LogFAQs > #966091435

#39: One Step From Eden

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/7/AAA-H0AADYWN.jpg

One Step From Eden is Mega Man Battle Network, but as a roguelite deckbuilder akin to Slay the Spire. Yeah, that's pretty much guaranteed to be a winner. I bought this one right away and I don't regret it, even if I do have a few issues with the way this game plays. Yeah, I'm just getting right into the game here, no rambling intro paragraph about some unrelated thing.

Mega Man Battle Network, for the uninitiated - if there's somehow uninitiated out there, who the hell are you - is a spinoff Mega Man RPG series for the GBA. In it, you move Mega Man around on a 3x3 grid against a 3x3 grid of enemies, and you have a 30-card deck of 'battlechips' that you randomly draw from, which give you a hand of attacks and abilities to use in the fight. It's one of the most elegant combat systems I think anyone's ever made, although that's really a writeup for a different list than this one (I'll get to it someday). While MMBN already polished its own system pretty much perfectly by the third game, there was always plenty of room for someone to come in and do their own twist on it. Hence, One Step From Eden's MMBN roguelike.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/8/AAA-H0AADYWO.jpg

There are some differences here; it's a 4x4 grid instead of a 3x3, and instead of having a 30-card deck of battlechips that you can't reshuffle, instead you start with a small deck of 4 and build it up, and you can reshuffle the moment you run out, though it takes a few seconds to get them all back. There are different characters with different starting abilities and decks, and you take them through a flowchart of levels very much like Spire's, fighting bosses and collecting items and such.

On paper, and mostly in practice, the game is really good. All of the characters are fun and different to play, and the variety in both chips and items is excellent. Bosses are well designed and have cool attack patterns. The presentation is sleek and stylish, with the visuals and music both on point; I'm kind of a sucker for this millennial cyber-anime vibe it's got going on, although I do think most of the character designs come off like edgelord deviantart OCs.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/5/9/AAA-H0AADYWP.jpg

I do think there are a couple of problems; mainly that there's a readability problem with this entire game where there's a lot of stuff flying around and it's really hard to keep track of the action at times, and most of the basic enemies are really hard to remember so it's not easy to internalize what they actually do. Also, this game moves faster than MMBN, so a lot of the times it feels like instead of lining up a chip to get the best shot in, the best thing to do is just spam every chip you have on hand and hope for the best, and just reshuffle if you have to. It can sometimes feel hard to build up the right synergies in your deck, at least for me, and I end up having a lot of random garbage that doesn't go well together - the strength of MMBN is that you can carefully plan your deck to synergize well, but here you're just kind of stuck with whatever you end up with and you have to make it work. There's some mechanics I don't intuitively understand well - I still can't really tell you off the top of my head what 'flow' does and how it works.

For the most part, though, even just resigning yourself to mashing attacks and hoping it works out is still a viable strategy, just because the game plays really well. It moves too fast and I don't feel like I've mastered it at all, and I'm not sure that I ever will, but I'm really glad that a game like this exists. They should combine all my favorite games with roguelikes, really. It's a free ride onto my favorite games list.

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