A lot of prominent mobile RPGs lean into gacha mechanics where your team might only be as good as your wallet size and luck. That was the case with Another Eden when it launched on mobile nearly a decade ago. While it’s one of the more lenient RPGs of that style (it doesn’t have stamina timers or anything; the game’s story is playable and enjoyable without spending a dime), it still was a mobile RPG in that style. The pedigree is notable, as the game features a story written by Masato Kato (of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross fame). So when Another Eden Begins was announced for Switch and Switch 2 earlier this year, the prospect of a Masato Kato RPG coming to consoles was intriguing. The reality of that is less so, though.

For better or worse, Another Eden Begins is nearly a straight adaptation of the first major story of the mobile game to a console experience. As far as I can tell, very little has changed. The side quest-heavy structure worked well on the go. While it’s been a while since I played the mobile version of Another Eden, I dipped in and out of it and would work my way through side quests in short bursts. That format becomes less appealing when you get deeper into a console RPG and you’re drowning in repetitive side quests. It makes me appreciate what Square Enix did with Octopath Traveler 0 (and seemingly doing with Final Fantasy Resonance) as those are more heavily changed adaptations of the mobile originals. Another Eden is closer to a copy/paste.

The story is fine, riffing on the Chrono-fueled machinations of Kato’s past work. You control Aldo who travels through time to fight a Beast King and save his sister Feinne. It doesn’t require a lot of squinting to see some shades of Chrono or Serge in Aldo, or Lavos or Lynx in the Beast King, or Schala or Kidd or Marle in Feinne. I’m typically someone who enjoys Kato’s style, but this felt far more like a pastiche than anything else.

Much like the story, the combat is fine. It’s a turn-based system that heavily leans into a strategic combo system. You eventually can have up to four party members who can each equip up to four different skills. Eventually you can pick and choose your crew and their loadouts to complement each other. The primary combo mechanic involves each character’s special ability, which is triggered by something specific happening in battle a few times. Aldo’s ability powers up exploiting enemy weaknesses. Others rely on types of damage dealt or when someone is healed. When those abilities are triggered, it sets up different attacks that escalate in damage. Setting up a good engine that sets up a constant cycle of combos is rewarding, but outside of some late-game bosses and the New Game+, it never feels like you need to exploit that system that much. I found a relatively simple pattern to follow and essentially did that for every boss in the game.

While Aldo and Feinne’s story is the main focus, your party does expand to include a wide variety of folks with different combat focuses and styles. In Chrono/Kato fashion, there is of course a frog. But with so much of the game featuring backtracking through side-scrolling towns and areas, it starts to drag on. Even the moments where you can run around a 3D world map doesn’t get all that interesting. The mobile history of this game starts to be a sizable debuff on what is a decent foundation of theme and combat. You might go between the past, present, and future, but the areas don’t separate each other that much to make it feel like you're going on that big of an adventure.

Another Eden Begins is aggressively fine. The turn-based combat features a good amount of variety, but the game’s light difficulty doesn’t make it something you really need to get that in the weeds with. The story isn’t that engrossing, but it’s not bad. I just feel like I’ve seen Masato Kato tell that story in more interesting ways in Chrono Cross. It’s cool that Another Eden will extend beyond my mobile phone, but it wasn’t necessarily something Switch players were missing out on if they avoided gacha RPGs.