First Impressions | Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space

A giant evil airship? What is this a JRPG?
Oh wait it is? Ahhhhh.

First released on mobile devices in Japan by WFS in 2017, Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space boasted the work of industry veterans such as Masato Kato and Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger). Now the game is trying to tackle the international stage by being ported to Steam, where it hopes to garner fans among PC gamers having rippled through the Japanese mobile market. I haven’t finished the game but I have completed just over 5 chapters of the game, and I’ve decided this is a good point to pause, take stock and review the experience so far. There’s a lot of ups and downs with this, so bear with me… [grrr]

The Good

There’s a lot to love about this game – when it hits, it REALLY hits. The first major “WOW" moment came from the musical score. Sound design can really make or break a game, and Another Eden’s music score is absolutely fantastic. It’s a refreshing blend of old and new that feels somewhere between 8-bit Final Fantasy and orchestral Dark Souls.

That is one handsome anime-wolf-boy.

The next thing that will likely stand out to you is the amazing character profiles. It is clear that a lot of time and effort went into creating these characters; there is a huge variety of designs and each feels bespoke. These profiles are reserved for important characters (so you know when you’re talking to someone you’ll meet again down the line), and they give a deeper insight into the appearance of characters beyond the rest of the game’s animated sprites. It really elevates the visual narrative and makes the game much more enjoyable.

Character portraits aren’t the only time the team’s artistry really shines through. The background design throughout the game is exceptional – providing a 3-dimensional depth to an otherwise 2-dimensional experience. While navigating the world, the map can feel quite linear, but the ability to see monsters and characters with whom you can interact in the background is a nice touch that really makes the game come alive.

Another small detail that caught my eye was a fun reference to Famitsu, a popular Japanese gaming magazine, which has an entire side-quest and weapon attributed to it. It helps that your reward for the quest is getting to see someone swing a magazine on a stick, and it’s even a decent weapon in the early game. 

Welcome to JRP Town, we have a place to buy potions, a place to buy food, a place to buy armour, a place to sleep AND NOTHING ELSE.

The music, art and small details are areas of this game that just sing, and it’s really impressive to see how well-crafted certain things are. However, there are a lot of little things you’ll start to notice as you play and they quickly add up…

Oh the Gallery of Dreams… What’s that?

The Bad

At the end of my first session, I decided to call it a night and started looking for the option to save and quit the game… except, there isn’t one. The game auto-saves which is fine, but the closest you get to a “save and quit” functionality on PC is a button that sends you back to the title screen, which isn’t great unless you want to spend another minute double-checking that your game’s save is up-to-date. The game was clearly made and optimised for mobile devices, so I can overlook this in the grand scheme of things. It’s not really that difficult to alt+tab out, or even just change the settings to windowed mode and close it manually. But all the same, it is a regular inconvenience on PC that you would expect to be cleaned up during the porting process.

A more fundamental issue with the game is that the pacing of the narrative can be rather clunky and, at times, disjointed. It often feels as though the developers have cut content for the sake of diverting the budget to other areas, and as a player, it’s just jarring. Even small changes to the transitions would make a significant impact on the flow of the narrative, and would generally make the story more palatable for the player. However, as it stands it often feels like the first draft of the script. 

I do have one surprising and rather large bone to pick: I’m five chapters in, and WHO, WHAT, WHY, AND WHERE IS THE CAT?! The “cat beyond time and space" was something that sold the game to me initially, and so far the closest I’ve come to a cat beyond time and space is that my cat casually wandered into a portal, and now they follow me around without offering any genuine contribution to the plot or explanation of why they’re joining me on my journey. I’m all for cryptic and fragmented nested narratives (Dark Souls ‘til I die), but this feels lazy. The player is often left to fill in the blanks, as opposed to offering thought-provoking (albeit intentionally vague) dialogue that allows you to interpret the story in your own way. For a game that leveraged Masato Kato’s prestige and success with Chrono Trigger, it drastically falls short of the narrative quality I would expect from someone so esteemed.

What’s worse, I’m 5 chapters in (and about 5 hours, too), and I’m still not sure what on earth is actually going on! I thought I knew who the bad guy was, but then another random villain was suddenly introduced, and just as quickly dispatched (in underwhelming fashion), before I was told that everything I just did was, not only “in the future", but also pointless, UNLESS I can save that specific future by going back to the past, oh, but you’ll also be butterfly effect-ing everything, so be careful what you do... It’s all just a bit of a mess.

The result of all of this is the narrative feels rather pointless and confusing. There’s no sense of direction for the player, and after a few hours, I found there was little driving me to continue playing other than my own stubbornness (and spite). You might think I’m being harsh, given that this was first and foremost a mobile game, but mobile RPGs like Zenonia prove that you don’t need to sacrifice quality on a phone – and that game was released nearly 10 years prior to Another Eden!

In the world of Another Eden Feinne is basically wearing three coats and gloves compared to most women.

I also want to address the scantily-clad elephant in the room: ladies’ armour in the game… I don’t care if they’re a white mage, no one is running around fighting monsters in an oversized tank top and belt… They’ve given the male characters’ designs a fair combination of form and function, why can’t the same be done for the women? Give them something that might actually protect them! On the face of it, it just seems like the worst of the stereotypical JRPG fan service that you’d hope we were getting away from these days.

And The Ugly

If we’re going to get really pernickety, I want to take a moment to mention the walking animations in Another Eden… If I was rating the game solely on this one animation this would be a solid 3/10. An effort was made to animate something, but that is about as generous as you could be. It’s as though the legs are detached from the general form and functionality of the body, and wiggle aimlessly as things pass by in some intangible way. This might look a whole lot better on a 6" mobile screen, but on a 28" monitor, it was hard to look at and caused a particular SpongeBob SquarePants meme to spring to mind.

Imagine if you had to pay extra for Cloud’s Ultima Weapon in FFVII!

In reality, I can abide by almost all of these issues. Sometimes a clunky game can have a certain charisma that just makes you fall in love with it more – I mean, we all love The Elder Scrolls games, and they’ve always been notoriously clunky and even somewhat broken… But there is one thing that I find near impossible to forgive. One thing that fills my heart with a burning rage. That is pay-to-win mechanics (especially in singleplayer games). In fact, in some instances, Another Eden can seem more like a pay-to-play game. This is because there are limited character summons that are only available with a type of gem that you have to pay real money for (i.e. you have to buy gems to access the high-ranking premium characters) as if the standard gems you earned through playing the game weren’t good enough. This is a trend that I wholeheartedly refuse to support because it means players without the money or those unwilling to spend exorbitant amounts on fake currencies can’t “complete” games. On top of that, the prices are (at the time of writing) insulting: $79.99 for only 3250 gems?! It’s 100 gems per regular summon, and 50 gems just to revive your team!

There’s a real wealth of characters, and there’s value in getting duplicates; so if you think I’m being stingy over 32 summons, I can promise you now: you’ll be doing a lot more than 32 summons throughout this game if you want to do well in it.

Final Thoughts

The greatest problems with Another Eden seem to have been caused by a rushed development, and a lack of time spent where it was really needed. I can forgive certain things; after a while you forget about the atrocious walking animation (if you stop looking at it), and the cheesy lines eventually fade into the void. With some considerable reworking, this game could certainly be a worthwhile contender for PC gamers’ time, but for the love of all things RPG, pay-to-win has to die, especially in this genre. I’d rather pay full price for a polished and completed game than pay a series of half-priced micro-transactions just to progress in a rough cash-grab “made by industry veterans” that gives wealthy players an advantage over everyone else.

Verdict

5/10

I wanted to love Another Eden, but it’s hard to overlook all its flaws when it keeps demanding just a bit more money.