Written By: Patrick Orquia
Title: Eternal Edge
Developer: Righteous Weasel Games
Publisher: Righteous Weasel Games
Genre: action adventure
Number of Players: 4
Release Date: 12 April 2018
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Price: $20.00
Eternal Edge is an action adventure game very similar to the Legend of Zelda games, especially the most recent Breath of the Wild in terms of the open world gameplay. No, this game is nowhere near as polished as Nintendo’s 2017 Game of the Year powerhouse. Perhaps calling this game “similar” to Breath of the Wild is just overselling it. Maybe it’s more similar to the very first similar Zelda game, only now it has 3D graphics and a much wider open-world map.
The game is about Cross, a young fighter under the tutelage of the eponymous Edge, an older, wiser, much more capable fighter. Spoiler alert, Edge dies at the beginning of the game, but not before telling the young Cross to follow his path to greatness. Cross, vowing to do so, embarks on an epic quest along with his 3 trusted warrior friends to free four chained-up fortresses to weaken the eventual final foe of the game, the Skeleton King aka the Lord of the Dead. It’s up to you, the player, to guide Cross and his friends across the wide world of Little Kingdom, fighting foes and levelling up and customizing your character with a wide variety of weapons, gears, and magical spells.
The premise of the game is a bit cliché, but it is in the visuals complemented very well by its gameplay where this game really shines. The game utilizes a retro-styled pixelized art style. Such is commonly seen in indie games these days, but this time around, it’s in 3D. The art style truly pops and looks really amazing. It looks like playing with cutesy small toys, but they are fighting brutal enemies, some would gladly one-shot kill Cross if he’s dumb enough to fight them underleveled. Yep, this game may look adorable AF, but it is still an action adventure game through and through, and you will either kill the enemies or be killed.
Various monsters are scattered along the vast open field, and if you want to have a fighting chance conquering the fortresses and the mini-dungeons, you have to grind your way to the top. These monsters drop various loots, such as weapons and gears, and of course, quills, the game’s coins. You will also see treasure boxes that contain even more equipment and money, and even magical spells. So aside from the usual melee weapons, you can also fight the baddies from afar using these spells. It’s up to you how you want to fight, the game will allow you to customize your character depending on your preference. Weapons and spells can be mapped to buttons of your own choosing, so it’s really up to you on how to make the game as convenient for you as possible.
Your character “level up” by getting better equipment than what you currently have (yes, similar to BotW). You also get spells and other skills that you can learn from treasure boxes or monster drops, so grinding is really the main task on this game. You can also buy equipment and consumable items at sellers near save points, so you better spend those hard-earned cash to prepare for your next fight.
So, enough of the good stuff. Let’s talk about the bad.
As good as this game looks, it also suffers from some very serious flaws. The biggest one are the very long loading times, especially during the starting up of the game. It could take up to 3 minutes just to load the game. That would be fine, if the game would no longer have long load times while at play. But no, loading times would just pop up even while you are just traversing the map, resulting to some major framerate drops. And if you are grinding, you better hope not to die, because reloading the game after you die also takes a long time. Even exiting dungeons also result to long load time that would probably make you regret even going in them at all. And to add more insult to injury, the game lack autosaving on the overworld, so if you die, you not only have to wait for a long time, you also lose a lot of progress. You can save on specified save points, fortunately, but only there. So if you are unsure if you will survive fighting more enemies after miraculously surviving a mini-dungeon, you better walk a bit back and save first, lest you lose all those sweet, sweet loots.
Overall, Eternal Edge is a game that looks really good on the outside, but has some very serious problems inside. I hope that the developers release a patch to address the long load times and framerate drops. Until then, I can’t really recommend this game, as the bad outweighs the good oftentimes in the game. But, if you still want to try it, not minding the flaws at all, then this game will surely be such a good one to play. If you are a fan of Zelda and other action adventure/RPG games, minus the long load times, this one is for you.
REPLAY VALUE: medium
PROS
- Excellent 8-bit retro pixelized 3D art style, character design, level design, and overall aesthetic
- The 8-bit chiptune soundtrack sounds quite good
- Has high variety of weapons, gears, and magical spell to customize your character with
- Big, open-world map that has a wide assortment of environment, characters to interact with, and monsters to battle with
- Local co-op play is supported
- Switch video clip recording is supported, surprisingly
CONS
- Very long loading times, especially when you first boot up the game (could take up to 3 minutes to load)
- Frequent loading while on the field
- Lots of framerate drops
- You can only save at specific save points and after specific scenarios, there is no autosaving while walking on the field
- Some very high levelled monsters can be seen even at the starting areas of the map, which could hinder progress and will force you to grind a lot
- The background music abruptly ends from time to time
RATING: 3/5 rough-around-the-edges
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