This game is so charming and cute and funny. So my impressions after like a dozen hours or so: I would've thought it would be a huge hit with the resemblance to Mother/Secret of Mana/etc but we only have 7 pages in the OT? Meanwhile, the Tales of Arise OT has almost 100 pages and I honestly was falling asleep playing that game and gave up after 10 hours. I'm honestly surprised how little attention this game has received on here. The music and spritework are unarguably fantastic though! Solomon's theme is so strangely satisfying.
It's a shame too, since I really started getting invested in the mysteries near the end of chapter 2 and especially the end of New Dam City. Maybe I'll feel better about the overall plot once if I read/watch some deeper analysis on it, but on a surface level, I didn't feel like anything got explained or wrapped up all that well. it just left me scratching my head more than anything. Speaking of the story, for a game where you spent more time watching cutscenes/reading dialogue instead of actually playing the game, the finale didn't really do much for me in terms of payoff. I also get that Ester City was supposed to be stuck in some time loop or whatever, but did we really need to repeat the letter delivering quest like four times? That felt so unnecessary.
#Eastward playtime movie#
Chapter 6 was the most annoying of them all, as it was when my interest in the story was at its peak, only to get stopped dead in its tracks by the weird monkey movie making filler stuff. A lot of the game felt like pointless filler, specifically a huge chunk of chapter 3 and chapter 6. Well I finished the game in about 21 hours, but it honestly didn't feel like it needed to be that long of a game. For the later, lo-fi samples are used to tone down the shrill/sharp nature of chiptune instruments, make them blend more easily with other instruments (e.g piano, flute) and helped the soundtrack to deliver on its intended tone. There is a fair mix of tradition catchy/upbeat tracks like you would often hear in retro games and ambient tracks to match story beats or environmental settings.
I commented on audio before but for the sake of completion, I repeat it here: the soundtracks is heavily inspired by 8-bit chiptune with a proper treatment for dated aspects. To me Eastward world feels alive with lots of attention for details without being distracting noises. Its visual style takes lots of cues from Mother 3 but with proper amount of improvement in fidelity to accommodate for larger screens. The game also excels in both visual and audio aspects. It is however understandable to me since such an explanatory effort may backfire and open even more questions than what it would answer. how the miasma was formed (my guess is by the Mother since she did exude it when taking over Sam near the end of chapter 7, and it also serves nicely as a thematic contrast with Sam's bubble energy). whether Sam/Mother have always been two sides of a coin or Sam came into existence thanks to John), and how long the cycle of life by Mothers - death by Charon - formation by machines has lasted when the main adventure starts, how the human evolution project came into existence, Regarding the open questions, I wished that the game could have done more to explain: Its ending is less bittersweet than the latter, it doesn't explore philosophical/social commentary topics as much as the later and its theme (humanity under attack from strange/foreign entities) is also closer to the former. In comparison to the Mother series, I think the tone of Eastward is closer to Mother 2 than Mother 3. With an overarching plot hidden underneath urban legends and mysteries.