Welcome to Gacha Hell

Gacha, short for gachapon, is often viewed as an exploitative skinner box made specifically to spear whales and keep them in tow until they can no longer afford to play or break the line. That’s because it is. However lucrative it can be, general gaming news ignores it until a whale drops 5 figures and fails to get a waifu JPEG. Gacha Hell seeks to review gacha games based off gacha-specific criteria. If a game’s here, there’s something worth talking about.
DISCLAIMER: Hatman works for a mobile game developer. For obvious reasons, none of the games reviewed will be from that developer.

Part of the reason for my obsession with Squaresoft’s SNES and PSX era is the sheer amount of projects that were killed as a direct result of Sakaguchi’s ousting and Yoichi Wada’s takeover of the company following the absolute waste of money that was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It resulted in a lot of lesser-known talents leaving the company and striking out on their own, or in the case of one Ryuji Sasai, flipping the bird to game development and joining a Queen tribute band as a bassist. Among those who left were the Xenogears team and while we know where two of those writers went (hint: they make games with Xeno in the title), a third is missing.

Playability

Part of the reason it’s difficult to review gacha games is because so many aspects are time-gated while others are available for a limited time only. You want to talk about that sick crossover event in XYZ game? By the time the article comes out, the event’s done and you can’t re-play it until there’s a re-run. Another Eden does this differently. None of the crossovers are shelved. The first Persona 5 crossover is still available for everyone to play (as well as its update for Royal). Same with the Tales crossover. All you have to do is get “far enough” into the game to play them (Chapter 13). I have been informed that the Chrono Cross collaboration will be expiring sometime in 2026, but if the game is still alive by then, chances are it will be renewed.

In fact, even its non-crossover events are present in the game at all times, and sometimes gate things in the main story. IE: The episode “Two Knights and the Holy Sword” has to be completed in order to continue the story after Chapter 25. This can make the game extremely daunting to approach as there is an overwhelming amount of content available after Chapter 13, but ultimately it’s all up to the player to decide how much they really want to do (and which rewards to prioritize)

Gameplay wise, if you’ve played a JRPG, you know how to play Another Eden. It’s turn-based, select a basic attack or a skill, press the Attack button, and then the turn plays out. The complexity lies (at first, I won’t get into Zones, Songs and Another Zones here) more in the two reserves slots of your six-character party. Since the skills you’re most likely to use cost a lot of MP, you will run out and there are no items to bring that number back up. What the game offers as a solution is the reserve slots. Every turn, anyone in the reserve slots will restore a percentage of HP/MP, making rotation of characters for longer battle essential. To make it desirable, what they did was that on incoming, every character has an ability. Some will buff your party, some will debuff your enemies, some will do both, others will just outright attack when coming in. The Valor Chants add another layer of strategy to teambuilding which, if they weren’t there, would make the game a slog.

Gacha Mechanics and Monetization

The gacha mechanics function similarly to other games in the genre. You pull the lever, a character comes out. You can pull the lever 10 times in a row in order to ensure one of the pulls is of a given rarity or above. Nothing too fancy here. The game relies on the traditional mechanics of desirable JPGs and power creep to get people to pull, and it functions somewhat well, unless you like dudes because like a lot of other gachas, the game is light on desirable dudes. On a given banner, it tends to go by the following, simplified because the game lists it per character instead of per rarity.

Rarity	Odds on a 1-9 pull	Odds on 10th pull
* * *	36%	–
* * * +	40.3%	–
* * * *	14.67%	70.85%
* * * * +	2.9%	15.05%
* * * * *	3.23%	3.56%

The game, overall, is balanced for a person using a majority of 4* capped units can finish the first story so long as they take the time to grind, get level appropriat equipment and weapons, and upgrade their characters whenever possible. Main Story 1.5 also adheres to this, but starts introducing upgrades to main characters Aldo and Amy, with others following suit as side quests (whereas the ability boards are unlocked through the story for these two specifically). Main Story 2, however, will require that time was spent on either upgrading your characters as much as possible or that an intricate understanding of the battle system to mitigate damage as much as possible (or end fights as soon as possible) as they will simply not have enough HP to take a lot of hits.

Obviously, you can purchase the pulling currency, but a lot of it will be earned through the game’s exhaustive achievement system, rewarding the player for essentially doing, uh, everything and anything. Completed a story chapter? Here’s some stones. Beat up a new enemy? Here’s some stones. Put on the worst play ever for the Royal Theatre? Here’s some stones, you filthy animal. This certainly helps the player get started, but considering the game is balanced around 4* and while there is power creep, it isn’t exactly necessary, how else can they make their money?

This is where the subscription service and ads come in: Every day they log in, a player will receive 20 stones, with an additional 20 if they subject themselves to an ad. They can recieve an additional 10 if they go view another ad in the shop screen where you would buy the currency, with 5 additional ad possibilities by tapping the chest at the top left in the menu. Those ads will grant either of 5, 10 or 20 stones or a green/red key (those are for optional dungeons at the cost of 1-2 green keys or 1 red key per dungeon). Ad revenue has been on the upswing among mobile games and this one is certainly no exception. When they started implementing it, there was a backlash but once people figured that it was possible to get 20 more than they were getting per day just from the daily ads, that blunted the blow a little.

What’s interesting is the subscription service. Typically you’ll find these in mobile games in the form of either a battle pass (thanks Fortnite) or a simple purchase to get additional currency per day, so long as you keep logging in for the duration of the subscription. Another Eden does it similarly with some differences: By being subscribed to any tiers, a player can just bypass the ads and collect the rewards without having to view them. Every month, players have some trials that they can unlock and subscribing just gives you more of them (thus, more rewards) for you to do, and they are very easy to achieve as a regular player.

Naturally, the subscription also grants choice pulls because of course it does, this is a Gacha game. Lowest is a guaranteed 4* unit that be upgraded into a 5*, highest grants you a choice of character once every 3 months (and the first month after you complete the trial period) and an paid-currency only 10-pull which typically has better rates than regular banners.

If you’re wondering why in the hell anyone would do this? That’s Gacha for you. You play an enjoyable game, and then their goal is to convert you into a paying customer. Even if you just pay once and then never think about it again. Subscriptions are even worse on the exploitation format as some will forget about removing the subscription before they’re done. Speaking of which, you should probably check the status of your Netflix and Humble Bundle subscriptions.

My point is that despite the predatory monetization practices inherent to the genre, there’s a good game underneath. Otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it. I’d just continue not posting.

Presentation

I made a whole deal about the presentation at the beginning but more specifically I pointed out the Director being Masato Kato and that the titular theme was done by Yasunori Mitsuda, both Chrono veterans. If I stopped there, it would be technically true but also dismissive of WFS’ own in-house writers and designers who have been writing interesting stories, creating compelling characters (despite some of them being a bit too tropey for my tastes, but that is to be expected in Gacha) and narratives involving these characters. They use the culture clash of timelines pretty well, with Aldo being seen as some sort of medieval cosplayer in the Future, and being viewed as dressing like a weirdo in Antiquity. That’s surface level, but this is an element that they never forget. Aldo does start to understand the things they can do in the Future, but not necessarily how to do them, which doesn’t help when you have two “Present” era characters having to ask a computer database about something.

Graphically, the paperdoll aspect can be grating for others expecting the production values that MiHoYo has been putting in its offerings such as Honkai Impact 3, which you may think is a dated reference, but it is the closest in timeline as to when Another Eden released. To me, it’s another callback to the simpler RPGs of the ’90s, where you did what you could with limited resources. Sure, their resources aren’t anywhere near as limited, like the soundtrack will constantly remind you with its constant bangers upon bangers, but it absolutely is a stylistic choice over a practical one, and one I can respect.

If you’re lucky, your favorite either lands in the main party or is featured in either of the Episodes, Ensembles or Mythos (essentially, lengthy side quests) and that’s when you get all of the juicy lore and where your favorite likely develops into even more of your favorite. While I’ve often shared some of the worst aspects of those on the TAY Discord (namely, the Sword mythos since it deals with Antiquity’s main religion, and as you can expect from a game directed by a guy who collaborated on Xenogears, the religion is certainly not on the level), it’s still an enjoyable story that sheds light on the background of several characters at once and introduces new ones.

That doesn’t mean the writing is perfect – Again, the aforementioned reliance on certain tropes such as a protagonist who’s oblivious to the romantic advances of the entire woman cast (in his defense, there is… sort of a reason why that would be but it is spoilers for, I believe, Chapter 21 or 23) as well as other tropes that feel more like a design by committee requirement than anything interesting. I’m looking at the number of cutesy children magicians here and shaking my head. The localization is typically great bar the pressure they have to keep up with Japan, which had a 2 year head start, as far as content is concerned so a lot of typos abound. There absolutely are some questionable choices in terms of localization, such as Miyu’s battle cry, but all in all it’s usually handled well and they often revisit text when they can.

And the music. It’s out of this world. I’ve brought it up before and well, Studio Procyon and their own in-house musicians have been offering up banger after banger for this game. There’s currently 4 different soundtracks for this title, and it doesn’t even have all the music! That is a lot of music! I’d dare say it rivals Masayoshi Soken’s team’s work on Final Fantasy XIV. My personal favorites tend to be the boss battles, but even the atmospheric themes for various locales are interesting in their own way. Except for Zami, why did they go for lyrics there? It clashes with everything else.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the fact that there’s barely any FOMO makes this an easy recommend for a introductionary mobile game. Event-based games are great for monetization but often run into the problem where if you’re a fan of a specific character that isn’t popular, you don’t get served for quite some time. Now, the recommendation naturally comes with the caveat that this is a gacha game. If you have gambling issues, or impulsive purchasing issues, please do yourself a favor and ignore everything I wrote that praised the game. While the banners themselves tend to not be the be-all end-all, it’s still a skinner box at the end of the day.

Outside of that, the game’s charming, having to move around in the world makes it feel more like a console game than a mobile game which helps tremendously with the game feel, the music is high quality, the main story and episodes are for the most part a good time despite the grinding, with some notable exceptions (Shadow Witch and Time Mine, I’m looking at you), there’s a bunch of side activities, etc.

It’s an easy title to get lost in for a phone game, but I don’t regret doing so.