Hiro Mashima gained some success as a manga artist with Rave Master/Groove Adventure Rave, but he really hit it big with Fairy Tail. That manga was so successful that it ran for around 11 years and spawned two spin-offs, one of which has been ongoing since 2018. Edens Zero was another manga of his that started around the same time as Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest before ending in 2024. Like many manga, it has an anime series that is ongoing, and it also has one video game made by Mashima, and two other RPGs are published and developed by Konami. The mobile RPG is gone, but we are finally seeing the console and PC RPG release.

For those who are already familiar with the manga, the game covers the story from the beginning all the way up to the end of the Belial Gore story arc. For everyone else, the story starts with a young Shiki Granbell, the lone human living in an abandoned amusement park filled with robots. He was told by his grandfather to make friends with people outside of the kingdom. Shiki's wish is granted when an adventurer named Rebecca Bluegarden and her blue cat Happy land on the planet. After a robot rebellion caused them to flee, the trio travel to the planet of Blue Garden, so Shiki can be a fully licensed adventurer. With his new job status, Shiki decides that the group's first adventure would be to find Mother, the celestial being who is possibly located somewhere outside of the Sakura Cosmos.

The first sin that Edens Zero commits is making newcomers uninterested in the plot. For some reason, the game opens with a quick rundown of the story from the beginning to the battle against Elsie Crimson aboard the Skull Fairy. You take control of the game, but after the fight, the game proceeds to show another medley of cut scenes that fast-forward through the story to the Belial Gore arc. When the game gives you control again, you restart at the introduction and finally play everything you witnessed in the cut scenes. Why the game shows you everything and then asks you to play through exactly what you just watched is a mystery, and it is one of the more off-putting ways to introduce a game to series newcomers.

Then again, your interest in the story will depend on whether you're tired of the tropes that the story uses: a naive main character who somehow has a power that's key to saving the world, a plucky heroine with a cute companion who has hidden powers of his own, the slow formation of a crew, and a goal that seems impossible yet only this group of people want to see it through. It's all familiar, and it isn't made any more distinct by the fact that the adventurers guild is nothing more than content creators and influencers constantly making videos for the universe's YouTube equivalent. You need to have a very open mind to buy into the story — at least until the middle of the manga, where everything opens up into more interesting but convoluted territory.

The game aims for an action RPG loop that feels quite different from most other titles in the space. The main storyline quests always start with you aboard your ship, selecting a mission and then selecting which members of your crew will be in your party before embarking on your mission. From there, you'll get to explore the level a bit before having to get into a fight. All the while, the game will pepper the level with plenty of cut scenes to keep the story moving along.

When it comes to the non-combat exploration portions, the game feels like Final Fantasy XIII. You can do some light exploration, but the game rarely lets you deviate too far from the intended path. Many areas that look traversable are blocked out by a force field, so you're always going to be forced to follow the route to the next important spot despite the illusion that you're in a very expansive area. The result is something extremely linear in nature, the antithesis of the more freeform nature that some players expect from an RPG.

The somewhat confined pathways of the world also highlight an issue: The enemy encounter system doesn't work as intended. The enemies you encounter in the overworld are visible, and the expectation is that they need to run into you or vice versa for a fight to begin. However, that is never the case, as enemies can look in your direction, be nowhere close to you, and still have a fight commence. You essentially have a random encounter system, but it appears to be a different system, and that  confuses players.

The combat system differs from other action RPGs in that it mimics the type of fighting seen in a Musou game. You'll get into a fight with a bunch of people in a given area, and you can essentially button-mash your way through the skirmish. You have several attack buttons for different move types, including ones that are only usable when a special meter is filled. One major wrinkle is that you can switch to any party member at any time, and not only does this give you the advantage of having different health meters, but you also have different attacks for each given hero. While Shiki might prefer hand-to-hand combat, for example, Professor Weisz can summon turrets to fight for him. That aspect alone makes each fight exciting, since you can throw in a ton of variety to how you fight without calling upon a menu.

The fighting is simple to execute, but unlike Koei Tecmo's long-running series, the combat doesn't feel so satisfying to perform. Part of the problem lies with the camera, which is too close to your player. Perform a lock-on, and the camera will move around to the point where you can't get a focus on who you're attacking, especially if you do this when you're near other walls. Other times, the camera aims at the wrong place when you change a viewpoint. This is especially noticeable when you're using Rebecca's ability to transform Happy into an assault rifle. You'll watch the cut scene play out and then see yourself aiming at empty space rather than at a group of foes. The other part of the problem is that almost all of the enemies you face are hit sponges. It feels like normal enemies take on less damage than expected no matter which move you use, and bosses are far worse at this issue. This is especially noticeable when you see that the screen isn't as populated with enemies when compared to a standard Musou title, so the feeling of button-mashing power you get from those games is dampened. You'll face much fewer simultaneous enemies that are willing to stand around to get smacked.

When you're not fighting or walking around, you're looking at cut scenes, and this is where the complaints about the game's story come into focus. The pacing for each of the scenes is off, and that's because most of the scenes seem to skip over some important bits. For example, the opening scene where Rebecca meets Shinki for the first time has her angrily punching him for scaring her, but the next scene shows the duo sitting at the same table rather calmly as if nothing happened. Compared to other anime-based games, the scenes try to go through the big story beats quickly. The moments don't get a chance to breathe, so there's any impact felt. The scenes are saved by the characters; their different personalities can be endearing, but that's not enough to erase the fact that the story isn't told very well.

You aren't always stuck with the story portion of the game. At any point when aboard your ship, you can opt to take on the open-world portion of the game. This essentially acts as your hub for all side-quests, since all of them come from your guild. The quests are standard, as you'll do things like making deliveries, taking photos, or eliminating enemies in specific areas. Yet the hook is that you get to explore all of Blue Garden while doing so, so you have a chance to do some exploring without being heavily guided down specific pathways to progress.

The idea behind having an open-world section is excellent. Being able to see parts of the planet that you couldn't in the anime and manga is a thrill for series fans, and that feeling is amplified when you realize that you can take vehicles or fly around instead of running around on foot. It also helps that some of the missions do a good job of fostering the theme of friendship that drives forward Edens Zero.

There are two major things that drag down the open-world experience. The first is that the world feels dead. The world is vast, but there are long stretches where you won't see a creature in sight. The city is perhaps the one place where you'll see people, but it also feels sparsely populated, and very few characters ever react to your antics. Compared to other open-world games, this is empty set dressing, especially when you discover that some places that look interesting can't be accessed.

The second issue is that the mode is always limited. While you have a decent number of missions at your disposal, your actual character progress is gated by your progress in the story-based missions. You can have the points ready for skill tree upgrades, but you can't spend those points on anything until you make more progress in the story missions. There aren't many branches in the skill trees that seem explicitly tied to something uncovered in story mode, making their blockage feel like unnecessary padding.

Aside from the story-based quests and open-world setting of Blue Garden, there's not much else to do in the game. You can play one of two minigames aboard your ship, but they share the same rhythm game-like mechanics, and the only real difference between them is context. You can chat it up with the various crew members, and you can do some things (like cook) to boost some stats. One of the things that will occupy some fans is the fact that you can outfit any character with any cosmetic item. Those with an eye for design will have their time eaten up by this, since there are around 700 items to combine for the desired look.

The audio in Edens Zero is mostly good in places. The voices are the real highlight, as the original Japanese voice cast is used throughout. Unlike other anime-based games, every scene is fully voiced. The music is also good, but the tunes have a habit of playing all of the time, dampening the impact of then moments where the lack of a soundtrack would amplify the scenes. Meanwhile, the effects are the only weak part; they're fine but sometimes lack the expected punch from gunfire and high-impact hits.

Graphically, the game is fine. The character models look decent, but there are plenty of models that get reused in fights multiple times — even in the same skirmish. The environments look decent, if you can stand the flatter colors and issues like item and texture pop-in. The frame rate is solid, but the major complaint is that the graphics look no more advanced than an early PS3 game. For example, shadowing looks very light, and the particle effects are pretty sparse. Again, it's a decent-looking game, but it's not considered impressive, since this is a new game instead of a remastering of an old game from a few console generations ago.

If you're planning to play this game on the Steam Deck, it falls in line with what players have come to expect from most games released in the past year. The options screen doesn't inform you of the screen resolution, but the presence of black bars at the top and bottom immediately informs you that the game is set to a max resolution of 1280x720. The game settings are saved in the cloud, so the game doesn't tailor its settings to the device. When setting the game to the low preset, the game runs at roughly 60fps in the story missions but drops to 30fps and a few frames below in the open-world section. No matter which mode you play in, you're looking at a battery life of less than two hours on a full charge on the LCD version of the Steam Deck.

Edens Zero really is a game made for existing fans, specifically those who aren't too picky about their gameplay. The combat is serviceable enough to provide button-mashers with some fun, and the open world gives the game some legs once the story section has been completed. For those new to the series, the rushed and initially convoluted storytelling provides a terrible first impression, while the gameplay's stunted nature makes you wonder why the game was made into an action-RPG title instead of a more straightforward action title. Overall, the game can be decent, but it fares poorly when compared to many other anime-based games on the market.

Score: 5.5/10