55.1 hours played
Written 3 days ago
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.
