Echo Generation: Midnight Edition is a turn-based RPG developed and published by Cococucumber. The development team is also known for producing Ravenlok, a voxel adventure game. The title is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch from 19 June 2024, and was previously released on Xbox. We played the Steam version.
In Echo Generation, we play as a young teenager who embarks on an unusual adventure during the summer holidays. With the help of his sister and some pets who join his fight, the hero has to unveil the mysterious events that are taking place in Maple Town.
In fact, a spaceship crashes in the cornfields, some animals mutate and animatronic robots come to life while we are busy organising the shooting of our alien film with our friends.
This is the beginning of an adventure that will involve our friends in interspatial chases and strange secret projects.
Echo Generation: Midnight Edition, An Intense Story
Echo Generation: Midnight Edition is a turn-based RPG with voxel graphics inspired by 80s and 90s pop culture. The leveling system is quite simple and is based solely on collecting experience points gained by fighting. At each new level, we can choose to increase our health, our strength or the number of action points we have available.
Each character has unique abilities that are gained through comics, which we acquire in various ways around Maple Town. These abilities can be obtained by purchasing them, by completing side quests, or by defeating certain types of enemies.
Skills are not freely available. New skills are unlocked for a particular character by collecting comics. Each unlocked skill has a cost in action points during combat.
In combat, we can choose to make a basic attack or use one of the skills, which are generally more powerful attacks with status effects, or allow us to gain combat bonuses. Each attack requires the use of a Quick Time Event, which, if not performed correctly, will reduce the damage dealt. The same thing happens when we are attacked by enemies; each attack will show us a QTE that we must perform, allowing us to reduce the damage to a minimum.
One advantage of the QTEs used is that they are different for each attack, which prevents the gameplay from becoming monotonous and repetitive. On the other hand, some QTEs are very difficult to perform correctly.
Echo Generation: Midnight Edition also has a minimal puzzle component, where you often have to search for an object and use it to get something you need to overcome an obstacle.
The atmosphere of the title is very relaxing, although some of the environments are designed to induce feelings of suspense. The voxel graphics are well done and there are different environments. This helps to avoid monotony in a game that often requires some backtracking to progress. To avoid wasting a lot of time moving from one area to another, there are teleporters, which fortunately have been masterfully integrated into the setting.
Back to Home!
Echo Generation: Midnight Edition has a well-balanced difficulty and does not require too much grinding to progress through the story. There are a lot of battles, which fortunately never become too boring or repetitive thanks to the variety of skills available.
There are several quests and side quests that often require some backtracking. The quests are collected in the journal according to a logic that we could not understand. It’s not clear which quests are main and which are side quests, or if they’re linked. This makes for a bit of a mess when trying to follow a series of quests, and we often found ourselves wandering around. The mess of quests makes it difficult to understand the overall plot.
Despite the confusion caused by the quest diary, by the end of the game you manage to understand the plot in its entirety. However, there are a few subplots that are not fully explained at the end of the title, leaving us with a sense of incompleteness.
The game has good controller support and is well optimised.
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