I discovered Eve of Calamity via the youtube algorithm gifting me a video on the game by a user named humblemud. Upon hearing that the game is an open world JRPG with heavy influences from Baldur's Gate and early Fallout, I figured I had to give it a shot.
Turns out, that means it plays a lot like a Romancing SaGa game. I suppose that's fairly unsurprising since (I'm fairly certain) Kawazu is on record talking about Western RPG influences in the series. Regardless, you are let loose with a general goal in a broad, ungated world filled with many sidequests to complete and characters to recruit. The overall story is a fairly basic "big bad is reawakening", which also fits into the Romancing SaGa mold. Enemies can be quite difficult early on before you have a full party and decent movesets, but if you focus on recruiting party members and finding better equipment, you can quickly get ahead of the curve. There's a trading system that, if you find the right places to buy and sell, can get you rich quite quickly. It all makes for a rather fun, sandbox-y experience.
Combat design is rather well done, too. You have TP that count up to use martial moves, and standard MP pools for using magical moves. Buffs and debuffs are extremely worthwhile, both stat affecting statuses and your regular assortment of status ailments. In fact, I'd actually say they end up a little too good, with most boss fights being solvable through consistent use of these abilities. Speed is a bit of an overpowered stat, as in most games where speed determines how often you get turns. Still, those are fairly minor issues until the late game, and I definitely ran into the game over screen a healthy number of times in my exploration. Late game with all of the top tier equipment, stat boosts, and skill options, though, I had absolutely no trouble walloping the final boss.
Character progression has some similarities to Fire Emblem and the old Might and Magic games. You level up in a class until level 30. Once you hit level 30, you've maxed that class, and can change to a new class. Your base stats reset when you change classes, though you keep all of the passive and active abilities from the classes you've mastered, as well as a modest permanent stat boost from each mastered class. Balancing which characters were early and late in their class cycles to make sure I could get through the content I was currently working on was interesting, and I enjoyed this system for most of the game. However, I had everyone maxed in their final class that I cared about for the last two dungeons of the game, meaning that there was no point to fight the random battles. Neither the XP nor the loot was worthwhile. So, I spent the last 1.5 hours of the game mostly running from scrubs to get to the bosses. A system to make use of extra XP or some unique end game loot would have gone a long way.
I had one major issue that I don't know can be considered a bug, but it was definitely a big disappointment. One of the major side quests involves a civil war. I decided I wanted to try for peace, but, in completing a sidequest in one of the unaligned cities, I'd accidentally got them to commit to a side. I couldn't later sway them for peace, but I also couldn't finish the quest for the side I'd accidentally started. I ended up simply not getting a resolution to the quest, which was a bummer.
All in all, though, I definitely recommend in the game if you're interested in open world JRPGs with a big cast of recruitable characters and lots of side quests. I had a blast with Eve of Calamity and will definitely keep my eye out for anything the devs put out in the future.
