Edge of Eternity is a RPG game inspired by the classic JRPGs of the 1980s and 1990s. It is developed by a small indie developer, which makes the scale of this game quite impressive, and as a player, more forgiving with the rougher patches of the game. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t set a great first impression with a terribly slow opening that takes too long to get to the main game proper. It has early PS3-quality graphics with average voice-acting. There are a bunch of available options to tweak your experience like the usual graphical and difficulty options, but they can only do so much.
The gameplay isn’t anything to write home about. The biggest thing about the same is the world, as it is huge. It’s in these areas that the game can shine through with pretty vistas and vibrant colors. This is until you come back to realise that a big open world is pointless if there isn’t much to do and this is the biggest flaw of the game. The environments are too big with little reason for it to be. There are awkward and jarring transitions between the big open world and the smaller dungeons that are in a separate area, the first time this happens, you’d thought that the game may have crashed with its sudden transition to a loading screen.
The story progression is predominantly linear, from wide open spaces to the narrow corridors, there’s really only one direction to go. The whole game is basically fetch, hunt or travel from point A to point B quests across the large empty open spaces, which makes it tedious and boring. It gets better once you are in the groove of things but since travel still makes up the bulk of the game, it is a lot of time with nothing much happening except for running into battles. The environments are initially heavily fantasy inspired but will eventually have elements of technology and machinery as well.
The battle system is a mishmash of several different well-known elements. It’s slow-paced, even for a turn-based combat system, so even normal encounters can take too long. When you encounter ran enemy, you’ll be sent to a separate battle screen (but surprisingly still takes place on the same piece of land that you encountered them in on the open world). The main element is the ATB bar, which dictates when a character has their turn once it is filled. Once it’s their turn, characters can attack, use magic, use items, run and move. These options are hotkeyed to the D-pad and the face buttons.
The battles also take place on a hexagonal grid so characters and enemies can move around. This adds in another layer of strategy (although this heavily depends on the difficulty and AI decisions as more often than not, they’ll just come straight for you and stay on the same base). Magic takes time to cast so they can be interrupted. This combat system actually had decent potential but unfortunately you’re stuck with only two party members for the vast majority of the game. It takes over half the game before you can finally get a full party of four members. This is a terrible decision since up until that point, you can easily get swarmed by being outnumbered, and that it heavily favors characters with high speed.
There are also interactable objects in battles, and this is where the positions of enemies can become quite important. Enemies may indicate that they are about to attack a particular base and you will need to move out. Or there may be objects to deal significant damage to a bunch of enemies at once so it’s beneficial to go there. There are several tower defence sections too but they are too slow to be fun and at times, too unfair. Enemies have weaknesses that you can take advantage of, as well as moving to behind them to deal additional damage from back attacks.
There is a myriad of systems such as crafting, sidequests, crystals, equipment, character levels and weapon levels. Spells are tied to crystals, which you obtain via drops or you can merge them to reroll stats and spells attached to them. This is yet another pointless grinding feature since whenever you upgrade weapons you lose slots to equip these crystals until you level them up. This means you temporarily lose access to spells (and the order of them on the hotkeyed buttons) whenever you upgrade for at least a few battles.
Crafting makes up too big a portion of upgrading equipment. In order to get better weapons, you first need to get the recipe, which, thankfully, are usually bought. The annoyance is the process of crafting. There are different tables you need to walk between for different types of items you want to craft (armor, weapon, crystals, consumables), and the same goes for buying these items from shops. The menus are not able to be sorted either. All this combines into an unnecessarily cumbersome process that eats up too much of your time, and not in a good way. There is definitely some streamlining that could be done here as it becomes a chore every time you upgrade your equipment.
The story, like the rest of the game, is slow paced. It’s pretty much just walk from here to there without the story giving you much of an objective beyond trying to find the next person to speak to. The game takes place in a world where it is invaded by a technologically advanced race that had unleashed the “corrosion” into the population. Being infected with the corrosion is guaranteed death. Daryon was on the frontline when he learns that his mother was infected so he deserted in order to return to his mother. He joins his sister, Selene, on a journey to find a cure.
Nothing much happens for the majority of the game. The story has a rough pacing and you can see the inexperience of the development team here. The storytelling is disjointed and uninteresting. Scene structure, camera angles and choreography is badly done, which makes them really boring. The characters have stiff animations with really limited expressions that doesn’t suit the emotions that they’re voices are currently expressing. It’s really only the last two chapters where it’s faster paced by having a more focused objective to push towards.
There are several annoying difficulty spikes. For the majority of the game, you’ve only got two party members so if you’re battling anything more than three enemies, be prepared to be overwhelmed and bludgeoned to death. The later parts of the game forces you to trek back and forth over large distances since they disable fast travel for no reason. It’s a huge waste of time. You start to want to skip enemy encounters since they’re too low level and doesn’t grant you much experience. But the flipside is that you then start to run out of money and ingredients to upgrade your team. The developers hasn’t gotten the balance quite right still.
The finale, and the game as a whole, drags on for too much. The dungeon designs were already not great, but when they added some of the most annoying game design elements in there to stall your progress, it makes it even worse. It’s not fun to trek through small dungeons where you’re gated by levers or damage sponge monsters with gimmicks. It’s not fun when you are on battle grids with half of them being traps that do damage to whoever is standing on top. And it is not fun to constantly fight waves of enemies or do something three times repetitively.
As if the game wasn’t bad enough, the final boss is horrendous. It takes forever since it is a three-stage fight. That isn’t the worst part, because the third stage has an absurd difficulty spike. It is absolutely ridiculous and horrendous at how difficult it is with its fast speed, high damage, and massive defence. It is disgusting and filthy, and pretty much impossible even if you are the same level as the final boss and passed the previous two fights with little difficulty. It is unfathomable why the developers made this decision. The game has difficult settings but when it is still impossible to beat on the easiest difficulty without grinding and having no issues at all with the game beforehand, there is a big problem. Unfortunately, the third stage of the final boss refuses to die and keeps on going. Yes, the developers were going for epic, but it is not, it’s just become frustrating and annoying. At this point, it’s not worth finishing as there’s nothing redeeming left about the game.
The game takes around 30 hours to reach the final boss, but as mentioned above, you probably won’t be strong enough if you made it there that fast. So add in hours to grind, which is never fun and is a lot of wasted time. The ending is disappointing, as even with the light story, it doesn’t really answer all the questions about its world. There’s no postgame content, you’re just dumped back right before the final boss, although the game is continually being updated and the postgame content is promised to be coming.
Overall, Edge of Eternity is mediocre, bordering on bad. It is supposed to take the best of the classic JRPGs but it takes a lot of the pain points as well. The combat system is undercooked, the crafting is tedious, the difficulty spikes are terrible, the story goes nowhere with too many distractions, and the graphics are bad. There are some portions where it’s passable and can be enjoying, but time and time again, the flaws come back to ruin the experience. The final boss is pretty much the nail in the coffin with an absurd difficulty that’s just unfair, not challenging. Avoid this game, the frustration and annoyance are not worth the rare moments of fun.
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