Edge of Eternity Review – Test

Edge of Eternity is a fantasy role-playing game with open-world gameplay and is based on JRPGs like Final Fantasy

In this Edge of Eternity review, you’ll find out all about the JRPG indie game, with high-quality graphics, voice-overs, and a beautiful world. Edge of Eternity is a turn-based role-playing game inspired by Final Fantasy. It was developed by a small indie team, but still offers high-quality anime graphics and a very interesting story.

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German Version:

This article is available here as text, but also as a YouTube video (German voice-over, many subtitles). This way you can choose how you would like to enjoy it most.

Video:

German Voice-Over, many subtitles

Edge of Eternity Test – Introduction

Hi there, it’s the Zap. In this Edge of Eternity review, I’d like to introduce you to this Japanese-inspired roleplaying game. It is currently being developed by a French Indie Dev team. And with the name Midgar Studios and the very first graphics of the game, it was immediately clear to me that there is a lot of “Final Fantasy”-love in it.

I’ll show you how Edge of Eternity is played, what features it has, how it feels today after 18 months of early access and numerous updates, and if the quality can compete with Final Fantasy in any way. In the end, there will be a rating from me, but most of all I want to give you an impression of the game so that you can decide for yourself if the game could be fun for you.

I got a free trial sample, but I always try to evaluate each game with the thought in mind how I would feel if I had paid the full price.

Edge of Eternity – Background

The Indie Dev Team Midgar Studios has previously co-developed the action-packed Parkour game, Hover. This came out in 2017 and was quite successful. So they are still Indie developers, but not a completely inexperienced team anymore. Edge of Eternity is in early access since December 2018, so it has already had a long journey and many updates.

At the beginning of the early access phase, the game was rather unstable, didn’t have many of today’s features yet, and also the character design was two or three classes worse throughout. A lot has changed since then, the work is not completely done yet, but more about that later.

Game Type

Edge of Eternity is a fantasy roleplaying game with strong Japan RPG style elements. The fights take place in turn-based mode. On a 3D map characters and enemies face each other, the camera rotates over the battlefield. Every attack and every spell is animated in a fancy way, like you are used to from the earlier parts of the Final Fantasy series. And this is not the only similarity that connects Edge of Eternity with this popular series.

We play a group of up to four characters, which we can control and equip alternately. The characters as well as their weapons level up when we get experience points through fights or quests. Level increases give basic fixed bonus values, we are not allowed to make any decisions here.

However, the game offers customization options for both the stats and skills of our heroes through the equipment and a gem system that allows us to upgrade our weapons. This indirectly introduces a character development that is at least as extensive as the usual character sheet systems of other RPGs.

In battles, through quest rewards and treasure chests, we collect vast amounts of equipment that we can use to improve our heroes. Through numerous resources, crafting, gem enhancements, and other systems, Edge of Eternity offers extensive role-playing fun. Crafting recipes can be found or bought in shops and in every major town we can find workbenches where we can give free rein to our crafter wishes.

Edge of Eternity Gameplay – Characters and Story

We start the game as Daryon. He is a young soldier who gets caught in an attack of an alien race on his world in the prologue and loses his whole unit in the attack. On top of that, he gets involved in a sacrificial ritual, which consequences are not explained at the beginning.

After these terrible experiences he deserts from the army and travels home to his sister Selene and the sick mother, who has fallen victim to a strange disease called corrosion. The two siblings join forces and against the will of the mother, they travel out into the world to find a cure for the mother and the many other sick people.

Where exactly the disease comes from, why the aliens suddenly attacked after many peaceful years of cooperation, what the strange sacrificial rituals in the military are, is what we have to find out little by little. To do so, we explore a huge unknown world and get to know many places, inhabitants, and the problems of the world. But also numerous monsters and villains cross our way again and again.

In the later course of the game, we find temporary and permanent companions, from which we can then form a group of up to four fighters. And there is also a very cute breed of huge cat-like animals that we can get as mounts during the game.

Gameplay – Combat and Skills

The fights take place in a turn-based mode, whereby additionally a time component comes into play. All heroes and opponents have speed values and these determine their initiative, which then determines who is allowed to take action and when. It is also possible to wait for the whole lap or only a part of it to precisely time an attack. For example, you can abort the skills of your opponents in a very targeted way or evade them.

In battle, the heroes are leveling, but also the weapons. And we can additionally strengthen them with crystals and adapt them to our preferences and needs. The crystals can also be exchanged at any time if we want to prepare ourselves for certain fights.

For this purpose, the game uses an eight-element scheme. So every spell and skill has an element, and the enemies have corresponding weaknesses and resistances. However, these must be discovered separately for each opponent variant, afterwards, they are displayed on the opponent’s head. And of the already numerous monsters, there are usually 5 or more variants.

Then the battlefield is divided into hex squares. Attacks can hit a field or a specific target. You can dodge, move, delay, cast spells, or strike. Attacks from behind are especially strong, just like element attacks. And sometimes there are other ways to fight, for example with magic crystals that bring certain advantages or disadvantages, or with a siege cannon that you can direct against the enemy.

In every battle, the game provides us with a special additional challenge as a bonus task. It says “kill the marked enemy last”, “take 800 damage in combat”, “attack three times from behind” or “kill an enemy without exploiting his elemental weakness”. There are certainly more than 50 different challenges in total. You don’t have to complete them, but if you do, you’ll get extra loot as a reward.

Edge of Eternity Gameplay – World

One of Edge of Eternity’s greatest strengths is its world design. It’s an almost seamless open world, and loading screens are only seen when you enter a cave or larger building. And the many different regions are extremely varied and very detailed. The design is really creative and can not only keep up with common AAA roleplaying games, but many popular titles could take inspiration from this.

In addition to meadows and forests, there are swamps, mountains, lakes, different types of grassland, the beach by the sea, and many other areas. There are dungeons with cellars and narrow caves, and almost everything is quite three-dimensional. Everything is lovingly filled with plants, stones, resources, hidden treasure chests, little puzzles, secrets, shrines, and quests through and through.

Edge of Eternity offers a day and night change and also a weather system. So the world is constantly changing light conditions and the sunshine shifts to rain, snow, sandstorms and other phenomena like acid or poison rain. With these means the game succeeds in placing very varied visual effects over the already beautiful and interestingly designed world.

Sleeping is necessary, because running, sprinting, fighting exhausts the characters and the further the stamina drops, the stronger deductions on the combat values our heroes and heroines will get. For this purpose there are small encampments all over the world. But if we stay overnight in a good hostel, we also have the possibility to eat something, which then gives a buff for the whole group for some time. Food is not absolutely necessary, but it helps if you take it.

Since the world is very expansive, there is an enormous amount to explore. Beside the main places, the dungeons and ruins there are also small things to find off the main roads, so that the game rewards the exploration up into the last corner. Thereby one is only rarely bound to artificial borders, either the map border is a mountain range or one can go almost everywhere. Only in very few cases, there was a fence, which prevented you from walking over the field.

The storage system is based on shrines that you have to find first. There you can then save as much as you like and at the same time, these shrines provide a fast travel system. This way you can reach already explored places faster without having to walk ten times through the same valley.

State of the game

For early access titles, it is always important to see how far the development of the game has come so far, whether you can already get something playable for your money and how likely it is that the development will really come to a satisfactory end at some point.

In total, Edge of Eternity does not yet include all the content planned for the game. There is a somewhat older roadmap, which was not followed exactly, but this is probably due to the special circumstances of the year 2020. So it’s also clear that the story around the siblings Daryon and Selene is not yet finished, yet.

The story is planned to have eight chapters, of which five are finished so far. According to the roadmap, the missing three chapters should be completed by the end of 2020. However, there is probably some time delay at the moment, but the team is working hard on the game. Because of the many updates, I’m very confident that the game will be finished in 2021, maybe even by the end of 2020.

Edge of Eternity – Scope of the Game

Edge of Eternity has a very complex main story, in which the heroes have to cope with some obstacles, twists, and surprises. The main quest is high quality with English voice-overs and this is deepened with in-game cutscenes. Even off the main quest, there are many more stories, big and small. We get into the popular “you’re a hero, help me” conversations again and again.

In addition, there are also temporary events that can be started at some locations. And for those who want more quests, loot and bonus experience, there is also a huge amount of collecting and hunting tasks, which you can get at a kind of notice board, which you can find in every settlement. The world is huge, and there is a lot to do everywhere, even if the game is not yet complete.

If you completely concentrate only on the main story, which is included in the game so far, I assume that the game will have approximately 20 hours of playing time. And if you can enjoy yourself with side quests, achievements, crafting, collecting, exploring to the last corner, the game time in the current state rather goes towards 50+ hours.

Both numbers will expand again with the missing three chapters. With the currently low price for the game, you will definitely get a lot of game time and role-playing fun for your investment. And then on the horizon, there is a mod toolkit and a dev team that supports mod creators to build more content for the game. Let’s see what will emerge from that.

Tech, Graphic, Sounds

Most of the time Edge of Eternity was running quite stable for me. That’s what I expected by the usage of the Unity Engine. However, in the few days I tested the game, there were updates almost daily, and one of these updates caused the game to crash to desktop several times. That was annoying, but at least in most cases, not much was lost due to autosaves, and after the next patch it will surely work better again.

The camera movements in fights and cutscenes are mostly okay, but every now and then also very confusing and so sometimes you look at the edge of the fight instead of the opponents. So you always have to readjust the camera yourself to get the opponents in the picture. Also when running around in the Open World, it often happens that the camera jumps around, or comes so close to the back of our head that we can see the inside of the head.

The main characters and most of the secondary characters have now reached a very high artistic level in terms of design, textures, hair, armor, and animations. In some quests, however, you will encounter characters that have not yet been reworked and improved to the newer quality standard. When the new high-res chars act next to those with the old graphics, it looks extremely weird, like 720p resolution chars acting in a 1440p world. But I think that the goal will be to raise all NPCs to the new graphics standard throughout.

The classical background music is pleasant, calm, and fitting. It never annoyed me, but I would like to have more different titles and they could be a bit longer and come up with more variations. Musically, there’s more of a classic home cooking, in a double sense.

The English voice-overs are really high quality for an indie title. Only the main story is dubbed, but it sounds excellent. The German translation of the screen texts, item descriptions, skills, etc. is absolutely useable. There are little mistakes here and there, but nothing where you wouldn’t understand what is meant now. All in all the texts are translated into seven languages, besides English and German, there are texts in French, Japanese, Chinese and two variants for Spanish.

Edge of Eternity Screenshots (Part 1)

Click or tap on an image for a larger version
In the popup, you can navigate right and left at the border of the screen

More screenshots below

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Opinion and Conclusion

Edge of Eternity offers a very interesting story, which unfolds bit by bit, but provides a nice framework for a fantasy roleplaying game. The animals and humans mutated by the corrosion disease, and at the same time, the world threatened by war with aliens, provide a lot of opportunities to behave truly heroic and help everywhere.

The world design is very good. Both visually and in terms of variety and scope, there is a lot on offer here. What I really miss in the game is that the characters can’t jump and sometimes can’t even get past small fences or stones, so that you often have to take unnecessary detours here.

But there are also some construction sites. Besides the sometimes appearing camera problems, now and then performance drops or flickering textures, there are also some things in the gameplay, which are not top. For example, you can find equipment items again and again, which have completely different values, but all have the same name. This not only makes it unnecessarily complicated to sort the equipment, but the items look so very monotonous and boring. Some creativity would be needed in the naming of the equipment here.

The fights are sometimes somewhat repetitive, but mostly entertaining, and there is always some tactical extra depth due to special opponents. I also like the bonus challenges in the fights, that’s a great idea. But it happens every few fights that you get a task that is not solvable or not reasonable in combat. So you have to kill a certain opponent last, but there’s only one anyway. Or you fight against a single weak animal, and then there is a “Suffer XYZ Damage” task, which would require you to do nothing for about 50 turns so that the weak animal would have the chance to do that amount of damage at all.

Edge of Eternity has small weaknesses, rough edges, and problems. But for a small price, you get a game from an indie developer that can do much more than almost any other indie game I’ve seen so far. The game is not finished yet but is slowly approaching this state. Since the price will be increased soon, and it is even on offer at the moment, I would recommend to buy it now, if you are interested and minor problems and bugs don’t scare you off.

But in general, I think that almost every roleplaying game lover can get a lot of fun out of this title. And if you also have a preference for Japanese roleplaying games and the style of the Final Fantasy series, you can’t go wrong with Edge of Eternity.

But if you can’t stand bugs, camera irritations, a jumble of high-res and low-res models and textures, as well as other flaws and construction sites, then you better avoid the game for now and maybe check back in a few months.

Edge of Eternity Review – Rating

All in all Edge of Eternity is a great game, in unexpectedly good quality for an indie title. For a relatively small price, you get a great adventure with lots of rough edges. Game fun for RPG fans is definitely possible in large quantities. The game is unfinished but should be enjoyable and playable for most players even in its current state.

That’s why I would like to give a base score of 85% for this enormously good price-performance ratio. For unfinished design, small technical failures, and the prospect of a future price increase, I would like to deduct a total of 7% from this. This brings Edge of Eternity to a final score of 78 % as of August 2020.

If the team should manage to fix the bugs that still exist, I think they could recover up to 5% in the future. And if the scope with the three currently missing chapters increases even more, which I assume is the case in the future, this will improve the game even more.

Outro

Do you like turn-based combat role-playing games and Final Fantasy and can you see the developers’ love for the series in this game? Or do you prefer to play only the original and avoid such offshoots, even if they were made by fans? Feel free to write me your opinion.

More Game Reviews, Gaming News and Guides can be found on zapzockt.de, on YouTube or everywhere where there are good podcasts. And if you’d like more of the same, why not leave a subscription so that you’ll be notified when there are new posts. A thumb up never hurts either. Then I wish you a great day, have a good time, ciao ciao your Zap.

Links and Sources

Edge of Eternity Steampage

Dev Twitter

Game Twitter

Dev Facebook

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