciter, ou de freeze complet, ... Bref, impossible à terminer, je sais que bcp de gens ne terminent pas leurs jeux, mais pour les personnes le faisant, le minimum syndical ça serait que ça fonctionne !
SummaryWage epic turn-based battles as you follow Daryon and Selene on their quest to find a cure to the all-consuming Corrosion in this grand tale of hope and sacrifice.