Edge of Eternity is a promising new RPG making its arrival on consoles. It was one of those JRPGs that snuck up on all of us when it originally released on PC. Now available on consoles, I was given the opportunity to review a copy of the PS4 version. Developed by Midgar Studios, a small French studio known for Hover, and was published by Dear Villagers who is known for publishing games like Ashwalker, Scourge Bringer, and Astria Ascending. Edge of Eternity started as a Kickstarter project back in 2013 and then went to early access in November 2018 and finally was released in June 2021 on Steam.
Edge of Eternity is a single player JRPG that begins with the world of Heryon being devastated by invasion of a technologically advanced race. They have brought death and destruction to a world that is reliant on religion and magic to keep the world from being completely taken over by these invaders. In addition to being invaded, the people of Heryon suffer from what is known as the Corrosion, a disease that turns human life into contorted abominations.
You play as a young man by the name of Daryon who survived the carnage of war and is on way home because of a letter he’d received from his sibling, Selene, about their mother suffering from the Corrosion. From there on you begin your quest to save your mother from the corruption and maybe save the world on the way. Edge of Eternity is a large game and so I would like to focus on three categories: story, gameplay and the ability system.
Starting with the story, it moves very quickly. Important events happen in a quick succession of one another along with tutorials, so it can be a little overwhelming. However, once you are past the beginning stage, things slow down a bit. This is where you being to realize how open world Edge of Eternity and how quickly you can get distracted by exploring.
Once you’re focused on the main story, you can start to see where the story is going as your main task is to save your mother. Of course there are more quests that happen on your journey as Daryon is an important piece in this story from earlier events. The game has voice acting, so I did notice a range of dialogue such as the clever and witty banter between Daryon and Selene to dull and clichéd interactions from NPCs and possible teammates. I understand that the developers wanted to include voice acting which is a always a plus, but the written dialogue doesn’t fit with the tone making the characters seem extremely cliché.
Edge of Eternity is an open world game and you’re rewarded by exploring with loot, crafting materials, and of course experience. You have your basic movements and there are enemies on the field roaming freely, giving you the option to engage or not. The level and danger of each enemy is color coded from green through red. One thing I’ve noticed is that you always have a prime opportunity to get a preemptive attack on enemies. It’s really difficult to miss. From the opening scenario in the game you would have noticed that their battling system is tactics based. You have options such as your basic attack, movement, skip turn, change character, and skills/spells. An interesting feature included in Edge of Eternity is that of the Advance Time, where you can line up character skills and abilities to unleash attacks together.
The tactics battle system should be fairly familiar as it is easy to understand. The abilities and skills have the occasional cool factor to them but nothing too over the top. In nearly each battle there is an incentive for you to obtain more money, or score more crystals/gems. Some of these incentives can range from not letting characters die, not sustaining a certain amount of damage to killing a specific enemy last. If you’re one of those people who like to grind this could be huge to accumulating funds and accessories. However, the battles do become repetitive and lackluster fairly quickly. You also have the ability to change the difficulty of the enemies on the field. Depending on your setting of choice, the AI can be silly to annoyingly dragging battles out. The latter seems to occur more with some of the human enemies more than wildlife opponents.
Speaking more about crystals and gems, Edge of Eternity has a different leveling up system that uses crystals and gems as a means to give your characters abilities and skills. Equipping various crystals and gems to your character’s weapons is reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII’s materia system but with a twist. There are usually two to three paths you can take when it comes to equipping the gems and these are based on the weapon that you have equipped. There is a limitation since you can only choose one path and the other paths seem to be locked either by level or by weapon. Even with this limitations, the abilities/skill system is still interesting. You can change the path whenever you want and switch out crystals and gems to upgrade them and so on. The crystal and gems are not difficult to find as you can get them battling and or buy them.
I focused on the three categories above because I found that Edge of Eternity is lacking and feeling incomplete. Though made by a small team, Edge of Eternity has the potential to be better with more time and fine tuning to fix flaws such as texture not loading, characters expressions being frozen to even locations and environments glitching out. I hope that with these flaws and issues being pointed out that the Edge of Eternity team will fix these issues to give players a more complete game.
