A new RPG from Final Fantasy, Persona Vets borrows from the past to ask how we can save the future

Eternal Anima finds surprising strategic depth, allowing you to predict your opponent's next move

If on one end of the spectrum you have Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and the Persona franchise bringing turn-based RPGs back to critical and commercial acclaim, and on the other, modernized nostalgia packaged as HD-2D RPGs, then Eternal Anima falls somewhere in the middle. It's a game that finds its place in the current and revived RPG scene, even if it sometimes feels like a collection of the genre's greatest hits.

A brand new Japanese RPG developed by a team of industry veterans and prominent outsiders at Marvelous, Eternal Anima is thematically driven by the responsibility that comes with inheriting a world and then passing it on to the next generation. How do our past actions ripple into the present and future, and how do those past choices shape the world today?

Eternal Anima director Katsuhisa Higuchi was a programmer on a number of early Final Fantasy games, also worked on Chrono Trigger, and most recently served as director on the first two Capcom Monster Hunter Stories games. Kazushige Nojima is another Square Enix veteran who worked on Final Fantasy VII and VIII as well as the Kingdom Hearts series. Meanwhile, the game's narrative is based on a concept by acclaimed writer Keisuke Makino, who contributed to both Persona 5 and Metaphor: ReFantazio.

The story follows Wade, a man who can see the history of objects simply by touching them. He lives in the world of Urvis Ael, where the truth about the past is lost and attempts to discover it are forbidden. Hunted as a contrarian, he travels back in time, where he begins to discover the truth about how the world came to be the way it is. Perhaps he can mend his present and change the future by changing the past and exploring the continent of Ambolis, which in his time was submerged underwater and lost to history (according to the game's creators, you'll later discover other continents that face similar conflicts, namely Wistregen, Himeshiro, and Rotala).

We were given a chance to check out a demo at an hour-long demo of the game shortly before the Tokyo Game Show last month. It begins by taking us on an early adventure for Wade and his still small crew of buddies, shortly after they arrive on Ambulis some 200 years in the past. The area they enter is called the Grim Forest, and it's a place befitting the name: far from a pleasant forest, the environment is dying all around you. The planet's anima—essentially its life force—is being depleted by human exploitation of natural resources, with those sworn to protect it praying and believing that Earth's will alone is enough to solve the problem. No need to act or make changes to save the climate, that's good!

However, our characters in the future know what will happen. This continent will not be saved and the world will die, all because of their inaction. They are here to change its course.

So far, it's been pretty typical of 1990s RPGs where the fate of the world is at stake, but how the game evolves beyond these themes and integrates this thematic concern into every aspect, including the gameplay, is what makes Eternal Anima stand out. With our characters knowing how the future will play out if nothing is done, the game makes a smart choice to integrate this foresight into combat. The outcome of the fight turns it into something of a puzzle, as you're looking to change the predetermined course of a fight instead of simply strategizing the best move.

The game uses a "brick" system similar to that seen in games like Octopath Traveler, with the twist that thanks to Wade's Future Sight abilities, you know what move your opponent is going to make before they do. Above your command menu is a progress bar where you can see when and what move each opponent is going to use next. With this knowledge and awareness of their weaknesses, targeting them outright will delay their next attack. Stop the enemy's actions long enough to knock them off the progress bar and be able to "break" them, opening them up for massive damage.

Knowing how your opponent will act can easily ruin the strategic aspect of the fight. Instead, this knowledge only escalates each battle into something more like a detailed puzzle than a typical RPG fight. I often spent exponentially more than usual per turn, wondering how I could optimize my team's attacks in order to break down enemies and prevent my team from taking damage. All your tactical considerations are enhanced by the game's BP system: each turn, allies gain some BP that can both increase attack power and increase the expected pushback in the turn's progress bar when exploiting an enemy's weakness. It might be worth taking a small amount of damage in one turn to ensure that when a boss's most dangerous attack is ready to strike, you have the BP to ensure a critical hit that can prevent the team from being wiped out.

“Through Future Sight you can see when enemies will attack, what attacks they will use, who will take damage and how much it will be,” explains game developer Makoto Shioda. "Players look into the future before choosing their actions, so their actions can change the predicted future. For example, if you see an enemy's upcoming powerful attack kill one of your party members, you can defeat that enemy first to ensure that your party member never gets hurt and therefore survives."

In simple battles with random enemies on the field, you hardly need to think too deeply about these complexities. However, against the bosses? It is necessary. Simply finding a weak point won't win the war, as the game prevents you from repeatedly exploiting the same vulnerability to apply variation to the battle. The result is a system that is easy to get used to, but feels very deep and difficult.

And that's what I can say about what to expect from the game.While we were given glimpses of the larger story, we were deprived of key context about how the past and present interact in the story, the identity of the game's main antagonists, and the circumstances that lead them to their quest.

What we've seen at times looks more like an homage to legendary games that developers have worked on in the past than an expression of the game's unique identity. M.O.S., the team's robot sidekick, looks almost like a carbon copy of Robo in Chrono Trigger. The village of La Bosette near the Sambre Forest is similarly derived, although the concept of elders who do not know what is best for their home, still believing that living with nature is listening to it and caring for it, is at least a very interesting approach to the metaphor. According to game director Katsuhisa Higuchi, issues of "parallel to the real world we live in" promise to be in the main game.

Even though 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 historical references and establish itself as something more, especially since legacy serves as a central idea in the game. As Higuchi concluded for us, "While we didn't consider our real-world heritage when deciding to make it the theme of the game, I can say that we did take it into account as development progressed and took into account our feelings towards Japanese RPGs. I got a strong sense that where we are now is the culmination of everything that has come before today."

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