Eden's Last Sunrise Reviews

Eden's Last Sunrise is an interesting game that deserves more attention. It's one part Final Fantasy Tactics and one part visual novel. Society had a major split 200 years prior to the start of the game. One faction used modern technology to take to space and forge a new life, while the other stayed on the planet and embraced magic. The beginning of the game sees the space faring faction detecting a potentially life-ending wave of energy wiping out their distant satellites, and deciding its time to contact their long-lost kin. In true visual novel form, you choose whether to play as the space faring people or those who stayed behind at the beginning. From there, each route splits into two more a ways in. The combat gameplay takes most of its queues from Final Fantasy Tactics, but notably adds a cover system and an aggro system. The cover system effectively changes how you think about positioning, while the aggro system allows for MMO style tanking and riskier positioning with those who can reduce their targeting priority. The game also features an action point system, with each character (typically) getting 6 action points per turn. A standard attack costs 3 points, moving can be done once per turn for a single point, and defending is always available for 2 points. Stronger attacks can cost more, while certain attacks and utility abitliies may cost less. This usually means a move, an attack, and a utility ability or defense per turn, but could also means two or more attacks in a turn if forgoing movement. On top of this, you have a solid number of classes to mix and match abilities with, covering both magical and high tech options. There is also a tension system, which allows for powerful limit-break like abilities, but I found that most of these were either not that impactful or took too long to build to show up outside of the longest couple of battles in the game. The combat is enjoyable, but it unfortunately doesn't quite hit the tactical heights of the best in the genre. I found the majority of the moves I used to be damage with some minor status effect rider or healing moves, with pure status effects and debuffs not generally being worth the action points when alternatives are available. For example, there's nothing that feels impactful in a similar way to Time Mages in FFT. There are a couple of abilities to speed up turns, but they only speed up the next turn as a rider effect on a heal or as a high tension cost ability that just didn't come into play. Similar things could be said about hard control abilities and other utility focused skills. Further, the difficulty is a bit odd -- I found once I'd learned a few essential abilities hard mode was quite easy, but expert was annoying. Enemies on expert are not only at a substantially higher level than you, but they also get an additional action point per turn. This means that most enemies can move and attack twice in a turn, which just felt bad to me. It was still doable once I got rolling, but I found I preferred just having the game be a bit easy rather than constantly feeling like the computer had a weird advantage. I really enjoyed the character writing. While I did find some of it to come across as a bit amateurish, the cast is quite likable, has good development, and are all quite distinct from one another. This is bolstered by each character having an affinity rating that is increased through optional social scenes. My biggest complaint about Eden's Last Sunrise is that, much like many visual novels, it expects you to play multiple routes to unlock the good end. I liked the gameplay and story well enough for a single route that took 25-30 hours, but not enough to playthrough a couple more times given how many excellent games are sitting in my backlog. The ending I got did a good enough job of wrapping up character arcs, but the conclusion to the existential threat was unsatisfying. I still enjoyed my time with the game, but it did drop my final opinion of the game a bit. So, my recommendation for the game comes down to this: If you like doing multiple routes in a game and New Game+ type options, and are interested in the genre, then definitely give Eden's Last Sunrise a go. If not, I think it's still worth playing, but it does depend on whether you are willing to move on with a bad end or are happy looking up the good ending.