cashew | Saturday, April 10th, 2021

I am currently very enamored with this game. I haven't gotten very far, but after four days of intense playing (I'm sequestering post-vaccination and am sore and unproductive), I can start to understand what people mean when they say that this is a gacha game where you do not need to play the gacha.

( Game mechanics and gacha system explained. )

As for the story, Another Eden starts off painfully slow. But, once you make your way past the first chapter and start the timey-wimey ball going, the story gets a lot better. I mean a lot better. The dialogue is better written, the story starts to build complex plot threads, and the characters start to really show...well, character.

I'm currently extremely fond of Riica, the android healer of the team. She's sneaky about her snark, then turns to I'm an android I don't know how humans work as an excuse when someone starts to catch on to her sarcasm. The main character, Aldo, is pretty generic, but that's almost a plus in these days of doom-gloom-dark-gritty cynicism. Aldo is a decent guy with some mysterious past that I'm interested in finding out. The antagonists cover an interesting array of gray to black, from psychotic evil to just misguided.

Then there's Cyrus, the samurai frog. Yes, he's a frog and he's a samurai and he lives in a swamp.

If all this is starting to sound a little familiar, it's because the writing staff is the same as the group behind Chrono Trigger. Am I getting Chrono Trigger flashbacks when playing this game? Yes. Is it a bad thing? Only if you despise the Chrono Trigger story.

Point is, I'm actually enjoying Another Eden a lot. If you have even the smallest fondness for JRPGs, I think you should give this game a whirl. Hey, it's free and you don't even have to pay to progress very far, what have you got to lose?