Time travel makes me sleepy

Travel through time collecting cute kitties and fighting bad guys in Another Eden Begins, a mobile RPG renovated for modern consoles.

Nothing causes more disappointment than hype so at Video Chums, we avoid hyping games prior to playing them for ourselves. 🤩

That's rather thoughtful of you, Feinne

Another Eden Begins starts with you playing as Aldo, a young man who lives with his sister in the Kingdom of Miglance. When she's kidnapped, he follows a strange cat through a portal and finds himself transported to the City of Elzion, 800 years into the future. Aldo meets a large cast of character on his travels, recruiting them into his party as he learns their stories and builds relationships with them. It's an interesting tale that takes a lot of turns and I'm always a sucker for anything involving time travel. 🤓 v1d30chumz cyzttywqbywxz

The world of Another Eden Begins definitely has some interesting backgrounds and landmarks such as the natural beauty of Lake Tiilen, the ancient town of Ratle surrounded by giant dinosaurs, and the futuristic dungeons near Elzion. There's an attractive level of detail and because each area is laid out like a 2D side-scroller that requires you to switch lanes to enter deeper zones, it creates a unique layered backdrop. There's also a solid level of detail to the 19 characters that can join you on your mission; each with their own style, animations, fighting skills, and one-liners. When Yuna joined my team and she would follow-up the end of a battle with her cute accent saying her catchphrase "It was nothing, really", it made me smile every time. 😸

These robots are no Terminators

Although the backdrops are mostly attractive, the actual dungeon-crawling leaves a lot to be desired, unfortunately. It starts to feel repetitive very early with not a lot to discover along the way and some dungeons lasted way too long to keep my attention. The odd dungeon has mechanics such as throwing switches and removing barriers but there isn't enough of it and what's there doesn't have much variety either. You will also find yourself backtracking a lot to look for new characters or complete quests which just adds to the tedium. 🥱

Battles are turn-based and you'll control up to 4 characters at a time; later unlocking the ability to completely swap-out all your characters at once mid-battle when you've amassed enough. This allows you to create groups with specialties that can do massive damage on the right enemies and given there's a solid variety of skills and weaknesses, it can really pay to prepare. When a new group jumps in, you also get a unique one-off ability that is stronger the longer you wait. Boss fights and horrors (strong enemies) definitely make for more interesting battles overall as they require you to swap-out characters to do the most damage. 👹

I say we use more fire attacks so we can have a fish fry

When you hit an enemy's weak point, you'll increase a gauge that triggers a party member to do an extra attack unprompted when it's filled. Timing these well can make it easy to cut through enemies. With every attack, you will also increase the "Another Force" meter which allows you to lay down rapid-fire skills without spending energy for a short period of time. These mechanics plus the ability to focus on specialities like tank, magician, healer, or debuffer add some much needed variety to the generally dull dungeon crawling. 🧙‍♀️

Even though there's a nice variety in the friendly characters, enemy variety is much more lacking and in those longer dungeons, it contributes to the feeling of tedium greatly. Another thing that adds to this is the fact that there are lot of cutscenes and you can't skip them. You can fast-forward but this still requires you to hold down a button for a long time as you watch characters talk a little faster. I was so bothered by this that I started avoiding recruiting new characters because I didn't want to sit through their lengthy story for so long. 😪

Another Eden Begins throws in another collectable system beyond building your party in the form of cats. You will also find merchants scattered around that sell a variety of collectable foods which can be eaten to give you buffs in battle or gifted to your party members. By gifting items that they like, you'll increase their kinship level, unlocking more bonuses. These collectables give you an excuse to explore a little more but given the lack of interesting dungeon mechanics, I didn't feel that compelled to search them out. 🧭

There's something about this chum that doesn't seem very pleasant

Another Eden Begins has an interesting story and setting but failed to keep me interested with its repetitive battles and dungeon crawling.

Watch Mary play Another Eden Begins 15:45

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Filed under: Reviews › Switch 2.