If, on one end of the spectrum, you have Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and the Persona franchise returning turn-based RPGs to critical and commercial acclaim once again, and on the other you have modernized nostalgia packaged as HD-2D RPGs, then Eternal Anima sits somewhere in the middle. It’s a game that finds its own niche in the current, revitalized RPG field, even if it can at times feel a bit too much like a greatest hits compilation for the genre.
An all-new Japanese RPG developed by a team of industry veterans and notable outsiders at Marvelous, Eternal Anima is thematically driven by the responsibility that comes with inheriting the world and then passing it on to the next generation. How do the actions of our past ripple into the present and future, and how do those past choices shape the world that exists today?
Eternal Anima‘s director, Katsuhisa Higuchi, was a programmer on a number of early Final Fantasy games, also worked on Chrono Trigger and more recently served as a director on Capcom’s first two Monster Hunter Stories games. Kazushige Nojima is another Square Enix veteran, having worked on the story for Final Fantasy VII and VIII as well as the Kingdom Hearts series. The game’s narrative, meanwhile, is based on a concept submitted by acclaimed author Keisuke Makino, who has contributed to both Persona 5 and Metaphor: ReFantazio.
The story follows Wade, a man with the ability to see the history of objects merely by touching them. He lives in the world of Urvis Ael, where the truth about the past has been lost, and attempting to uncover it is forbidden. Hunted as a dissident, he journeys into the past, where he begins to discover the truth about how the world became the way it is. Perhaps by changing the past and exploring the continent of Ambulis which, in his time, has been submerged underwater and lost to history, he can fix his present and change the future (according to the game’s developers, you will later explore other continents facing similar strife, named Wistregen, Himeshiro and Rotala).
At an hour-long showcase of the game shortly before Tokyo Game Show last month, we were given a chance to check out a demo. It started off by placing us into an early adventure for Wade and his still-small crew of comrades not long after they arrive on Ambulis roughly 200 years in the past. The area they enter is called the Somber Woods, and it’s a place befitting such a name: far from a luscious forest, it’s an environment that’s dying around you. The planet’s Anima—essentially its life force—is being drained due to human exploitation of natural resources, with those sworn to protect it resigned to prayer and a belief that simply willing the land to solve the issue will suffice. No need to act or make changes to save the climate, it’ll be fine!
Our characters from the future, however, know what will happen. The continent will not be saved, and the world will die, all due to their inaction. They’re here to change its course.
So far, so typical for RPGs of the 1990s in which the fate of the world is at stake, but it’s how the game evolves beyond these tropes and integrates this thematic concern into all aspects, including gameplay, that makes Eternal Anima stand out. With our characters aware of how the future will play out if nothing is done, the game makes the ingenious choice to integrate this foresight into battle. The result transforms combat into something more like a puzzle, as instead of merely strategizing the best move, you seek to alter the predetermined trajectory of a fight.
The game employs a “break” system similar to that seen in games like Octopath Traveler, with the twist being that you know what move an opponent is going to make before they do it thanks to Wade’s Future Sight abilities. Above your command menu is a progress bar where you can see when and what move every opponent is going to use next. With this knowledge in mind and an awareness of their weaknesses, explicitly targeting them will delay their next attack. Halt an enemy’s actions long enough that you push them off the progress bar and you can “break” them, opening them up for massive damage.
Knowing how your opponent will act could have easily ruined the strategic aspect of combat. Instead, this knowledge only intensifies each battle into something more akin to a finely tuned puzzle than a typical RPG fight. I’d often spent exponentially longer on each turn than I typically do, pondering how to optimize my team’s attacks in order to break enemies and prevent my team from taking damage. All your tactical considerations are enhanced by the game’s BP system: each turn, allies earn an amount of BP that can both enhance an attack’s potency and increase the expected pushback on the turn progress bar when exploiting an enemy weakness. Perhaps it’s worth taking a small amount of damage in one turn to ensure that, when a boss’ most dangerous attack is ready to strike, you have the BP to ensure a vital break that can prevent a team wipeout.
“Through Future Sight you can see when enemies will attack, what attacks they will use, who will take damage and how much,” explains Makoto Shioda, the game’s producer. “Players peer into the future before choosing their actions, so their actions can change that predicted future. For example, if you see that an enemy’s upcoming powerful attack will kill one of your party members, you can defeat that enemy first to make sure your party member never takes damage and therefore survive.”
In simple fights against random enemies in the field, it’s hardly necessary to think too deeply about these intricacies. Against bosses, however? It’s essential. Simply finding one weakness won’t win a battle, either, as the game prevents repeated exploitation of the same vulnerability to enforce variety in combat. The result is a system that’s easy to get accustomed to, but also appears fiendishly deep and difficult to master.
And that’s about all I can say about what to expect from the game. While we got glimpses of the broader overarching story, we were stripped of key context about how the past and present interact in the story, the identity of the game’s major antagonists, and the circumstances that led them onto their quest.
What we did get to see sometimes felt more like an homage to the legendary games the developers worked on in the past than an expression of the game’s unique identity. M.O.S., the robot sidekick of the team, feels almost like a carbon copy of Robo in Chrono Trigger. The village of La Boset near the Somber Woods is similarly derivative, though the concept of elders who don’t know what is best for their home, still believing that living alongside nature is the same as listening to and caring for it, is at least a pretty interesting approach to this trope. Issues with “parallels to the real world we live in” promise to be central to the game, according to Katsuhisa Higuchi, the game’s director.
Even if the game describes itself as a love letter to RPGs of the past, I’m curious to see how it can define itself beyond those historic references and establish itself as something more, especially with legacy serving as such a central idea to the game. As Higuchi concluded to us, “While we did not consider our real-world legacy when deciding to make it the game’s theme, I can say that we did consider it as development progressed and factored in our feelings towards Japanese RPGs. I did develop a strong sense that where we are now is a culmination of all that has been passed down prior to today.”