Eden's Last Sunrise

not very good

I love this game. I played it when I really crave a tactical RPG at the time and the game just gave me what I really need. Let's start with how the game is when you play it for the first time. You got to choose which faction you want to be, the spacefarer or the surface dwellers. Still, after I played the game I will say that playing as the surface dwellers actually gave more benefits to you because along the story because you would not know who to trust hence making your future decision more interesting. Also, as surface dwellers you got Kesh, a sunspell which is an OP class no joke, and also Jess, a lovely bodyguard who are really good at melee. Next, for the core tactical gameplay, it is really fun. There's some sort of stuff you can do to do extra damage ranging from ailments to enemy resistance. Having 2 weapon slot plus 1 item slot and even having 2 class on 1 character can make a character do lots of stuff based on how you want them to be. For example, I make Jess become a Bloodthrob, a melee class and a Sunspell, a magic class. With Large sword and a magic crystal, she is a killing machine because she can attack anyone regardless how far they are. Then, there comes the liberation system. You liberate a region by assigning your troops to a task each region provide. Once you liberate it you will gain resources from it. These resources can later be used to upgrade your weapon and armor. It is a pretty cool mechanic that I never encountered in my life at all and I like it. Also, the characters in this games are loveable. I like that there is a socialize option in the game so you get to spend times with the character and know a lot more about their backgrounds, problems and all of that. I don't know if there is anything that will happen if you don't socialize with them because If you are like me, you will always try to max their trust. Speaking with them can also change your perspective of them, from character you hate to character you envy, from character you are scared of to character that you love. It will happen. [b]Ending Spoiler Ahead!!![/b] There is some things I want to address though like having a character to appear and gone in a milliseconds on the bottom edge of the screen when placing the troops on the battlefield. Second, the true ending is not as pleasing like the normal ending because hey, at least in the normal ending I got to see the characters speak to me and have some heartwarming moments. Also, the status effect should be shown a lot more clear on the character's hud because the only way I knew a character status is by looking at their aura which is hard to remember. So that's pretty much it. It is a great tactical RPG and it is obviously an improvement to the developer previous games. I look forward for the developer's next game and I hope he can continue to deliver us many more great games.

Fairly uninspired and simplistic gameplay aside, there's no reason for this to eat 11GB of storage space.

A decent game created by a solo dev. Some parts stand out as unique and very well done, namely its story and the characters. But there are small issues such as repetitive combat, inventory management, and UI in general. The story is set up in a way that encourages multiple playthroughs. Basically I'll need to choose which sides to play, either as Dwellers or Spacefarers. I chose the Dwellers first, then the Spacefarers next. It's interesting because the whole premise stays the same between playthroughs, but you'll be experiencing the events from different perspectives. The pre-made characters are memorable, and I liked how they develop and start to open up to the player as the story progresses. It's possible to create custom characters for the combat phase, and its customization is incredibly in-depth; you can change the voice and its pitch, choose any body/outfit color, and even add custom portraits. However I've run into many annoyances. First and the biggest one is combat, and how simple and repetitive it feels. The game doesn't explain the mechanics well, and it took me a while to even notice Tension mechanics (basically a resource used for Ultimate moves). Almost every scenario consisted of 5-6 enemies, and the goal was to just defeat all of them. It could have been more complex, such as enemy reinforcements and diverse objectives (survive for X turns, defend point Y for X turns, move all friendly units to point Z...) I ended up setting the combat difficulty to easy/very easy because it became too boring. Secondly, inventory management is a pain. There are no ways to sort/filter items which makes finding the specific one very time-consuming. I can see it becoming more of an issue after many playthroughs because it's not possible to sell any of them. Last but not the least, the UI is somewhat a mess. Everything is very colorful and expressive, which made finding the exact information I need very difficult. Sometimes I couldn't tell which button I can click on and which one I can't. It's also apparent during combat phase. It does a poor job at explaining status effects, and I found myself opening the character sheets everytime they got applied to my characters. It also doesn't fit the whole "impending doom" narrative at all. It took me 16 hours to complete my first playthrough, and I'll need to go through it at least two more times to see the supposed true ending. If the positives outweigh the negatives for you, the game is very much worth it especially on sale. Thankfully the dev always offers demos for their games. You'll get to experience everything it has to offer except for the crafting system.

A lukewarm recommandation. Eden's Last Sunrise is kind of an hybrid of TRPG and Visual Novel. Unfortunately, I don't think those two things go well together. At least not in this specific game. On the visual novel side, you have several routes available as typical, four normal ones (two on the dweller side, and two on the spacefarer side) and one "golden" one, and you have to go through at least two of the formers (one for each side) to unlock the later. But here's the thing - TRPG aren't quick affairs. My first playthrough took something like 20 hours, and for the other ones - well, look at my playtime (I did all the routes though, not just two + golden). Even though about halfway through my second playthrough I put the game on story difficulty and rushed through thing, it still took a hell of a lot of time to finish. And there simply aren't enough events to sustain that many playthroughs, I saw a LOT of repetition. I enjoyed my first playthrough, the second a little less, but the next ones were just plain boring. As for the tactical side, well there's just half of one here. What's there is fine, but it doesn't go very deep. There's a decent amount of classes (17), but it feels like way less than that, because they all feel very samey - you can clearly tell there was a very rigid formula that was followed when making them : exactly five active skills, two innate passives, two reactions, three "tension" (ultimate) abilities, four cross-class passives, and two advanced innate passives per class. And there's a lot of repetition even in the details : the first active of every single class is a basic attack with a rider of some kind (usually a minor status effect, sometimes an accuracy bonus under certian conditions, or an AoE, or something like that). Then you usually have one buff, two more specific attacks, and a final, more powerful but less usable attack. The cross-class passives also follow the same boring formula : the first one is almost always a resistance bonus (with every class having a different permutation, e.g +15 to this and +15 to that, or +30 to this, or +30 to that...), and the second one is often an equipment ability (that allows you to wield a specific weapon even with other classes). Only the last two stand out. That leaves the innate passives, and they are indeed notable, but they are only active for your primary class, as do the tension abilities. Add the fact that you can only have four cross class passive equipped at a time, and in the end a huge chunk of a class abilities are completely irrelevant when used as a secondary class. Though in the case of tension abilities it's not a big deal because you never use them anyway. Tension just takes far too long to build up - when I finally have enough to use an ability, I'm basically done with the map and don't need them anyway. There's also the impression that classes are all meant to have their own little niche and be a viable choice, except that some classes do have objectively better stats than others (including, inexplicably, four classes having an extra action point - which is a big difference, but they don't cover all archetypes so some builds are screwed). So if you're min-maxing you're going to want to use those classes, except if you do well you lose out on the innate passives of the previous class which might be better for what you want to do. There are also a number of interface annoyances. Inventory management is genuinely bad, there are no way to sort, filter, or discard equipment, and after several playthroughs you'll have amassed a huge amount of it, and it's a CHORE to go through it when you find something new you actually want to look into. The game also turns every effect into its own status instead of presenting things clearly. For example, the Engineer has an ability that inflics a physical resistance penalty and inflicts the sick status effect. But instead of just having the floating text say "-30 phys res" and "sick" after a unit has been hit, it says "Irradiated" - it's up to you to check what it actually means if you don't already know. And that's the case for EVERYTHING - the Enforcer's Evasion penalty? "Staggered". The Miasmatist's bio resistance debuff? "Noxious fumes". The Bodyguard's combat skill debuff? "Bruised". And so on and so forth. And finally, there are the resistances. There are six types of damage in the game, and every unit has different resistance to it. Problem is, there's almost no consistence to those values for the enemies, except "a class that uses mostly one damage will be resistant to it". Resistances can vary hugely from one battle to the next, and so you have to check them every single battle for every. Single. Enemy. Which gets extremely tedious. And if you're thinking you could just overpower that, well, no, you can't, quite the opposite actually. Enemy resistances are affected by the game's scaling, to the point where when you approach the level cap enemies will have massive resistances against every damage type except one or two. Hilariously, they're not dependent on the actual unit level - story difficulty sets the enemies level at 1, but I still found units with multiple triple digit resistances in every battle. Speaking of level cap, that's another issue with the visual novel aspect. I hit the level cap for my main squad about one third of the way through my second playthrough. Having so much of the game still left to do without gaining anything new was a chore and further reinforce my impression that you're not actually supposed to do all four routes, just two and then the golden ending. Now yeah, I'm kind of dumping on the game here. But I really want to stress out that to me, putting a visual novel and a TRPG together results in something less than the sum of its part. I still liked the game well enough to play it through entirely. The gameplay was great before it got stale, the story was nice enough, the characters seemed mostly believable, and the final route was a... let's say "interesting" twist. It's worth your time and money. But "the full experience" of doing ALL routes isn't. Ultimately, here's my advice. If you're looking for a TRPG, buy the game on sale and do ONE playthrough. The TRPG aspect gets stale very very fast after that. If you're looking for a visual novel, buy the game on sale or not and do TWO playthroughs before going for the golden ending. The game just takes too long to go through for the minor story payoff of seeing the other route for your chosen side.

I really like tactics games, and I was expecting this just to fill the desire I had to play one. I was not expecting such an interesting and immersive story and an incredible cast of characters. The gameplay loop is very fun! The classes are all interesting and suit a variety of playstyles too! The only thing I so far haven't really found all that interesting is the armor and accessories, but the approaches you can take to combat more than make up for it!

Note that my playtime is actually a misnormer, about half of it was AFK. My only real grief is that while the combat was interesting it got quite repetitive, however there was a reason for it. Viewpoints, even when fully explained, are valid up to a point. Multiple perspectives are key. What do we really seek and what will we do to achieve it? What do we know and what do we think we know? It was very enjoyable being able to be a part of these 5 new lines. What will the next verses be?

Other than games like Xcom, Baldur’s Gate, and some others, I haven’t gotten too far into the Tactics genre as a whole. Eden’s Last Sunrise is probably the most “traditional” variation of the format I’ve seen, and it's an excellent one, especially for one made by such a small team. [h3] Gameplay [/h3] Eden’s Last Sunrise has some pretty basic RPG systems at play with all you could expect from the genre (i.e. crafting, levelling, and some management systems à la Xcom, etc). You’ll be spending most of your time in combat encounters since it seems like they’re the best way to gain resources, XP, and items, with additional ‘Dispatch’ phases that let you level your units passively. The encounters themselves bring everything you’d expect from a game of this genre with basic combat and spellcasting, cover, HP and XP, but they do spice things up with a “tension” bar that only fills when dealing or taking damage, and elemental resistances between allies and enemies that forces you to strategize with your units. There's not too much challenge later on except for growing HP pools and resistances, but the wide variety of abilities you get throughout the game keeps things from going too stale. That being said, I’d say the more memorable thing about Eden’s gameplay was its unique class system. Basically, you get a couple characters to start, and the choice of a few classes, each of which is able to be set as a main, or subclass. Your main class allows you to use all the abilities that you assign to it, while your subclass only uses your combat abilities and gets less XP. There’s no limits to which classes can be put where, so you get plenty of opportunities to experiment and figure out what works best. For example, I paired a support class and a rogue-kinda class together to create a character that can easily attack and debuff enemies from cover while still being able to heal allies. It’s well-balanced with a lot of potential, and I had a lot of fun playing around with it. [h3] Story [/h3] On the story side of things, Eden’s Last Sunrise’s narrative is phenominally well done, and is told in a visual-novel style format. Starting with the basic premise of a world-ending threat and a growing conflict between magic and science, it branches into a really fascinating dilemma. Should we sacrifice everything, or should we take everything we can to save ourselves? There’s a well-written conflict in the backdrop of everything that occurs, and the lack of traditionally “evil” antagonists in the plot makes Eden’s Last Sunrised a really nuanced, interesting story. The characters are also surprisingly good. Though they aren't the strongest in terms of writing, they have enough charm and distinctive personality to make them worth socializing with and learning their stories. Some of them are particularly interesting, and I appreciate the effort that went into defying traditional tropes. The music is also really great! While tracks repeat often in certain situations, each one is such a great listen that it doesn’t really matter. [h3] Issues [/h3] I’d say the main problems I found in Eden’s were mainly founded from its very clunky UI and how little information it gives on its systems. For example: [list] [*]It’s hard to tell what buffs/debuffs your character has at a glance, and at times I even had to resort to a handy Steam Guide (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2896612623 use this!) to figure out what my spells actually did. [*]Inventory management is a bit of a nightmare. The UI is too basic and doesn’t provide much control in terms of dealing with large amounts of items. I imagine this would get pretty exacerbated by having multiple playthroughs-worth of items in your inventory at a time. [*]I also agree with the negative sentiment that having to sink multiple playthroughs in to get the ‘true ending’ is a big ask, especially with how repetitive some aspects of the game can get and the 20 hour-ish runtime. [/list] Thankfully, none of this overly detracts from the game too much or becomes unbearable, but it's worth knowing before going in. Overall, I’d say if you had any reason to want to play Eden’s Last Sunrise; Do it for the story. It's unique, extremely well-done, and for a dev-team that can fit on a business card, it is an incredible piece of work that I’m glad I had the pleasure of playing. I recommend it regardless if you're playing it through to the true end, or simply staying for a run or two.

I’ve finally finished it and unlocked all achievements! What a journey — I really enjoyed the story. It would be amazing if future updates could allow faster dialogue and battle skipping!

sad to see another game get taken off my list but hey this one was one of the best games i have played in recent times. I thought it was gonna be basic. instead i had 77 hours of Fun trying to piece together what was happening through out my journey on this little planet, i highly recommend picking this one up.