Gerald James reviews Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space…
When I had heard the the head writer for Chrono Cross and the composer for Chrono Trigger were putting out an RPG together I was rather excited at the idea. When I discovered that the very same game would be holding a crossover event with Persona 5 my excitement grew even further. And when I was told that it was a free to play mobile game my heart sank straight through to the bottom of my stomach. But I am a man of nothing if not journalistic integrity so I charged up my Pixel 4 and set off to endeavor into Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Space and Time.
Let me begin by stating that I was booting up a copy based on a review code sent by GREE Inc. that had a fully fleshed out roster including an overleveled party that was ready to take on the Persona 5 collaboration quest and plenty of equipment to make sure I wasn’t going to die too easily. This is important to note since I was jumping into the game with a headstart and no need to grind or spend money to accumulate gear and party members.
As I started I was impressed with the visuals of the game with it’s chibi sprite style and detailed backgrounds as well as with the score of the game which was on par with any epic RPG from the nostalgic era it was trying to replicate. The gameplay style is about what you’d expect in a mobile game with most dungeons being simple side-scroller hallways with entwining up and down paths. Keys are found on monsters to unlock paths for either treasure or shortcuts and battles can be avoided or instigated depending on your resources.
Leveling is a pretty straightforward process of unlocking nodes along rudimentary skill trees which mostly contribute to your stats but offer the occasional ability to use in battle. You’ll find plenty of crafting components in place of actual gear as a means to give you something to strive towards and a reason to keep grinding things out.
It wasn’t until a bit more of a dive into the event that things start to fall apart at the seams. As I dove through the first major dungeon I noticed a disturbing lack of healing items. I was handling random mobs easily enough but the mini-bosses had some rather interesting mechanics that could take a little trial and error to figure out. And whereas I have absolutely no issue with getting my ass handed to me while learning in a video game locking healing behind with leaving the dungeon altogether to acquire your 1/1 healing item or swapping out party members for fresh ones just to heal them seems like a decision based around wallet mechanics and not game design.
This is a free to play mobile game after all. There has to be some hook to keep you paying into it, right? And that’s where the hook lies. The lootboxes in the game are essentially gacha capsules of playable characters. When finding a duplicate of a character they get a little stat bump but nothing that makes up for not finding someone new and when you do find that new character to help flesh out your party they are introduced at level 1 so you had better be ready to spend days grinding them out just to make them usable to your group. Is this an unforgivable sin? No, of course not. But it is one of the reasons why mobile games will always have the stigma that they hold. It seems that most games are happy to be a game that you play whereas these gacha games are only interested in being THE game you play. Artificially padding out your game through mindless grinding (which you can bypass with real money, of course) will always be a business design and not a gameplay design. I’m not trying to keep money out of the pockets of developers by any means but you can look at a game and generally determine if their intention was to make a good game or a profitable one. Of course you can have both, but in cases like these you can see which was more important to GREE Inc. There are often mistranslations and straight-up grammar issues that can take you right out of the game. I understood that the game is large but to find yourself in the culmination of a lengthy plot-line only to have to reread a phrase multiple times to try and discern what was meant comes off as insulting.
All said, the true sin of Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Space and Time is that you can often see the glowing ideas of what could have been a great full-fledged JRPG experience on mobile right before being smacked in the face with the reminder that this is in fact a game designed to dole out just enough advancement to keep you playing longer while enticing you with the promise of making the tedium go away for just a few measly dollars a day. For those who are used to gacha games by now you are already aware of your personal threshold as long as you go into this game knowing what to expect you very well may have a great time with it. As for myself, I would rather have a game that is more designed around fun than addiction mechanics.
Pros:
+Interesting characters and setting
+A trademark lawyer’s wet dream of callbacks to former games from those involved
+In-depth character advancement and customization
+Gorgeous art style
+An expectedly fantastic score
Cons:
-Forced party growth to combat lack of healing
-Needing to pay to reach the game’s full potential
-Shoddy QA and localization
Rating: 6/10
Reviewed on Android. Also available on iOS and coming soon to Nintendo Switch.
Gerald James – One half of Mushbrains Media and Mushbrains: The Podcast, Flickering Myth’s gaming podcast
