ANOTHER EDEN 12+

I don’t normally review games but this one deserves praise. Classic experience with modern visuals. Music and landscapes look amazing. The story is interesting and you don’t need to spend money to “do good” in this game. Just takes more time and commitment to raise your characters. But if you do decide to spend, they have a good selection of units in their gacha. Overall it’s a amazing game you can easily put hours and hours into.

This is a really solid old-style jrpg; it’s been a bit simplified for mobile, of course, but it has a lot of cool ideas, nice artwork & visual design, and some touching story moments.

But I keep thinking that I’d like it so much better if it were a real jrpg, instead of being awkwardly forced into the freemium/gacha mold. Sure the game is very generous with free premium currency (at least until postgame), but there are way too many available characters, which undermines the narrative. Almost half of the 59 characters are just useless reskins; the other half actually have story quests (some of which are quite good!), but the sheer number of characters makes it hard to get attached to any of them, & means that most of their stories don’t have any depth.

And of course 6 of the 59 characters are DRAMATICALLY more powerful than the rest (5-stars). This doesn’t actually affect story mode, surprisingly, because the difference only starts being noticeable at very high levels, but it still feels really bad to have collected 36 characters but still not have a single 5-star (5-stars have a level cap of 80, while everyone else has a level cap of 50-60; it makes absolutely no sense).

Finally, the grind gets increasingly ridiculous as the game progresses. Old-style jrpgs had a lot of grinding, and that’s fine, but because this is freemium they added a six-hour timer on dungeons, and made the drop rates incredibly punishing. So you wait six hours to run a dungeon and then don’t even get a single drop of an item you need 30 of.

This game is good, and if you don’t mind freemium/gacha nonsense I highly recommend it. But it could be so so so much better without that nonsense. So disappointing.

I was long since expecting to hit a bottleneck but this game is just plain content full. My only problem is the gameplay is trite and lacking. There is a complex system here that does not matter at all. This should not have been an RPG because you have very little control over your fighting style. Regardless I was more than pleasantly entertained and so long as they don’t use events to strangle users like many other games do, I’d recommend downloading this one you won’t regret it