Another Eden

I started playing Another Eden about a week ago after having heard about it in passing as one of The Good Ones for the last few years. I think I misunderstood the sort of gameplay it had. Somehow I'd convinced myself it was some kind of weird strategy RPG or tower defense thing instead of it just being the bog-standard turn-based JRPG that it is.

Written by Masato Kato, whose previous works include Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Final Fantasy XI, the DS Mana games, Sands of Destruction and Baten Kaitos, Another Eden follows up on a lot of the ideas in those. From what I've played, Another Eden isn't so much some secret masterpiece as it is a very consistent 7.5/10 in the vein of a cool DS RPG you might half-remember fondly. It's lightly sentimental at best, for the most part. However, it is a pretty refreshing change of pace from a lot of gacha games since there's a lot of good free characters you can recruit in the vein of Chrono Cross, it has an overworld you walk around in contrast to most gacha games's menu-driven movement, and the cast, for the most part, just has normal platonic relationships with the main character instead of thirsting at him. I also respect how hard they've committed to the title. Every four hours of story content or so someone will basically turn to the camera and say "wow, this really is the Another Eden: A Cat Beyond Time and Space", and be talking about a different Eden every time. One interaction about the game I saw between a couple of my friends went something like "Did you get the joke there?" "Yeah, it was eden right" "Yes, but specifically?" "...goddammit". There's so many Edens, it's really funny, and it gets funnier every time. Surely they wouldn't come up with another Eden, and then they do.

The plot of the game is basically "do you know JRPGs? great, it's all of them". Mainly it's a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, but the people I know who are further in say it's also a successor to Xenogears so I have no idea where it's going to go.

log

2024-12-18: Elseal AS released. She's my favorite character in the game so I felt obligated to get back to it and roll for her. The rolls went poorly. It took ~$250 or so before she showed up. Could be worse with how gacha tends to go but it's not great. Sometimes I forget that AE's gacha is about as bad as FGO's. I fully expect to do her new quest and then go back to not playing AE for a bit longer.

2024-12-15: I spent most of the year not paying attention to AE but they announced Elseal AS so I've gotta pay attention again. They had two collabs this year, with King of Fighters and Atelier Ryza. Neither one really grabbed me. I'm mostly just logging in and grabbing the daily gems right now.

2024-01-26: The two versions of Another Eden have caught up. I spent a little bit and got Melpiphia. When summoning her she says she won't actually help you, this was just a prank. To steal a bit from Nakar, she's rapidly shot up the "most likely to make a deez nuts joke" charts.

2024-01-19: I have continued to just run dailies. I got Wenefica eventually, after spending a bit. I have not gotten Thilellille ES or Alma AS. Some incorrectly-applied update showed the next character will be Akane ES. They've implemented dungeon skip tickets so I've been able to not play the game even faster than before.

2023-12-28: I've just been doing dungeons for the last few days. The banner for the new character Wenefica went up, but I didn't get her.

2023-12-23: Finished going through the Elzion mythos on the main, and I finished going through First Knight the other day. If I felt like reading into some of the ideas the characters started expressing at the end I might get some conclusion about nuclear deterrence or the need for america to have a communist enemy to keep them moral, or how absolute dictatorship produces good results if you think mercantilism is a good thing, going by the sorts of ideas that got expressed. I think those are unintended consequences of the things they tried setting up though.

2023-12-19: Tried to figure out how to solve Aldo's stellar awaken fight with only free characters. After a bit of testing I figured out that between Blaze Sword and Ashtear's Guard Zone and an MP+300 badge I could mititgate enough damage and lower MP costs enough to let Prai use Indulgence a second time on turn 4, which is good enough that I could then solve the rest of the fight with free characters. I still had Tetra in the party when I tried it, but I think Ashtear's repair kit should work, probably. Kid could probably also use a healing element if Prai's not restoring enough HP since I otherwise just had her clicking fortune to build up power levels for the first four turns, and that's one more than she benefits from. Alternately, Pisce probably works in place of Tetra if you don't have Minalca.

2023-12-18: I've been taking it easy for the last week or so. I caught up with the main story on my main account and plugged away at the Elzion Mythos some more. While I was working through the Elzion mythos I got true Ogre Rancorem: Light for Aldo. I ran a magic team for that one. Flamme, Eva, Pom AS, and I think Myunfa AC? Something like that.

I also sat down and got Prai's 5* unlock, and decided to give Aldo's Stellar Awaken fight another shot. I had to mess around with some grasta and swap out Parisa AS for Minalca in my fire team, and swap in Iphi on turn 3 to survive the AF on turn 4, but I got there in the end. The team I used for the fight looked something like this:

at least, that's all the relevant parts. True Ogre Rancorem: Light ended up being useful for this fight because Origin Force pretty much walls the attack the enemy does on turn 3. Prai's there to take the hits on turn 2, Iphi's there to revive people if they die in the AF on turn 4, Tsukiha AC's there to set fire zone and do other buffs (she could probably be replaced with Aisha, honestly), and Aldo's there because if he isn't the enemy will use Another Force and kill you turn 1. It's an interesting puzzle, but I have no idea how I'd get through turn 4 on my free alt.

Aside from that, Suzette and Tsukiha are going to get Stellar Awakenings in about 20 minutes from when I'm writing this, and from what I'm hearing Suzette is silly good now. She's also fun and cute so I'll go and roll on her banner when that goes up.

2023-12-13: I pushed a bit further through the main story on the alt. The main thing I've been wondering with playing through the game without rolling the gacha more or less was to find out where the wall was. How far in to the story do I need to go before a boss is just way too hard? The answer is chapter 89 in 3.1. The Aspid boss is just way overtuned. It's maybe possible with true manifest Gariyu and a beefed-up high light Aldo, but Gariyu's true manifest fight is a pain in the ass and I haven't figured out a way to solve it yet. I pushed through the Aspid fight with two continues but I'd like to give it another shot at some point, see if I can find a better way to do it. Still, Chapter 89 is pretty deep into the game considering the current end of story content is at chapter 104, and is further than I'd expect to get with pretty much just the free characters, even if I am counting the characters they're giving out for free right now as part of that. It'd probably be a little bit harder without Necoco and her free 3000 HP heal, though someone like Yuri or Serge or Morgana should be able to do similarly well at healing even if they don't have the same kinds of defensive utility that Necoco provides. Either way, they've done a pretty good job at making a game that more casual or staunchly anti-gacha players can enjoy, and from what I'm seeing from having pushed through the main story a bit more they're going to try and balance the inherent need for power creep that a live service gacha game creates by introducing a robot combat system that's completely disconnected from the gacha and making that the centerpiece of story progression for a while. It's a really interesting decision that I appreciate.

2023-12-09: I finished working through the main story of the Octopath collab. It's fine. Talking it over with a couple more people it seems like Partitio is probably the most useful of the three, with his attack that scales to a really high multiplier based on how much money you have and his taunt that ignores resistances. His guard skill is also good, but it's only available in Stellar Burst. I've tried putting Cyrus onto my shadow teams and he just isn't quite fitting in neatly. I haven't progressed the story any further, but I did go and farm Nadara Volcano VH until I got Gariyu's tome and manifest weapon. I need to farm it up to level 10 and then I can try doing the true manifest fight, which doesn't look like it should be too bad with how many fire characters I have, though maybe it'll be awful who knows.

2023-12-07: I'm up through the start of 3.1 on the alt now. The catch-up tickets got me Premaya AS and Iphi, which should help take me through the annoying parts of 3.1. The collaboration event was announced as being with Octopath Traveler. The Octopath characters seem decent. Cyrus sets water/fire/thunder zones and restores MP to the party, Partitio... I'm not sure yet. I think he's supposed to be a tank, but as far as I've heard his guard skill is only available in Stellar Awakening, and his debuffs seem okay? And then Tithi is a singer who doesn't need two turns of setup to give out a decent damage buff. She seems solid. I'm not sure if Cyrus or Tithi are better than Aisha, though Tithi seems a bit more versatile and seems like she'll work in more party comps, maybe. I'll need to mess around with it a bit. Maybe Cyrus's advantage is giving free shadow teams any kind of support to work with, since he comes in at 16 shadow and can set zones and apply any buffs, which were things I was complaining about when I was trying to put a shadow team together to farm Aldo's psalms the other day.

2023-12-04: I've been continuing to work on the pretty much only using free characters alt. I cleared out NG+ on Complex Dream to get Harle as well, and then ran into a roadblock when I needed to get Amy and Riica to 4* to progress through 1.5 and 1.9. Riica's Patriarch Tome dropped while I was farming Industrial Ruins, but Amy's Assassin's Fist Tome refused to drop, so I went spent 8 hours or so working on getting to where it was in the Time Mine episode. If Riica's hadn't dropped, I would have needed to go and work on the IDA School 1 point ladder to get that.

After that though, I went and cleared out the rest of arc 1.5 and started arc 2, which hasn't been as much of a difficulty spike as I was worried it would be. 4* Aldo's been having trouble keeping up so I've swapped him out to run a frontline of the Chrono Cross characters and Aisha, and they've been able to clear content well enough so far. Right now I'm up to Prison Ship Gulfagin in 2.2 and I'll just keep working on story progression until I run into a wall that I can't figure out how to solve.

2023-11-30: Yesterday I went and cleared the Chrono Cross collab on the alt once to get Kid and Serge. Clearing it on standard took a few quartz revives but I think that was worth it to do that instead of bumping down to Beginner because clearing it on standard meant I could get 5 more light for Aldo. I left the game running with an autobattle macro while at work and sleeping and got the tomes to upgrade Kid and Serge to 5*. Serge's flat 1000-2500 HP heal seems like it's better than using Prai or Colette so I've set him as the party HP healer, which also helps increase the damage output of the other Chrono cCross characters. If I feel like Serge isn't cutting it for healing I've heard mention that Yuri or Morgana are also options, since they heal a flat 1500. Aldo's falling behind a bit, but I'm still not finding a better option for a pretty much free 30 MP heal, so I'm keeping him in the party. That said, he's falling behind a bit in terms of damage and speed so I'm going to need to go and push story a bit more to get his 5* class unlocked, which I'm working on as I write this. The plan I've got is to farm Snake Liver Damaku VH and use the weekly Tsubura Gems to speed up acquisition of Aldo's psalms. If I'm feeling especially deranged I might force myself to hard commit to not rolling and just spend gems on red cards, but that's going to depend on how much of a pain in the ass the dungeon is.

2023-11-28: Grinding out character quests is mind-numbing so instead of spending another day straight doing that I've decided to break it up by starting a gimmick run where I just use f2p characters, more or less. I rolled the gacha once to fill up the party with a couple more bodies but otherwise it's the adventures of Aldo and Aisha and probably Serge whenever I get around to doing Complex Dream. At some point in the last week or so Aldo got a retroactive buff to his Blaze Sword skill that makes it hit AOE and heal 30 MP for the party and reduce MP costs by 35%, which makes the early game f2p experience so much more tolerable, it's wild. Right now I'm up to chapter 26 on the alt and it's been pretty smooth sailing ever since Aldo hit level 20, though I'm going to want to pick up the Chrono Cross crew at some point soon to make party-building easier.

2023-11-22: I've pretty much just kept chipping away at the event ladders over the last week and a bit. I've cleared out most of the main episode ladders at this point and started working on clearing out the character quests that have built up as I've rolled more characters. Unigan was starting to get to a point where the framerate seemed to be falling into the single digits so I've started there. The next event, Wryz Saga Part 1, is going to be dropping tomorrow, so I'll get to clearing that out next before going back to working on character quests and the various apocrypha and mythos. The character quests I've been working through today have mostly been better than the Parisa quests I worked through last time. They're still pretty workmanlike and functional but none of them have felt as contrived as that one did so far.

Also at some point in the last couple weeks I went and set up an android emulator on my computer. I don't run Windows on my main machine so I can't just use Bluestacks, so I had to figure out which of the android emulators on linux didn't require me to go and dual-boot. Waydroid worked once I switched my desktop enviroment over to Wayland, though I kind of want to figure out a solution that'd work on steam deck without too much hassle at some point. I wrote a quick writeup of what I did to get that working. no idea if it'll help, but at least it's shorter than all the lorem ipsum dolor sit android emulation is very popular these days if you want to play games on your computer sort of AI-generated websites that clog up search results.

2023-11-13: forgot to update the website, but I've continued grinding away at another eden for the last couple weeks. I got up to the point where Kamlanage joins the party in part 3.2, and there's nothing that really unlocks after that so I stopped pushing story to work on clearing out some of the old sidequests and events. The events have usually been fine, though they usually all fall into a rut that needs to be blocked off by three doors that need you to get event currency to progress. The character quests seem very functionally-written. They're workmanlike. The character quests are here to clock in, clock out, and get a paycheck. They're not especially good, but they usually manage to not ever be more than 45 minutes total, of the ones I've played. The appeal of the game seems to be, aside from its dumb commitment to The Bit, having a bunch of interesting locales and nice vistas, with the occasional music track that is actually unironically pretty good.

I've also been working through the event ladders, which seems to be the main way event rewards are handed out. You run some dungeon with various bonus characters related to the event who increase drops of the event currency. There's some pittance if you're not running the Another Dungeon version of the dungeon, and more currency per enemy and boss if you're using your green or red keys to enter the Another Dungeon version of the zone. Theoretically, this means that you could, if you were feeling especially bored, clear out the ladders without spending any green or red keys. This takes me to automation and macros.

Usually when a game like this has some mindless task that is optimal but boring, you end up using some kind of macro app. Most gachas have auto-modes built-in to combat this, but older games like Another Eden or Fate/Grand Order don't do this. The main macro app for Another Eden seems to be a script in Macrorify, which costs some amount of money per month if you want to just set it up and leave it running in the background all day, unlike Fate/Grand Order which has Fate/Grand Automata, which is a free autobattle app that seems like it was ported out of something similar. If I were less stupid I'd probably go and rip the FGO guts out of FGA and slap in the scripts for Another Eden, since the principles seem like they should be the same, just tedious to go through and fix.

2023-11-02: good god there's a third eden now.

2023-11-01: I continued working my way through the main story and hit the end of 2-2. Some of the parts in the middle of the chapter got a bit repetitive, but I liked the bit where they spent a chapter going over the lifecycle and reproductive habits of the training dummies, and the bit where the airship kool-aid-manned its way into the microwave hallway, and the bit where aldo turned to the camera and said another eden, and then it activated project another eden.