Edge Of Eternity

While not every idea in Edge of Eternity fully gels, developer Midgar Studio gets enough right that the game feels familiar and welcoming – a fantastic classic RPG in modern clothing. With fun characters, a solid battle system, and just enough surprises to maintain the player’s attention, Edge of Eternity announces the arrival of Midgar to the top echelon of JRPG developers.

Edge of Eternity is solid attempt of being love letter to bygone era of JRPG. The well-established world and combat system could take you dozens of hours and soundtrack will please you every time. But poor pacing, weak character models and uneven difficulty could lower your enthusiasm here.

If the rich, dramatic and engaging intertwining, and the ingenious turn-based combat system with a strong tactical component could abundantly satisfy the palates of fans of the genre, the technical backwardness is attributable as much to the low budget available to the transalpine studio as to the years delays that this has accumulated during development, however, risk obscuring what is good in Edge of Eternity.

Edge Of Eternity has some modern touches – you can freely speed up battles, and a variety of difficulty toggles can reduce the grind. Less care, however, has been given to optimisation. Even on PS5 you’ll fail to get a smooth framerate in performance mode when out in the field, and while teleporting is fast, assets can’t keep up, clipping in sometimes seconds later. It might hold you over until Final Fantasy XVI arrives but it’s hard not to feel like you’re playing, as the French say, a faux pas. [Issue#12, p.75]

This love letter to the JRPG genre looks beautiful and its combat is very well done. There are many problems, however – awful animation quality, a clumsily paced story, an empty world and cringey dialogue.

Edge of Eternity has heart and Midgar Studio should be proud of what they’ve achieved for a small indie team. I just wish I liked it more. Thanks to an uninspiring story, lack of overall polish, and some uneven visuals, the final product simply can’t match the developer’s ambitions, making this a hard game to recommend. If you’re curious to dive in, there’s still plenty to like. With a versatile combat system, colorful environmental design, entertaining side content, and old-school design, JRPG fans may find something to enjoy here. It’s on Game Pass at launch, so if you’re playing on PC or Xbox, you could always dip in that way, but otherwise, you’d be better off looking elsewhere.

I just did not care enough about anything that I was seeing or doing to enjoy Edge of Eternity. The narrative lacks thought and insight, the characters are bland, and each new location simply means more fetch quests and slightly higher level enemies to go through the motions to fight. Edge of Eternity is undoubtedly beautiful and the art team deserves kudos, but it is a hollow, empty, and shallow kind of beauty, and with no intelligence nor soul to back it up, the talents of the artists are largely wasted on this one.

10 hours of gameplay! Gorgeous! We are talking about a team of 10 people who have made a product with heart and mind and a boundless love for old generation jrpg. Music, combat and sets are beautiful, colorful and inspired, even the English dubbing amazed me with its quality! Congratulations to this small team that I hope has more budget in the future to give us a perfect Jrpg. The only flaws I find concern the camera that occasionally does strange things, and the protagonists' facial animation, which at times seems a bit out of context. But for now what to say. WHAT A GREAT GAME

Fairly solid JRPG. I really like the environments and high tech sci-fi mixed with traditional fantasy elements such as swords, magic, gems, armor, etc. At its price point its well worth it

Graphics =3 laggy and blurry inconsistent visuals with glitches that can make entire screen flash white at times. Needlessly big world that is empty and takes to long to traverse with vast empty spaces. Character animations are substandard by indie psp game level of standards, facial animations are hideous and creepy. Gameplay =2 allot of gimmicks none especially polished and repetitive puzzles. In battle why do you need to first press R2 then X,X to attack, when other RPGs just press manage with x, repetitive fetch quests that just mark a huge circle on the map that you need to search. Weapons and rewards from quests immediately "10 min later" become replaced making these fetching searching quests unrewarding. Story= 3 unlikeble characters that you just don't care about, story that is kind of bland and forgettable. Sound= 7 Great soundtrack and nice voice acting sometimes unbalanced sound levels like during load times song plays much higher then rest.

- Irritating. You do NOT need to be aware of the studios size. Get out with that nonsense. - Good music - Good landscape design, dungeons and mines are disgusting though. You see nothing but ugly 90's looking areas until about 3 hours in, then suddenly BAM, it's pretty shocking how the entires game graphical appeal flips from the 90s to something fitting for 2022. VERY bad first impression. Dumb decsion. - Decent VA and mostly amazing music, some of it in ch4 is horrible. - Sound FX's are horrible and not impacting at all. Like fallons gun, sounds like a bb gun, it should sound like a sherrifs cannon rifle from the old west. It definitely doesn't. Its pathetic. - Story is laughably bad, except for a few scenes in ch2 ending. - This is not a small studio issue, its a lack of intelligence in the devs issue. - Crafting is horrible. I'm not going to 1, kill a monster for a drop, 2, hunt down a plant from a specific region, 3, buy an ingredient that only appears in 1 specific store you can't even reach when teleporting is blocked, just for 1 potion that barely even heals any HP. If you think that's a lot for just a potion? Wait til you look at armor and weapons. I play gacha games that have worse upgrade your character methods in them. That says something. - You spend the majority of this game with only 2 party members. Ya, not lots of tactics going on here. - Your mount is taken from you obsessively and you rarely have access to it. I'm talking maybe 15 minutes every 10-20 hours of story advancement. To add to this issue, there is no auto-run yet the size of the world is ridiculously huge. You are literally forced to run without auto run for hours, and hours, and hours. It's really really painful. And again, a dev choice. Not smart, even a little. For two years almost all games have been a 1/2 at best, so this game has that going for it that it isnt that low i guess. This is no ffx. Thats for sure. Biggest problem is this game lets you unlock and recruit people then takes it all away just because you advance a chapter. You cant ever make progress in your party. You do tons of work to craft grind quest then equip them and they go poof because of the story….never to come back. Its literally the worst idea for an rpg ever. You hit endgame with only 6, yet have 12-14 join your party at random points in the story, letting you equip & upgrade gear, or waste tons of time leveling them, only for them to vanish permanently. The graphics are good for a budget game Bugs dont ruin it. So that's good…. Since its 2022. The problem….. is the devs low intelligence decisions to just lock things like your mount, teleporting, or flat out take them from you, forever, like party members and tons of gear. I cant even trust that I can PLAY the game, grind, get gear. Etc. Because in 10 minutes that person may be gone forever anyway. The choices these devs have made for “tactical battles” is outright bad. Example. Enter battle, before you even move once, tentacles appear from no where and slam your entire turn away. This repeats until you're dead, all before you even get 1 turn to react. It's not even a mini boss. Just a normal fight. I would put money on it right now, that if me & all 10 devs played chess, Id beat all of them within 20 moves. ZERO Logic in their decisions. The only amazing fun things in this game are the environments, at night only, daytime lighting makes the game look old. And the kitty mount. Which surprise, the devs decided to also take it from you every corner you turn, followed up by locking you from **** teleport blocking is major. IDK what they are thinking, seriously. If the teleporting was locked short term, ok sure, but its not short, we are talking 10's of hours, it opens up again for maybe 30 minutes, then boom, you do one part of the story and they all lock all over again for 10's of hours. No devs, No. Game could've been good, devs decisions are horrible. I rate it a 4 because its playable and when its night, looks gorgeous on an oled tv. Beyond that, forget this game honestly. Persona 5 is still the Turn Based RPG king for this decade. Also, the fact that this game struggles to hit 60 FPS, let alone 120 on the PS5 is a joke. Verdict? Once you start to see all of these problems around chapter 3 and 4, you are NOT going to enjoy this game at all, not even a little bit. It has done nothing but bring out irritation in me, and definitely NO enjoyment. And I'm someone who typically plays ALL games on the highest difficulty setting. This game is not difficult, it's a chore, and that's a major difference. @ The art & music designers, for the outer worlds if they ever read this. Freaking amazing work with so little money, but my advice, RUN. You are clearly very talented, and the only reason this game is NOT universally rated freaking 1. Your talents are being wasted here. They put trash all over your fantastic artwork

An uninspired mess with big ambition but poor execution. It's a largely empty world filled with forgettable characters, mediocre art direction, and confused design principles. It tries (and fails) to emulate the success of the JRPGs of yesteryear, but does absolutely nothing exceptional. The writing is substandard, with plot holes everywhere and and refusal to push the player to feel any sort of urgency outside of the opening tutorial section. The humor is out of place, and although the developer attempted to shoehorn in some lighthearted moments, it falls flat and feels awkward when the player isn't emotionally invested enough in what's going on to need a funny one-liner to ease the tension. Everything here just screams average, yet there's going to be a large subsection of the gaming population who is going to try to tell you that the game is great because it was made by a small team, and that people are being too harsh on it, etc. Everyone needs to remember that when you're paying for a product, you can't make excuses for someone who is providing a substandard experience and trying to take your money for it. Stop excusing lazy developers and poor work.