Date Released: 1 November 2016
Date Played: 9 January 2022
Introduction:
Earth's Dawn is a side-scrolling beat 'em up developed by OneorEight games and published by Rising Star Games. It was quietly released as a budget title to mediocre reviews from both critics and the general public and seemed to fade somewhat into obscurity soon thereafter. As far as I can tell, it's the only game that this company ever made or released. In essence, it's nothing more than a clone of Vanillaware's cult favorite game, Odin Sphere. It has been changed to a sci-fi setting instead of fantasy, but the similarities and inspirations are clear... and blatant. It can be difficult to tell if a game is highly inspired by another work or if it is just trying to rip-off its ideas and grab a quick dollar by piggy backing on someone else's efforts. In the case of Earth's Dawn, it's difficult to tell. It is so heavily similar that an uninformed viewer might think that this game was created by Vanillaware themselves. However, once you have personally grabbed the controller and played through this game, it will be abundantly clear that this is not the same team that made Odin Sphere and pales in comparison. Still, we can ask ourselves, is the game still good, does it have merit, is it worth playing? It is a clone of a tried and true classic, that's developed by a one and done developer. Maybe we have a hidden gem or future cult classic on our hands.
Story:
Earth's Dawn is set in the "far distant future" of 2020 where humanity has been invaded by hostile aliens known as the E.B.E.. These monstrosities have ravaged the land, population, and life as we know it to the point that it is near extinction. Despite humanity's best efforts, they find their tactics and weapons are basically useless against this horrible threat. In a last ditch effort, the remaining scientists have discovered how to fuse E.B.E. biomatter with metal to create a superpowered armor that can be fused to a soldier to turn them into an ultimate killing machine that has a change against the alien menace. These new super soldiers, eye-rollingly dubbed A.N.T.I., set off on their mission to push back the invaders and reclaim Earth for everyone who still remains. You'll work your way through New York, Wisconsin, Canada, and Alaska as you fight back the hordes of enemies along your way and hopefully win the day.
It's a trite premise that serves as nothing more than a vehicle for the gameplay and setting for the whole experience. This, of course, excludes the sheer idea of going to Wisconsin, a locale I can't recall ever even hearing mentioned in a video game before and wish was explored more in this scenario. Did the developers just draw a straight line from New York to Alaska and realize that it crosses through Wisconsin and decided to include it? I want to know more about this decision because it's one of the more interesting inclusions of this game. As for the rest of the narrative, you're given some minor exposition here and there, but it's very sparse and basic and never goes beyond acting as a combat briefing for the upcoming battle. As you level up and progress you are occasionally given some journal updates that fill in the lore and backstory, but most of this information will already be deduced by the player. If you're in the mood for some deep story telling, character development, and meaningful insight you're just not going to find it here.
Gameplay:
You begin the game by creating your character from a set templates that only serve as cosmetic skins. After that, you're thrown right into the fray to start hacking and slashing with your new avatar. Just like in Odin Sphere, gameplay takes place on a 2D plane. You can double jump, attack, slide, ground pound, shoot, and string together combos. You enter into segmented arenas and after clearing the enemies can move on to the next section as you slowly uncover the map and work towards your objective. There are a few tiny branching paths, but mostly every stage is extremely linear. As for these objectives, all of the story missions involve fighting your way through an area towards a boss that you will have to defeat. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of main story missions in the game. The rest of the time you'll be doing side content to upgrade your character, unlock new skills, and just pad out the game. In between story missions, you're taken to the menu of the game and given a timer until the next story mission will take place. During this time, you're supposed to tinker around with your character's skills, craft new armor from items you collect during gameplay, upgrade weapons, and take on the copious amount of side missions mentioned before. These side missions are essential not only because they are required to unlock new skills for your character, but because the game actively makes you do them to run down the clock between main story missions. Once the clock reaches zero, you're given one minute to finalize upgrading your character and then the game throws you into the next story mission. These can be somewhat challenging (especially the boss fights in the beginning) and you might fail several of them. Luckily, the game takes pity on you and kicks you back out to the menu and allows you to grind, complete more side missions, and do whatever you need to without fear of the countdown timer. It's nice of them to do this, but makes you realize that the timer itself is pointless and is just there to annoy you and artificially add tension.
As for these side missions, they make up the bulk of the game. Almost every skill and upgrade you can get in the game is earned by completing them. They are mostly the same, requiring you to traverse a section of the map you've already seen in the previous story mission and kill a number of enemies. You'll see the same areas again and again, fight the same handful of enemies over and over, and feel like you're in an eternal loop of grinding. Some of these missions you literally have to replay 4 times in order to unlock some of the skills you need. There are entire upgrade chains in the menu that will have 3 or 4 blips that say +3 ATK each and each blip will be unlocked by playing the same mission multiple times. It's a mindboggling bad design choice and you can tell the developers just didn't have enough content to make a whole game and had to recycle the same missions over and over. Add onto this, the enemies can be very spongey and take too long to dispatch. You'll spend several minutes just clearing one combat encounter of the same enemies you've seen a million times. It's very padded and anyone who has played this game is very aware of this and more than willing to let you know (if the internet is a good example). It almost has the feeling of an MMORPG where you're doing fetch quest after fetch quest while waiting for the next big event to happen. Not only that, you're graded at the end of the missions and certain skills and abilities are locked behind earning an S ranking on these. That can lead you to having to grind out these repetitive missions even more. Most of the levels feel exactly the same with the exclusion of the second area that introduces a half-baked and poorly implemented gravity mechanic that allows you to invert your orientation to the ceiling and walls during combat scenarios. It doesn't really add anything to the game other than scrambling your brain with the flipped controls and placing enemies (and the worst boss in the game) constantly out of your reach. Even if it was poorly done, the game could have benefitted from some more gameplay mechanics to break up the monotony. Still, that being said, I never really found these missions to get that boring as the game has a sort of relaxing mindlessness to it that can be enjoyable.
The combat is fluid enough, but does feel a little clunky quite often. Enemies never block, but they do tend to evade and will read your attacks and hop out of the way too often. This can get quite annoying as the enemies seem to be reading your moves and you just can't connect with them. Also, you're combos will often have a move in them that causes you to lunge forward or do an aerial dash that will cause your character to shoot too far away from the enemy you're focusing on and force you to have to move back into range. This usually isn't that much of a problem because of the good amount of enemies on the screen. But, when you're down to only one remaining enemy, it can feel like you're constantly having to reposition yourself as you chase them around the screen. Enemies will also have a lot of poise and rarely seem to get stunned by your attacks. This will often lead them to smacking you right when you're in the middle of attacking them in a combo or grabbing you and putting you into a lock. This leads you to be forced to constantly block or maniacally dash around the screen in hopes of avoiding their attacks. This is in contrast to your character which will often rag-doll, get stun-locked, or be frozen easily from enemy attacks. You'll be forced to pull out your best guerilla tactics and hit a couple of times and then dash out. Strike and move, strike and move. It can lead to some tense battles that give the sense of only doing a tiny amount of damage here and there while you're trying your hardest to survive. This can especially be true of some of the more difficult bosses. These can be tedious (several of them took a couple of 20+ minute attempts), but they can also be quite fun; it really just depends on your loadout and the boss design. Sometimes, you'll have a tanky boss while you're using fast and weak weapons; sometimes you'll have an agile boss that you can barely hit with your giant mace. It can be the luck of the draw on your first attempt. However, you're always given the opportunity to change your tactics on the next try. Of course, if you are like me and over level and grind out all of the skills, you can just mindlessly button mash your way to victory.
As you unlock skills, you're able to create loadouts for the different weapons and styles you chose to play. Skills and upgrades require an available free point in a loadout to equip them. These points can be earned by gathering crystals that are scattered around the stages and from defeating enemies. This does add a little bit more on the grindiness factor of the game, but it's never that overwhelming and mostly happens passively as you're playing the game. You're given a good selection of weapons to try out that really serve to change up the gameplay and you'll want to try multiple loadouts and character builds as you find a style that suits you. There are swords, guns, bows, longswords, and shoryukens to assist wiping out the E.B.E. threat and they are all welcome and viable additions. Of course there are a plethora of each of these different weapon types to upgrade, build, and try out. Selecting the correct one to build with your limited resources can really make or break an upcoming stage (I'm looking at you, bow that heals you when you reload). In addition to this, you can imbue the weapons with skills like fire, ice, electricity, vampire, etc. when crafting them. This can give you a real boost, and can pretty much remove all challenge to the game if you play your cards right. At other times, you'll find yourself shooting at a giant armored beast with a pea shooter for half an hour.
Presentation:
Earth's Dawn has a very striking and beautiful presentation... that looks exactly like a Vanillaware game. All of the backgrounds are stunning and presented in a flowy watercolor style with a lot of parallax scrolling to add dimension. The characters have a sort of paperdoll/marionette look that is ill proportioned and cartoony but charming. You can really tell that the game was a little too inspired by Odin Sphere. It's basically bordering on legal action and I'm shocked that they were able to get away with it. I'm actually curious to know if some of the artists working on this game previously worked for Vanillaware, but there's just not much information out there on OneorEight games. Whatever the case, you can tell that the art direction was a much higher priority that the gameplay during development because the bosses, characters, and enemies all have a really awesome art style that meshes perfectly with the picturesque backgrounds and settings. It is honestly the best part of the game and really does make for some impressive screen shots. Despite this, their best efforts are still not quite as good as Vanillaware's. Of course, who's would be?
The story is mostly presented in the classic budget focused mode of having still portraits appear on screen while the narrative is given in the form of text at the bottom of the screen. There is some Japanese voice acting as well as some motion effects added to the portraits to add some pizazz to the presentation, but it still boils down to looking at a picture of a person while you're being told about action going on somewhere else. This is a HUGE no-no when it comes to storytelling. SHOW ME what is happening, don't have someone tell me about it. You can tell that there were some serious budget issues with this game as all of these cutscenes involve just a handful of pictures that are used over and over again with some slight aftereffects added.
As for the score, it's pretty epic and well orchestrated. The style ranges from symphonic, to rock, and all the way to electronic based on where the action is taking place. It fits the game very well and serves to keep the energy pretty high, but is never memorable nor catchy. It is great background music that does the job, but could have elevated the game if it had been just a bit better.
Conclusion:
The critics weren't wrong when this game came out. It really is a mediocre experience and all of its best features and highlights were taken from the game it's trying to emulate. The combat, art style, art direction, music, story, characters, gameplay, and almost everything else is taken from Odin Sphere but not done nearly as well. In my 20 hours with the game, I was having a fun enough time but couldn't help but feel that I could be having more fun playing the game that THIS game is trying to copy. There is just way too little meaningful content to the main story that is severely over-padded with repetitive and banal side quests.
I guess the main takeaway from this game is that no matter how poorly executed your game is, if you copy from a good enough game it can carry you through. Just like a terrible band doing a cover of a Beatles' song, you recognize the quality and impact of the original but wish it was done better in this circumstance. I had planned on fully completing this game and unlocking all of the trophies, and I got pretty close. The only thing left to do after finishing the final boss was to complete the remainder of the side missions and unlock the remaining skills (also done by finishing the side missions). However, the game decided to introduce a bunch of post-game content after the credits rolled. I realized that I was going to have to do 50, count them, 50 side missions to unlock these two final trophies. There were actually only about 14 new missions, but the game wanted me to do each one 4 times each. Padded-out... even until the end...
Final Status: Beaten (almost 20 hours... with 17 hours being side missions)
Final Score: 6/10 (OK)
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