Creating a game is not a simple task, far from it. Especially when it's the first game from a development studio. And when a game is tested, it is only the finished product that is judged and not necessarily the quality of the developers because, as I said just before, creating a game is not easy. Budget, team experience, pressure from a possible publisher or investor, internal conflicts, ambition, project manager, working conditions, deadlines... These are a whole host of factors, and much more, that can make a difference. a game a playful success like a failure. A single problematic gear is enough to jam an initially flawless mechanism.
It is therefore important not to confuse bad game with bad development team or the opposite good game with good team and all the nuances in between, because there are so many talented studios who do not arrive to collect all the good elements, some of them being of an astonishing rarity. So there is absolutely nothing personal if I say good or bad about a game. I just judge it on what it offers and not on the people behind it, even if the final game reflects the work of all these people.
So why am I bothering you with this, you must be wondering.
It's very simple: Edge of Destiny, the game we are going to talk about is the first game from a very young French development studio (and who will therefore perhaps read this article) and whatever the quality of this game , this does not mean that they have a flamboyant future or that they do not have their place in this business, but that they expose themselves in the latter to positive and negative criticism. Consequently, they should not take what is said personally, but on the contrary, draw conclusions from it in order, at each game, to be able to give the best of themselves, improve their strengths, overcome their weaknesses. Only then can you move forward in life.
On this... place to the test!
In Edge of Destiny, you are a soldier in a world in conflict in an interplanetary war where you find yourself in a position of inferiority due to a lack of technology, but also a mysterious evil that gradually spreads until it kills his victims.
Don't ask me for details of names, places or anything, I've already forgotten them. And this is unfortunately the first problem... The narration and the staging are very, but then very clumsy from an artistic but also technical point of view, such as for example, certain cutscenes have voices for the dialogues (English or Japanese of your choice), others are only illegible texts because they are written on images of a similar color. Without any artistic reason for it. It's limited if the budget has restricted the voice dubbing and the developers had to play splash splash to find out which cutscenes will be eligible!
And I'm not even talking about the dialogues that put me in a facepalm state or in WTF mode so much sometimes there is not much meaning or context in what is said and so much the language used can be irregular, even very familiar in situations who demand something correct. Unfortunately, this is too common. All this side narration, scenario, dialogues is really to refine for an RPG because it lacks coherence, originality and clarity. We are lost from the intro and it is not its end that will fix things. Not that leaving mystery in an RPG is bad, quite the contrary, but because it's so poorly done...
Rather than continuing on the technical part, I will save it for the end because the test was carried out on Playstation 4 AND Xbox Series X. And there are different things to say about each of these generations.
So let's move on to the gameplay, which will not change depending on the generation of machines.
Edge of Eternity is a tactical type RPG which is divided into 2 phases like any RPG.
The first of these phases is the adventure part where you explore the environments, dialogue, collect quests and objects in order to equip yourself or progress in your adventure. Classic of the genre what. We will call it for the rest of the test, the Adventure phase.
The other phase is the Tactical phase which includes fights and "puzzles". Its code name will be Catastrophe.
PHASE AVENTURE
In the third person, you will wander through this world divided into large areas. Really big, but horribly empty of life apart from monsters and other enemies. Even villages and camps have little life with the immobile inhabitants waiting to be interacted with for their only line of dialogue. Finally when you can interact with them... In 2022, it's a little difficult not to require a minimum of life other than the perpetual animation of certain animals, including the feline equivalent of the chocoboo (rideable under certain conditions and which to my taste, cruelly lacking in charisma and cuteness to compete with the giant choupinou chick of Square Enix). But that's not the only problem, since invisible walls and other collision bugs will become embedded, making exploration rather clumsy.
To commit to the adventure, the game tries to take ideas here and there, such as, among others, some survival games like Outward where, if you eat before, you get bonuses and fill the bar group endurance. We can also mention the dialogue system in the more than similar inns of the "Tales of" series where the protagonists can dialogue with each other according to the player's choice. Nice, but without real counterpart, since the game, unlike a Tales of, does not limit this interaction. So, we pass all the dialogues we want at once and we don't come back to them, unless we find a new exchange.
The system of gems meanwhile, is strongly reminiscent of that of the sphere of Final Fantasy X, but much more limited and that's a shame. Especially since despite the fact that weapons gain experience and can be used to forge more powerful ones, we quickly see the limits of this system applied here with only one selectable path (the others will be blocked) and in the end few gems. Probably to limit the possibility of spells, with respect to the gameplay (but we will come back to this in the other phase).
The problem with this exploration phase is very simple: it scatters too much in all directions without excelling in anything. Suddenly, everything becomes anecdotal. It would have been better to focus on one thing, perfect it and then adapt the consistency of one thing to add to the first, integrate it perfectly without detracting from the basic one before integrating another, and so on . Because the problem of taking ideas here and there from the competition is to find yourself compared to them... and not to put weight on these same ideas.
The only thing that seems 100% original to me, at least if it isn't I don't have the reference, are the secondary combat objectives. During the fight, you will have secondary objectives such as not getting hurt, hitting the enemy X times from behind, inflicting this state X times, finishing the fight in X turns, etc. Completing them will grant end-of-battle bonuses in the form of extra money or a few more experience points. Nice as an idea, except that these objectives seem randomly generated and some are even unachievable at times, not by laziness or difficulty, but simply technically unachievable. To be refined, but the idea is very nice.
But that's just exploration. The other phase is more problematic. You really thought I gave that codename just for fun?
PHASE CATASTROPHE
When you encounter an enemy, whether during the exploration part or depending on how the scenario unfolds, the game switches to combat mode. Represented by a checkerboard of the terrain in real time, each box has a hexagon shape, equivalent to a displacement movement. Classic Tactical except for the generally squarer shape. Some of these "boxes" will have attributes depending on the environment they are on. For example, if there is a menhir of life placed on a square, those on this square will regain some life at the end of each turn. There are other possible interactions depending on the elements, weapons included. Similarly, it will also be necessary to do with the topography, like these same menhirs or other elements of the decor which can be obstacles and therefore require you to move or to use magic techniques. Well that's when it's not buggy: imagine the ruins of a small isolated house in a meadow and in which there are hostile deer-like creatures. All hits pass through walls if the squares are connected when there is clearly an obstacle that should not allow hitting, at least not physical hits. Especially since certain bugs or lack of reflection during the game design phase mean that you can be pushed back by one or more squares without taking into consideration that there is a wall on the way which should block expulsion or at least find themselves destroyed. Because in this kind of case, the converse is not necessarily true and we find ourselves losing an incredible number of turns moving around this obstacle which, as if by magic, is no longer bugged, whereas we shouldn't have to find themselves in this kind of situation in the first place. Especially since the camera in the combat phase is quite a problem.
You see, when I'm playing a game, I like to know what's going on with the action. Maybe it's just me and my diva whims, you might say, but when the camera doesn't focus on the current character and automatically prefers to offer a global shot of the center of the field, putting certain opposing characters or allies out of frame, well that's a big concern for me. These are not battles of 3 million characters against 3 million characters, but a dozen in all. It is therefore abnormal not to be able to fit everyone on the screen and even less not to offer to refocus the camera on the character whose turn it is. Especially since the manual control of the camera remains a bit tedious.
Now that the rant is over, how are the fights going?
There, there is the idea since the grip is clear, and it is a good point, even if it limits the actions, magic and other techniques a little because they are not command menus to which we have deal, but to a one-button-per-action system. If only, like the rest of the game, the fonts weren't too tiny...
This land division system will also activate for "puzzles". You will then have a limited amount of time/actions to overcome whatever is blocking your path. This usually goes from activating a mechanism to going to an end point. Unfortunately, the end result makes the whole thing cumbersome, especially for such simple tasks as going to a point that activates a door of the same color for another character to pass through and activates a similar mechanism for the first to pass. , And so on. Allowing this to be done in real time like the rest of the exploration would probably have made these puzzles less boring.
Last little thing and then we're going to talk a little technical. The game offers a tutorial at the start of the game. It's good, nothing to complain about its presence. But starting, before even having a foot in the story, it really feels like this tutorial takes the player for a fool by explicitly expressing what is implicit because obvious in all the other games. Again, I don't dispute its presence, because some elements seem important to me like explaining how the equipment system works, the crafting and upgrading system, how to use functions, but there is the art and the way in everything. I give a simple example which is not: "When you have no more HP, you are dead!" (Captain Obvious - 2022). During the exploration phases, you can use a kind of attack dash at the touch of a button. The latter is accessible from the start and if it hits an enemy who is happily frolicking, the player will have a surprise advantage allowing him to have the initiative during the fight. What a classic. But the game only mentions it after a few hours when I've been abusing it for a while now, so why introduce it so late? Why even talk about it at this level?
Current Generation vs Previous Generation
Let's get technical now. The bulk of this test was carried out on Playstation 4 (which is why all the screens are from the Playstation 4 version of the game, but the game in the meantime being available on Gamepass, it would have been a shame not to see what changes !).
Because there are differences on the 10 minutes during which I watched what it looked like on Xbox Series X, stopping quickly following the narrative trauma that was waking up!
So let's first lay out the generalities on Playstation 4: the game is not particularly beautiful and even less detailed. The faces of the characters are expressionless and seem straight out of a PS2. Which these days, well... it's really not great. I've seen sprites on SNES in his day that managed to communicate more emotions than that. Bad slowdowns are felt when casting certain spells and during exploration, even if the game is not really stable overall with slight almost permanent drops in fluidity, tearing and aliasing becoming encrusted also. Let's add loading times, especially from the title screen to the game, which are really very long.
On the current gen, we lose the slowdowns, the loading times are much shorter (Thanks SSD!), the game is more stable and smoother and allows you to add some details like on the snow. Overall it's better. But even if it's better, it's still just clean with a design still worthy of a PS2 and unfortunately far from living up to what we are entitled to expect for a 3D title on this machine generation.
So we can wonder about the question "Who will be satisfied by Edge of Eternity?"
Tactical purists will be biased by tactical concerns and the game's lack of depth in this area, beginners will be completely confused by mechanics that fail to convince, fans of RPGs have a much better story and characters to relate to. put in their mouths on many other productions.
And if you want my opinion, it's a shame that this title is so scattered without being able to stand out positively either on its combat system, or on its history and background, or on its characters because these are the 3 essential points who can make a role-playing game succeed or fail. So, even if it's the first game from a small development studio, I can only warn you that you may not be satisfied. But if you're curious anyway, and you have an Xbox One, Series X|S or a PC with a Gamepass subscription, give it a try, maybe you'll like it despite all the artistic and technical obstacles of the game. ...
