Edge of Eternity

Edge of Eternity — One of those games that requires a little background to understand. Originally, the project was developed by a team of four. After the relative success of the early release on Steam, the Midgar Studio staff has grown to a hell of a dozen. And this small team, full of ambition and love of jRPG, set out to sculpt a large open world. And without any exaggeration we can say that the environment was a success (in contrast to the animation of the characters that looked as wooden as possible). Wide fields with strange plants and islands flying in the sky; snow-covered mountains; incredibly creepy «clock fields» creatures tainted by corrosion; the heretic city of Tir-Kalum, looking like a love note to the slums of Midgard from Final Fantasy VII. The world of Edge of Eternity is full of diverse, beautiful and interesting at first glance locations. On the second one, though, there's practically nothing to do in them.

Despite the great scenery, the world here is empty. Players get little more than to run from pile of monsters to pile of monsters with the occasional hook toward a chest or crystal flower in sight. Edge of Eternity doesn't motivate you to explore the environment. You won't find a single particularly interesting element of the lore here. And you probably won't miss important quests, because exclamation points are visible on the compass from afar. And even if you miss it, it's not a big loss. Only the occasional side story is really interesting, revealing and adding to the world. The vast majority of the activity on the map, however, boils down to sawing out a number of monsters in the region and riding Nekaru the pack cat, habitually stopping halfway through to dig up some trinket or an aggressive giant worm.

Well though the central plot is not too original, but it does not suffer from the monotony most of the time and carefully makes you wrap circles around the world showing its best sides, just in time tossing in interesting characters, sudden turns and a pinch of humor diluting the gloomy atmosphere.

But the cornerstone of Edge of Eternity can be called the local tactical-hex combat system. When you enter a fight, the game divides the location into a group of hexes, where the opponents are placed, honestly taken from the area of the open map, roughly corresponding to the size of the combat zone. And if on normal and lower levels it's just a nice detail, then on the higher ones — Something to ponder if you should ever tread on the local crocodile crowd.

As you might guess, everyone here has clear ranges of attack, from a single field for melee weapons to two for individual spells and firearms. An easy to understand system allows you to constantly maneuver your heroes to choose a more effective position for an attack and to avoid the expected retaliation of the enemy, friendly telegraphed on the map. If you can make it, of course. Because the sequence of actions is determined on the basis of almost a complete analogue of the system Active Time Battle.

And yes, if the classic ATB when compared to the simple turn-based system is rather annoying than improves gameplay, in Edge of Eternity it works. There is a need to calculate what is more important: to have time to strike or chase all the characters from the hex, where they pile up — and this noticeably shakes up the gameplay. Especially in battles with bosses, with which the authors have tried to make the experience as unique and memorable as possible. Sometimes memorable to the teeth — For example, the boss in a mission with unrenderable training figured out to give the function of self-destruction with the sawing of the entire playing field. And yes, along with a love of jRPG, the authors have adopted a love of annoying training, leading the player by the hand and not tolerate rush.

In addition to the typical pumping the authors added to the game the ability to insert the weapon Matter Crystals that boost individual stats and gain access to different tricks and magic. And to cram more crystals into your gear, you have to specifically pump it up in combat. Does it fast enough, so that each new sword does not have to unlock for hours (in fact, three grand slots are usually opened after the first fight). But still sometimes unwittingly catch yourself thinking that it is easier to continue to use the old hardware, than to re-organize the crystals in a new configuration, and then rearrange the skills in their usual order.

And everything seems to be fine with the game. Yeah, it's average, but solid, with nice gameplay and a good storyline. It would seem, what else to say? And the fact that at the time of passage PS5-version worked on a fair word. At least three times during the passage of Edge of Eternity just refused to work. The first time it started crashing steadily at the beginning of the story screensaver. Well at least a short time before the tip advised to make a separate save, as the story came to one of the points of no return, and the problem was solved by simply downloading this early save. A little later in the story battle, built purely on the movement of the field, this same movement refused to work. The third time the game turned on battle mode, but the fight did not start.

So if you want to be protected from similar flaws, it is necessary at least to score on the developers' idea to save in the special points (good thing it can be switched off at any time in the settings). Also — play two safes at least.

But that's only half the trouble, there are a lot of little bugs and flaws in the game. From lightning fast loading to the banal sharpening of the interface for the keyboard. Here and there you can run into an icon «cross» for closing windows. In the menu of weapon creation can not switch to a description of items needed for crafting, and have to guess at their thumbnails. And the whole design of the window suggests that you can see this non-existent description, you just have to hover over the thumbnails with your mouse. And yes, by the way! Why the hell can't we craft weapons sequentially here? The menu goes into lockdown, forcing me to reopen the workbench every time. Menu lock — that's a big headache. Just the same equipment and spells of the characters only occasionally get to change a row, because when you change the active character in the window game crashes.

Blurry textures, sudden time jumps, teleportation of characters after resting in a tavern in the middle of a bare field. At least in the Russian localization some of the menu items banal does not display the text. Speaking of flaws, sometimes it's funny: Edge of Eternity boots up too fast on PS5, so it gets really light and behold, the beautiful melody of the loading screen cuts off before it has even started. What's more, even the introductory message of the developers before the first patch was impossible to read: it disappeared so quickly. Some of the problems the authors managed to fix before the game came out — the same problem with high-resolution textures not loading on characters after battles and tavern sit-ins. But it's just a drop in the ocean. And what of this will be fixed in the first few days that — in weeks, and what will be forgotten to correct — big question.

It's good, of course, that Midgar Studio aims to maintain and refine the technical state of their product. And even without taking into account the small size of the studio, it would be naive to expect a simultaneous release of such a massive game on multiple consoles to go off without a hitch. But everything has its limits, and it would be a mistake to forgive all the faults just because the game was developed by a small team. You need to correctly assess your strengths in relation to your ambitions. However, the authors have already been bought by Nacon publishing house, so at least the ambition of the comrades is already appreciated there.

But it's hard to call Edge of Eternity a quality product. Let the spent 40–50 hours and no regrets, but the game has enough problems and shortcomings without taking into account the technical flaws. And all because the authors tried to bite off a much bigger piece than they could chew. However, the love and effort of the developers can be clearly seen. And the talent is seen. And the desire to make a great game. And so we involuntarily want to support Midgar Studio and wish the team further success with new projects. Except that Edge of Eternity is at least a couple or three major patch recommend.