I’m still playing the same five games regularly: Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsujimura, Genshin Impact (once a week), Love Nikki, Shining Nikki and Another Eden. Apart from Another Eden, they’re all time-gated in some way or another, which means I can’t play them for very long every day. And Another Eden crashes without fail every ten minutes or so, so it’s practically the same. So does Shining Nikki, which means it’s probably my phone’s fault. I knew gaming on the mobile phone was a mistake. But it’s too much effort to migrate to emulator now, so I just treat it as a game meant to be played in 10-minute bursts.

So! Another Eden. My teams are an average of level 65, with the highest passing 71 recently. I kicked all the 4-stars out long ago, but they’re still present on the B-teams I use to farm extra points in the Episode quests. In one of my earlier posts I mistakenly said that 4-stars upgraded to 5-star aren’t as good as native 5-stars, but it’s not true. Good 5-star units are good regardless of the method you used to get them. It’s just supremely tedious to raise a 4-star to 5, so I have no intention of doing so for now.

My current 5-star party consists of Tsukiha ES, Mighty, Victor, Heena and Zeviro, with Morgana as healer/debuffer. I also pulled Miyu AS, Hozuki, Laclair and Felmina recently so I’ll raise them on the side when I get the chance. Laclair is the only one I seriously need, because I have the feeling I’ll need an extra water character for an upcoming boss. I mistakenly said I had Isuka 5-star earlier, but she’s only 4.5-star. Pity, I really liked her.

I pull on the free banners whenever I can scrape together 1000 Chrono stones. Sometimes I’m lucky, most of the time… I still need solid Fire and Earth units to round out my roster, so I’ll keep trying to do a 10-pull on every new banner until I’m set. Unlike most gacha games, Another Eden doesn’t have a “pity” system where you’re guaranteed a particular unit after pulling for a while. That means there’s no point in saving stones unless there’s an upcoming banner you really really want (to be disappointed in).

Warning! Huge story spoilers follow!

Enough about the characters. Another Eden styles itself as a regular JRPG so let’s talk about the story! I found out who the “cat beyond time and space” is, so I’m here to report it as promised. The cat is…. *drumroll* the main character Aldo! …But he doesn’t really care about being a cat, so neither should you.

To give more details, there was a Professor named Chronos who sent his whole family hurtling to different time periods for a reason I’ve forgotten. Chronos went into the distant past, his wife Madoka is missing, their son Eden… well, shame about what happened to Eden. Their daughter Feinne/Cecile ended up near Baruoki together with the family cat Kyros. Baby Feinne/Cecile was so terrified at being left alone that she used her magic/Prisma powers to turn Kyros into a copy of her brother Eden. Kyros/Eden then grew up to be called Aldo. So he’s the cat, and he’s beyond time and space because he came from the future. Get it?

Simple enough. The writers probably expected me to be surprised by such a revelation but… I’ve seen it before. And I’ve said it before: there are RPGs where the main character turns out to have been dead or non-human all along, but it’s almost always treated as a non-event. Just something trivial in their backstory where everyone goes “Whoaaa!” and then the game just moves on. Besides, my official party contains a literal frog-man, a pink android and a purple cyborg, so the human-looking Aldo is actually one of the more “normal” ones.

Nobody dwells on his feline nature anyway. In fact Aldo doesn’t even have a feline nature. Apart from one brief and meaningless transformation, he never acts or thinks like a cat. He even says he can’t speak cat in one episode. In short, it was just a “shocking swerve” the writers added to make Another Eden stand out from the zillions of other JRPGs out there. Your mileage may vary on how successful it was.

BTW, Aldo/Kyros himself isn’t much of a cat, but there are many other cats dotting the landscape that you can befriend in the game. You can even go adventuring as Aldo’s pet cat Varuo. In that mode, you can collect items for forging kitty clothes then dress your companion cat up. AFAIK the effect is purely cosmetic. Too bad, I don’t do pure cosmetics in JRPGs. But who knows, if I run out of stuff to do in the main game I’ll give it some thought.

For the rest of the story so far, I’m at chapter 50 and my characters are really, really dumb. When a bad guy kidnaps your sister (another guy’s sister, not Feinne. The writers really like little sisters) and wants you to gather powerful weapons for him in exchange for her, maybe you should stop and think about whether it’s a good idea or not. You know, exercise the ol’ grey matter for just a few seconds. Is this baddie the kind of guy we want to hand super weapons to? (No.) Will he really let the girl go once we’ve done his bidding? (No. Duh.) Is there a way to storm his castle instead? (Yes.)

It was really stupid… After all the time wasted collecting the weapons and the resulting fallout, we had to spend waste more time storming the baddie’s castle anyway – wait, even before that we had to find the key to the castle, and to get that we had to go through like 10 different stages… The main story is such a hassle and it’s not even good. I’ve already forgotten what I’m supposed to be doing on the new continent I unlocked recently. Playing hide-and-seek with my companions, rescuing kidnapped kids, retrieving Aldo’s face… it’s all over the place.

And it’s even more surprising that the main story is so brainless because the “episode” side stories range from “decent” to “actually really interesting.” They’re all like mini-RPG stories condensed into a few short hours. That means much less time-wasting and pointless detours and more focused story-telling. You won’t be able to avoid lengthy dungeon crawls, but at least there’s a clear short-term objective (usually). Plus you get to interact with more interesting characters than Aldo’s boring crew. I especially enjoyed the Mythos stage. It could be a full JRPG on its own if they fleshed it out. The Azure Rebel stage was good too. Much better than I’d expected.

The 1000 Year Ark sucked, but it unlocked the fishing minigame, so that’s cool. Fishing is fun! Much better than the garbage system in Genshin Impact which I will trash a little more next time I write about GI.

TL;DR when people say Another Eden has a good story, they’re probably not talking about the main story. Their perception might be clouded by the Episode quests, most of which are very good. If you ever wanted to “finish” an RPG story in a day or two and get good rewards to apply to other short “RPGs,” this is your game. I have more to say about the stories, the systems (just unlocked Grastas), my party, etc. but it’s been a long time since I wrote anything so I’m out of stamina. My next post will probably something quick on Undernauts. After that, maybe a Genshin Impact update before I take another break till Sumeru releases. After that we’ll see. Mata ne!