Sporadic thoughts incoming, bear with me.

Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space is a time travel JRPG like Chrono Trigger, with the story written by Masato Kato (Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears) and the main theme by Yasunori Mitsuda, who also worked on the previously listed games music, as well.


The story itself is reminiscent of that classic JRPG feel. The mayor of a small Truce-like village finds two children in the woods and raises them as his own grandchildren until that fateful day where our young protagonist has to go on a journey to find his sibling who gets kidnapped by a big bad because of her innate magical powers she doesn't know about. You know how it is.

This game is a large scale, single player RPG that appears to avoid all of the large pitfalls of free to play mobile games. Here are just some of the things I picked up on having played it for an hour or two and also doing a bit of research.

-There's no stamina/energy meter, so the time you spend playing isn't capped or behind a pay wall.
-Piggybacking off the last point, the game lets you play at your own pace. There's no timed events, PVP, or daily quests, so you don't feel guilty about not logging in every day.
-There does, however, seem to be a login bonus. The game currency is called Chronos, which is this game's version of lapis/crystals. You can use this to buy extra characters.
-There's partial voice acting. Due to the nature of mobile titles it's mostly reserved for battles and character introductions.
So here's the thing about the "gacha" feature of this game. It's not really necessary to buy characters. As a story driven RPG, you meet story related characters along the way, on top of getting free Chronos for doing things like beating monsters or moving through the story, so you can use that to unlock new side characters instead of buying them.

Much like Kingdom Hearts Unchained, it appears you can sink hours into this game and not have to pay a dime unless you want to buy side characters faster.

The references to Chrono Trigger are all over this thing. If it wasn't written and composed by the same people, you'd might think it was almost a bootleg. Fortunately, it's charming enough that it comes off as more of a love letter. The frog man in the header image is named Cyrus, wink wink.

This launch trailer will hopefully give you a general feel of the game, the side scrolling nature, and the playstyle.