One Step From Eden – A Degenerate Battle Network-like | Review

One Step From Eden – A Degenerate Battle Network-like | Review

[MUSIC] When I saw One Step from Eden in a discovery queue years ago, I was immediately interested. An endless Mega Man battle network. What I got instead was something very far removed from what made Mega Man battle network great. It was honestly so jarring that I had to put it down.

Since then, I’ve approached One Step from Eden a few times. I thought that would be a break and a fresh mind would make the game grow on me. Maybe it was just really hard and I needed to practice. I can’t say the time away really did anything to improve my opinion.

I’d like to convince you that One Step from Eden is not as good as its Steam reviews make it out to be. But in order to talk about One Step from Eden, we need to talk a bit about its predecessor. The Mega Man battle network series. [MUSIC]

Maybe you haven’t heard the buzz about the Battle Network Collection’s recent release, or you did hear about it, but you don’t understand what the big deal is. Mega Man Battle Network is a series of six games with a few spin-offs. that are, to use buzzwords, real-time turn-based, grid-based, card-battling RPGs.

I know that sounds like a lot, but I promise it’s actually really simple. The games were made for like 10-year-olds, so it can’t be that complicated, right? The first Battle Network game is kind of rough, but still very fun. You merely need to play the opening

Segment of the first Battle Network game and then play literally any of the other ones to see what I mean. Each game… for the most part, positively iterate on the series. Until recently, the second best-selling Mega Man game of all time was Battle Network 4.

Though the less I say about Battle Network 4, the better. There are only six games, and considering that the series started on the Game Boy Advance in 2001, you might have guessed that they stopped making them at some point. There are a lot of reasons why,

But it boils down to a few things. Waning interest in the Battle Network series? And this new but obscure handheld by Nintendo called the DS that I’m sure nobody bought. The Battle Network series was shelved and in its place Capcom started making the Star Force series instead.

Star Force has a lot of what made Battle Network great. The RPG segments between the battles were still there, and it has some really nice looking sprites and 3D models. The 3D models are low poly, and I think they look really good. But Star Force’s simpler battle system

Was not enough like the thing it was made to replace. Star Force did not sell as well as Battle Network. I think there’s a lot of merit in the Star Force games, but it’s just not the same. And I think the people who like the Battle

Network games more would agree with me on that point. So, since the drought of new Battle Network games extends into the current year, at least of the making of this video, many others have tried their hand at making something just as good, if not better.

Something to scratch the itch, something to fill the hole that Battle Network 6 left in our souls. There is not a single derivative of Mega Man Battle Network that doesn’t change something. And that brings us to one step from Eden. I can only imagine what it was like for Thomas Moon Kang

When he started development on One Step from Eden. He had a lot of wild ideas if the footage I got from his twitter is any indication. The game’s early days show the battle grid being much larger than battle networks. At some point he had enough of a game

To try to get funding from Kickstarter. His Kickstarter launched on January 3rd, 2019, and he exceeded his goal shortly after. By how much? By 460%. I’d say that’s pretty good. The game eventually released on Steam on March 26th, 2020. A month later, I saw it in one of those Steam exploration

Queues and I just had to try it. As this is somewhat a matter of comparison, I want to go over the very basics of how MegaMan Battle Network’s combat works. If you get confused, don’t worry! Every single game in the Battle Network series forces you to complete the tutorial at the start. Every.

Single. One. You can’t skip it. Capcom. Come on! This is the sixth game! I already know how to play! Why can’t I skip it?! Here’s a rough idea of how the combat works. The player plays as Mega Man. You can move on a 3×3 grid and only on

The tiles of your color, in this case, red. Mega Man can fire his Mega Buster to do very small amounts of damage. You can augment the Buster in various ways, but typically it does one point of damage. You can charge your Mega Buster to multiply its base damage by 10.

To do significantly more damage than your Buster, you can use Battle Chips. Battle Chips are one time used cards that have some effect, usually damage. You can have a total of 30 Chips. No more, no less. There is some restriction on Chips that you can put in your folder.

You can select battle chips to attack every turn, and after some time, you can select more. There are some restrictions on how many and what chips you can select in battle. You usually can’t select them all at once. Battle chips can affect the battlefield grid in various ways. Battle chips have elements and

Enemies have elemental weaknesses. When you exhaust all the chips in your deck, you can only do damage with your Buster. The battle ends when you defeat the enemy. or you die. There is no Force tutorial. Finally. You can play as more than one character. There is no main character, so to speak.

The tile colors are swapped for seemingly no reason. You draft cards instead of building your deck ahead of time. Only two cards are usable at once. There is no card screen where you select your cards. Everything is done in real time. Cards endlessly push from your deck into your hand

Until you need to shuffle. There are no elemental weaknesses for enemies. There is no hero customization outside of the artifacts you get. You draft artifacts like you draft cards. When you beat enough encounters, your level increases and you get to choose between three artifacts.

You can also get an artifact from a chest or another event. There are no role-playing RPG elements. There are no towns, no NPCs to talk to. One step from Eden is purely battle focused. The grid size has been increased from 3×3 to 4×4. We’re gonna talk about this later.

One Step from Eden is roguelike, and as such, variance plays a huge part in your decision making. One Step from Eden is bad. [buzzer] Did I say that? Well, there are some things to like about One Step from Eden, but the changes aren’t necessarily improvements.

I’d go as far to say that all the mechanics work against you in ways you wouldn’t expect. And, like the tile colors, a lot of these changes seem arbitrary. I would definitely call this game “deviant,” but I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll talk about the graphics as they pertain to gameplay later. I do think that they’ve improved a lot from the originals. The graphics in this game didn’t look super great at launch, but I do have to say there has been a huge improvement in the Hero sprites in

Particular, except the shopkeeper for some reason. I don’t like that there are no outlines on the sprites, but that’s more of a me problem and not a problem in and of itself. Well, at least it’s not a problem in terms of the art style.

I’m just not a fan of the scratchy look enemy sprites have. I prefer sprite art to be in a style more similar to Owlboy or Jamestown Plus, and not something like Hyper Light Drifter, to name some modern games that didn’t come out on the SNES. [SOUND EFFECTS] [SOUND EFFECTS] [SOUND EFFECTS] Metal Slug.

I always do this thing where I compare a game’s sprite art to Metal Slug, because I don’t think Metal Slug has ever been surpassed. And I mean in a released game, not an art project. If your game looks as good or better than Metal Slug, you’re a legend.

And before you ask, no, this game doesn’t look as good as Metal Slug. Nothing ever will. But the new hero sprites do at least look 5-7ths as good, which is still very impressive. And good enough for me, this is what happens when you hire a competent artist.

Consider that all the characters used to have these weird noodle-y gumby limbs, and I think you can see what I mean. Are these things even human? They look like they’re gonna jump into a book any second now. Anyway. I think the Gunner and Hazel had the most improvement given

What they looked like before. The enemies look the same as far as I can tell, so the improved graphical quality is not everywhere, but I do like the new Hero Sprites a lot. We’re going to have a conversation about the enemy sprites later, but for now, they look fine. If not, scratchy.

On their own, in a vacuum, I can see what they’re supposed to be. most of the time anyway. To talk about the non-sprite art, I think the backgrounds in the hero portraits look really good. The entire game has a painterly, anime-esque style that I like a lot.

Anything that’s hand-drawn, that is to say, anything that is not pixel art, looks consistently good. I also want to talk about the art on the cards. They’re fantastic. With a few exceptions, all of the art looks distinct enough that I don’t even need to read what’s on the card anymore to

Determine if it’s bad or if it’s not worth taking. I will say that there are a few cards that look similar enough to trip me up, but these are in the minority. [MUSIC] The music in One Step From Eden sounds like Mega Man X music from the PS1 era, and I love X-4.

Also, it reminds me of the DS version of Battle Network 5, which I personally happen to like a lot. You are skilled. The music is also reminiscent of Star Force, though Star Force’s music is a bit more whimsical in some of its compositions. You’ll be hearing a lot of music in

This video, so I hope you like it. I mean, listen to this. [MUSIC] I can’t really place what level any of this music is supposed to be from, but it does sound nice when I get there. And I guess at the end of the day, that’s what’s important. While one step from Eden usually runs well, I often get sudden performance dips. I notice them the most when selecting cards after an encounter, or when there are lots of projectiles on the screen. That last one’s pretty common, by the way. I think this might have something to do with the examples

That play when selecting a card, but it’s hard to say. I’ve got an unintended slowdown in battle, but occurrences are typically very short. I do want to say that I have a pretty beefy computer, especially for when this game came out. I have an AMD 5900X and a 6900 XT,

So I don’t think the problem is me. Let’s be clear, there is nothing impressive on the screen that should cause slow down, at all. I don’t see any ray tracing in this game. This game is made in Unity, so it doesn’t surprise me that there might be some overhead

Cost when it comes to performance. If I get slowed down on the PC, I can only imagine what happens on the Switch port, but I haven’t played that version, so I can’t say. [MUSIC] So this game does have a story. The story changes a bit depending on which hero

Reaches the final boss, but I’m going to talk more about the heroes in the hero section. It’s very limited, but here is the story as best as I can piece it together. A war broke out and devastated the planet. Eden is the last city slash civilization where everything seems to be great.

Several people are trying to get to Eden, often fighting each other to get there. That’s the game by the way. Spoiler alert! You make it to Eden if you play well enough. There are a few different endings, but I will also talk about those later. Will you make it to Eden? Probably not. This game is considered to be a roguelike, but I want to talk about the individual pieces before we talk about them in the context of BEING a roguelike. The battleship analog in One Step from Eden is spells. I will, however, be referring to them as cards, because that’s essentially what they are.

Each hero starts with their own deck when you start a run. All cards have the following. Costs, mana. Effects, damage amounts, arch types, little symbols on the bottom, also known as brands, and rarity denoted by the color border around the card. For the sake of thoroughness, I’m

Going to talk about the card design, because the card design is one of the most interesting and contentious things about this game for me. Heroes have a mana pool, and in order to cast a spell, you must expend the amount of mana equal to the card’s cost.

If a card costs 5 mana, and you only have 3 maximum mana, you cannot cast that card. Period. Better cards are typically of a higher rarity. Some cards do things when you hold them in a command slot. Here are the mechanics that can be on a card. Flow. Gain

One flow charge. You lose one flow charge on the next card cast. Flow can also be used as a cost for additional effects when you cast a card. Trinity, gain one Trinity. Three trinones can be used as a cost for additional effects when you cast a card. Shield – temporary health that

Goes away after the battle ends. Total shield value is reduced by 40% when you shuffle. Poison – add to the poison total. After a set amount of time, poison deals half the accumulated total as damage. Jam. Add a trash card to your deck temporarily that has a cost to use and does nothing.

Using the jam card removes it from your deck. Shuffling does not. Fragile. Increase his damage for one instance of damage per stack. Freeze. After three stacks, freeze the target in place and do 150 damage. Blaine leaves a burning panel that deals fire damage periodically. Consume. Cards with Consume

Can only be used once per battle. Backfire consumes the card in the other slot. There are only two cards that have the Backfire ability, but both of them are not worth using. There might be more that I’ve missed, but I think you should have a good enough idea about how cards should work.

Each encounter you complete, you will get to choose from a few cards of varying quality and usefulness. You can select esoteric symbols between encounters that slightly improves the chance of getting more cards in a specific brand, as well as higher rarities of those cards. Sometimes, cards will have modifiers on them,

Changing how they work. Cards can be upgraded to have additional effects on top of their standard ones. Each card can be upgraded two times. Here are a few effects an upgrade can add to a card. Increase damage and mana cost, decrease damage and mana cost, reduce mana cost by itself,

Improve HP of summon structure, root, keep an entity in place, piercing, projectiles go through enemies and obstacles, gain flow, gain shield, add frost, add flame, add poison, add splash damage and many more. This is probably the coolest thing that One Step From Eden does. Every card can benefit from most of the augments.

You can take a substandard card and upgrade it into a very viable and desirable card. The problem with this system is that you never really get enough upgraded tokens to apply interesting effects to all of your cards. But the idea is still very cool.

If you’ve ever played Path of Exile, it works in a very similar way to the gem system. If you’ve never played Path of Exile, the effects stack on top of each other, sometimes to comical effect. It’s much cooler and more interesting than it sounds, trust me. Artifacts are usually permanent effects that get applied to your hero. Artifacts do one or more of these things. Adds damage to your attacks. adds damage to your cards. adds additional effects to your attacks. changes your card effects. Grants one time heals their money. changes your weapon attack. Grant permanent stats.

Swaps two or more stats. gives you a friendly pet and PC. And I’m sure there are edge cases, but you get the idea. I’m going to go over the problems with artifacts later. To keep it simple, while some of the artifacts are very cool, many artifacts aren’t as useful

As a few common specific ones. For example, in the end game, pets die too quickly to be noticeable for very long. Needless to say, I don’t like all the artifacts. It’s my opinion that some of them don’t need to be there. And as petty as that sounds, there are good reasons

That are unrelated to my personal distaste for them. Though, I can understand why removing something might be considered offensive. The characters you can play as are called heroes. You start with one, but as you play you unlock more. Each hero has a unique play style, as well as at least one additional

Style of play. These different styles include a change to their starting weapon, deck, and artifact. I’m only going to go over the base styles of the heroes I’ve unlocked. This is a bit of a spoiler, but it’s not like you won’t see who they are in your first couple of runs.

Each hero you can play as is also a boss you can fight during the run. You can choose to kill or spare them if you beat them. For the record, I haven’t unlocked all the different styles for every hero. The reason why I’ll be apparent later. Saffron is the hero you start with. Her cards are a mishmash of a few different things that I don’t think mesh very well. Her weapon attack is a machine gun. You can hold down the trigger button to keep firing. Her starting artifact lets her revive once. And, because of this, she’s

Probably the best hero for most people. It is also very likely that Saffron is the hero that one step from Eden is balanced around. She revives in her boss fight, so do be careful and don’t get hit unnecessarily. If you spare her, at the start of a battle, she will

Sometimes attack an enemy with a big sword that also breaks the tile it hits. Reva’s starting loadout revolves around shields. Her default weapon can deflect most damaging attacks, though the timing and mana requirement don’t allow you to spam it. All her starting cards either use or contribute to her accumulated shield. Except Diagbeam. We’ll talk about that one later. Riva has one of those cards you

Need to catch, called Shield Catch. It’s an interesting mechanic, if not a bit misguided. Her starting artifact lets her generate shield just by moving, which you’ll be doing a lot of on any character. Especially considering you have no reliable way of dealing damage to enemies without cards.

I would say build poison on her and just rack up the shield while the poison ticks away. Riva’s boss fight can be a little annoying as she can keep summoning an enemy to help her out. Just don’t attack when her shield turns purple. If you spare her, she will stop your hero

From dying once and heal you for 400 HP. Gunner. Apparently, this guy doesn’t have a real name. “What’s your name?” “My name’s not important.” I think his shorts are really doofy looking in the character portrait, but in the sprite he looks badass. I would say his sprite art is the most improved by the art touch-ups.

This guy is also arguably the best hero in the game because of his default weapon ability. His weapon attack fires a beam down the entire road that gives you one mana when you hit something with it. Meaning he enables spamming cards like nothing else. Not to mention his shot’s cleave.

So his damage output is also very good with just his weapon alone. His base cards work well enough together, and his artifact is really nothing to talk about otherwise. I do believe he is the only hero who has a choice of different weapons to pick during gameplay, as opposed to

Choosing them at the start of a run. I also think his boss fights are the fairest out of all the others. If you spare him, he will throw you a healing potion when you visit a campfire. [MUSIC] The typical anime swordsman and terrible C.R.O. impersonator.

Her base kit is all about putting frost on enemies and hitting them with a weapon attack to deal bonus damage. Aiming her attack is a bit annoying at first, but once it clicks, it’s easy to do a lot of damage all at once.

I really hate her boss fight, as it’s unclear what many of her moves do until you get hit by them at least once. Talk about bullshit anime magic. If you spare her, at the start of battle, she will sometimes do small amounts of damage to every enemy on the screen and apply Fragile. The Engineer from Team Fortress 2. Sentry going up! Job well done! Her weapon attack buffs and shield structures, including ones that aren’t yours. Have fun shielding those rocks! It also deals a small amount of damage to enemies you hit with it. The card she starts with includes a gun turret and two

Cards that let you move things up or down. But I would get rid of those as soon as possible, because they don’t do damage. For her boss, just like the Engineer from Team Fortress 2, Hazel summons a bunch of different turrets to shoot at you. She also fills the field with a

Lot of junk that she then destroys. Having lots of cards that cleave is a good idea. If you spare her, she will sometimes drop a turret on the enemy field for you. When I first played this game, she had a habit of placing turrets directly in front of hostages, often killing them.

As a result, I would always kill her in any run. Since then, that problem has been fixed, but I still think the placement of her turrets is not optimal. Shiso is a huge dork. He gives me that “Nothing personnel kid!” vibe like nothing else. He looks so much cooler now, but the portrait art still makes me think he stole a cape, wore it over his marching band outfit, put on some sunglasses, and just started shooting people. [Screaming]

His gameplay style revolves around finishing off enemies with his weapon attack. His weapon works by forcing you to “Stand Still” and line up a shot. Every shot costs money, but you get more money than it costs if you kill something with that shot. I don’t like using him because you

Have to move around a lot to stay alive. Compare Chisso to Riva. Riva’s base weapon does zero damage by itself, but she has much more going for her with her shield generating ability, and she can still miss with her weapon with no downside. You are better off not using

Shiso’s weapon at all during the endgame. His weapon also scales with your max money, which incentivizes you not to spend it at shops. If you got 20 money for killing blows instead of 10, I think the risk would be more worth the reward. But right now, his gun is not worth

Using, especially since it costs money. You already have to give up your movement just to take a shot. Why add another downside? His boss fights are the second fairest in the game after the gunner. He pushes you around a lot and has shots that make you shuffle, but otherwise his moves are very

Readable and reasonably dodgeable. If you spare him, he will give you an artifact when you visit a campfire. But, you have to be the next encounter to get it. Gee thanks. Terra’s gimmick is breaking tiles. Her weapon attack allows her to crack a single tile. Cracking and breaking tiles are extremely good when it comes to limiting mobility, for you or for the enemy. Her starting cards are a weird mish-mash of support cards and damage cards.

The one that does a tiny amount of damage based on the amount of broken tiles is quite frankly awful and I almost always get rid of it right away. There are better ways to scale damage with no strings attached. Her boss battle is one of the worst

Because she cracks your tiles and requires the most and most specific movement of any boss. Except the shopkeeper, but the shopkeeper is an optional boss. Terra is not. Unless you pick her. If you spare her, she will sometimes rake six random tiles on the enemy field. Violet breaks my rule about not having to look things up on the wiki. Not once, but twice. Her weapon says, “Does a different effect depending on where you move.” But it doesn’t say what happens when you move to a particular spot. I can’t find a description of what that means in the game.

You just have to experiment. Or look it up on the wiki. Thanks. I would also say she has one of the worst starting decks ever imaginable. Core Set trades health for shield, and shield disappears at the end of the battle, so it’s worse than worthless. Then you have Iron Will, which gives

The enemy you hit with it a lot of shield. I don’t care how much damage it does, it makes your life harder and is a liability towards the end of a run. The other two cards are fine, but only having half of your cards be usable is really bad.

Her boss fight is on the easy side, and it would be even more reasonable if it was more obvious how her big nuke works. Another case where you might need to look it up on the wiki. Pro tip, you need to stand on the music notes she drops on the field.

Each square will accumulate shield on you so that you can survive the attack. It’s pretty bad when you need a separate FAQ entry on your website just to tell people how to beat your boss. If you spare her, she will sometimes give you a collection of buffs at the start of battle. This is an optional boss and hero to play as. When you do 100 damage to the shopkeeper, the fight will start. Her patterns are pretty hard to deal with, but as an optional boss, I don’t mind. She’s also the only one who didn’t get an

Upgrade when it comes to the sprite art, and she’s the only one with a single playstyle. Her gameplay revolves around money, but in a more fun way than Shiso. As the shopkeeper, she can buy stuff from herself for free. But if you want to buy more things, you

Need to spend money to refresh the list. The only problem with this is that your money is also your health. So it would be a good idea not to spend all your money at the start of a run. You don’t want to have a bad time.

I believe she must fight every hero as a boss. If you beat her and don’t kill her, she will sometimes give you six money at the start of a battle that you have to go and pick up. That’s it for the heroes. You can unlock extra play styles and very cool looking alternate costumes. For the ones I have unlocked, most of them have different starting artifacts, decks, and weapons. However, I did not experiment with them all, so if they’re any good, I can’t say.

I think there is enough content with the base sets alone, so even more content is welcome. One Step From Eden has a pretty decent shot. Shops are a pretty simple concept. You buy things from them. I do want to complain that I never have enough money,

But that’s more a problem with the economy than how the shop is run. If you were to compare a shop to a chest, in most cases, you always get two to three items you want from a shop, whereas you could only get one choice of artifact from a chest at best.

And that’s assuming the chest you got gives you an artifact. You also sometimes get a shop that requires your health as a cost instead of money. I always seem to get the health shop when I’m low on health. When in the shop, you can choose from the following.

Three different artifacts, two different cards, refresh the shop’s stock, trade health for money on a decreasing ratio where more health gets you less money, upgradeers that cost more the more you buy, removers that cost more the more you buy, and challenges that last for a few fights,

But provide a major benefit like extra permanent health, extra money, or extra upgradeers. Like I said, I think the economy could do some work to be a tiny bit more generous. It would also be nice if every shop I visit didn’t require me to do the challenges on an upcoming boss encounter.

This makes me not want to take them ever. Despite all that, you can always afford something, which is more than I can say about certain other roguelikes. Speaking of roguelikes. There are a few things you need to consider when you start a run. Your hero choice? the cards you have. the cards you want. artifacts you want. and the path you take. With the exception of your hero choice and starting cards, everything else is randomized.

Here is how a typical run in One Step from Eden goes. You pick your hero. You pick your hero loadout. You start the game and get dropped into an encounter. You get to pick a card at the end of every encounter you complete. Every encounter also awards XP.

When you get enough XP, you level up and get to pick from a selection of artifacts. Eventually you reach a boss. When you beat the boss, you can choose to kill or spare them. You then pick from a few zones and continue your run.

You do this until you reach the wall in front of Eden. Depending on what you did with the bosses, you get an ending. If you killed all the bosses in a run, beat Sarah, but didn’t kill the shopkeeper. The game loops and you start over with your accumulated loadout and difficulty. When you beat a boss, you can spare them or kill them. You get a couple different endings, depending on the choices you make. I’m going to go over these endings very quickly. All they really change is the boss you fight at the end. This is technically a spoiler,

So go to the timestamp on the screen if you don’t wanna see it. Pacifist. If you spare all the bosses, you fight terrible as the final boss. You can spare her or kill her. You make it to Eden. Neutral ending If you kill at least one boss, you get this ending.

The gate is the final boss. And if you beat the gate, you get killed by a boss called Seraph. You cannot fight her in the neutral run. You need to complete the genocide run for that. Genocide ending. Kill all the bosses and the shopkeeper. Unless you are the shopkeeper,

Then you just kill all the bosses. Even becomes another zone you need to beat instead of the gate or terrible being the final boss. Then you fight Serif legitimately. Her boss fight is very unique. If you didn’t kill the shopkeeper, the game loops. [Intro] One Step from Eden does quite a lot to

Help you understand the game without having to go anywhere else. It makes a valiant attempt to alleviate my biggest frustration with roguelikes, which is having to look something up on the wiki. Obfuscating useful and or necessary information from the player because you are too lazy to

Properly describe what an item does drives me up a wall. To give you an example of what a bad item description is, Hero Siege, great game by the way. Okay, so this is Future Mark. So after I did my voice recording, the developers of Hero Siege redesigned the entire game.

When I was trying to get footage, it was 100% different from what it was before. It’s awful now. I’ve been playing it for hours and it never gets fun. I just don’t understand what happened. It has an overwhelmingly negative rating on Steam and it has earned it. Whatever you do, don’t listen to

Past Mark about how good it is. He’s wrong. Hero Siege has an artifact called the Book of Belial. When you pick it up, it says cursed. So you might think, this is something bad. I should get rid of it as soon as possible. What the artifact actually

Does is doubles all of your damage for seven seconds with no downsides. This is the best artifact in the game. And you would never know if I didn’t tell you or if you didn’t look it up on the wiki. There are lots of artifacts like that in Hero Siege.

One step from Eden attempts to remove this problem entirely by having an in-game library you can reference on the title screen. But the best thing about this game is that… The developer put accurate descriptions for the cards and artifacts. Shocking, I know! Like duh, obviously, right?

You’d think it would be more obvious, but so many game developers seem to hate telling me how their game works. There is not a single card you won’t understand after reading what it does. Unfortunately, when browsing the library, the cards are very big and finding exactly what you

Want can take longer than it should. Still, this is extremely useful if you want to get better at the game. There is a search function, which is nice, but search is only useful when you know what you’re looking for. Thankfully, you can also filter cards and artifacts by

Various criteria, so it’s just about as good as it can be. And that’s a good thing too, because there’s a lot of cards. The sheer amount of cards is honestly a gameplay problem, as much as it is a knowledge problem. But the library is still very welcome.

On top of the library, any time you hover over any card during a run and only during a run, a video will play that shows you what it does. But it’s not really a video. It’s more like a live example, because it’s also context-aware.

The live example factors in the hero you’re playing as, the upgrades on the card if it has some, and the artifacts you have. So, if you have an artifact that turns poison damage into fire damage, you will see the effect play out in the example.

And that’s super cool! Every game should do this. If you can get the examples to play in the library, I don’t know how. Despite all the in-game reference materials, however, there is still a lot of nuance to one step from Eden that is hard to grasp, even with more experience under my belt.

I still don’t really understand how the encounters work, and what I mean by that is, I still don’t understand what encounters I don’t want. Each encounter type has a symbol and a text description. After a while, you get a rough idea of how the encounters might play out. But it’s the outcome at the end that is still a struggle for me. And after playing almost 20 hours, you’d think I would know by now. But no.

Here are the encounter types. Battle. A standard battle encounter that may have bonus objectives like saving an NPC, or something negative like hazards. But it’s not guaranteed. Distress. and NPC will need to be protected while you fight. The reward you get depends on the NPC type you save.

I seem to always get the healing NPCs when I’m at full health. hazards, a battle encounter with guaranteed obstacles on the field that can hurt and obstruct Camp. The campfire drops health that you can pick up for a small heal. You can also get a reward from some specific bosses if you

Already beat that boss on your current run. And you can optionally increase your luck by killing the bunny. We’re gonna talk about how luck works later. Shop. You can buy things with health or money depending on the shop. You can also choose to fight the shopkeeper. Pro tip! If you kill the

Shopkeeper, you can’t buy items anymore. Treasure. This encounter has a randomized chest that has a different challenge and reward depending on the chest type. Chests are one of the best ways to get artifacts. Or health if you don’t need it. You also get a lot less XP from these, so it’s entirely

Possible you’ll end up in a worse situation compared to choosing a different encounter. Mini Boss. These seem to be harder versions of the standard battle and may contain more and or harder enemies. All encounter types have the chance to be red. This makes them harder, and, I assume, also makes the reward better.

The standard battle, treasure, shop, and camp encounters are pretty easy to figure out. Obviously, if you could, you would take a treasure encounter every single time. The only exception is when you have enough money to buy more than one item in the shop. Then it depends. It’s the hazard, distress, and mini

Boss encounters I don’t understand. All of them are technically more rewarding than a standard battle, but I don’t know if they’re better than a treasure encounter, or even worth the risk at all. And I don’t think I’ll ever know. Part of this has to do with the added

Challenge, especially the mini boss encounter. Often, a mini boss encounter is just one or two recolored enemies with extra health and damage. When you win, you get a little bit more money and XP compared to the average encounter. Why would I take this over a hazard or a standard battle? I’m not sure.

Even treasure encounters, which seem like a no-brainer, end up being a gamble because you get less XP. And when you get stuff like healing at full health or a small amount of money, you’ve basically wasted an encounter. It’s just gambling on top of gambling on top of gambling.

Does it even matter which encounter you get when they all have the chance to blow up in your face? I would say yes, you still want to aim for the chests, but you aren’t guaranteed anything in this game except your starting equipment. And I think this bears repeating.

I feel I should know what the consequences of my choices will be considering the amount of time I’ve played, but I don’t. And that’s a problem. A problem that stems from this game’s warped difficulty scaling. [MUSIC] Before starting this section, I want to be clear that I’m

Talking about the base difficulty for the game. I did not bother with the added challenges via the Hell Pass. Adding extra difficulty to your run is your choice. The base difficulty is not. I am very tired of hearing that One Step from Eden is really for Mega Man Battle Network

Veterans that want to push the combat further. Even if that was the intention, I do not genuinely believe that One Step from Eden successfully achieves this. Now, compared to the launch of the game, the difficulty curve has been smoothed out a lot. At least for the earlier levels.

But that doesn’t stop the endgame levels from feeling overtuned with bloated health pools, enemy spam, and projectile spam. Late game bosses have so much health, it’s unreal. If I could describe it in one sentence, it’s like the game was made for you to feel overpowered, but forgot to actually make you overpowered.

To say this game feels like a clusterf*** towards the end of a run is an understatement. I don’t really know how you can possibly call it fair. Your damage output does not scale as fast as health on enemies increases, and the burden of knowledge and reflexes required to handle encounters becomes unbearable.

Did I mention you don’t get any invincibility frames? Which means that enemies can shred your health like it’s nothing? And you can say I’m bad or whatever, but I’ve gotten an ending a few times, which is more than most people who’ve played this game. And let’s get this out of the way too.

If the difficulty and game balance wasn’t a problem, the developer probably wouldn’t have added an easy mode slider that removes all the challenge from the game. So, I guess, technically, you do get a choice over the base difficulty. What a great idea! Just leave it up to the player

To improve the game they paid for. A lot of games do this instead of properly balancing their challenge. It’s really easy to do. And you can say that the people who use the slider are still playing the game. Okay, sure.

But in the same way that I don’t claim I beat Hell Pass 14, you can’t claim that they beat the standard difficulty. The fact that you get achievements with those sliders turned on skews the statistics I just showed you. I’m willing to bet that every achievement would have a much lower completion percentage

Without those sliders. It’s just kinda degenerate. I think now is a good time to talk about the combat and how you beat One Step from Eden. All of these things are kind of related, so putting them in any order is kind of hard. So please consider that all of these things contribute to one step from Eden’s balance problems. When you start up a run after picking your hero, you start an encounter. All encounters have enemies,

Including the shop and the camp, technically. So let’s start there. Each biome has some unique enemies and a few choices for bosses. We’ll talk about bosses later. Different enemies do different things, as you might expect. However, most enemies will have additional behaviors the further you get in a run.

This is honestly the best approach to difficulty, at least compared to the bog standard. More health, more damage, more enemies. Except that one step from Eden does that too! Oops. In a vacuum, these individual mechanics aren’t terrible, but they are all combined into an awful mess. Which is exactly how I would describe

The screen towards the end of a run. The other problem with this approach is that there are so many variables in play when I get an encounter, that it’s hard to determine exactly how dangerous an encounter is. As far as I understand it, the following factors affect how dangerous an encounter is.

The encounter type you chose on the map, for example, choosing a hazard or mini-boss over a standard battle. whether or not the encounter is red. what current zone you’re in. the level of zone you’re in. For example, zone five is harder than zone one. Your luck stat.

Luck will be getting its own section. The number of enemies on the screen. the number of obstacles on the screen. This is a lot to parse in the three seconds you have before the battle starts. At higher speeds, it’s almost impossible to determine what’s going on. It also doesn’t help all the

Enemies blend into and obscure each other. In my original Steam review, I complained that a snake-looking enemy was impossible to keep track of. This was mostly due to its speed and the color choice from the artist. It just blended into the battlefield tiles too well.

That was addressed, and I’m very happy about that. But looking back, I think the issue goes much deeper than just that one enemy. On this revisit, I found that most enemies are hard to track, which gets worse the more enemies and projectiles are on the screen.

I don’t know how you would address this without rethinking the entire art style for the enemies. Or having less enemies. or reducing projectile span. Everything that applies to enemies also applies to bosses, except that you usually won’t find obstacles on their battlefield. And bosses don’t change colors. At least, I haven’t run into any that have. Do note, your choice of hero will remove that hero as a boss encounter for your run.

Unless you pick the shopkeeper, then I think you have to fight them all. But she’s an optional boss and hero choice, so don’t read too much into that. Like the enemies, bosses scale their damage, health, and behaviors the further you go in a run. The problem with this approach is the inconsistency.

Unless you’ve been keeping track of every single difficulty factor, you’re often going to feel the difficulty spike, spikes that get worse depending on your luck during the run. That is to say, your actual luck retaining to the cards and artifacts that you got to pick from, not the luck stat.

You will also need to memorize four different tiers of difficulty for any boss. Actually, I believe it’s seven tiers, but that’s only for the optional help pass difficulties. On the standard difficulty, each boss has four tiers, and there are four zones in a run. That’s 28 different attack patterns

And dodge behaviors to memorize. And that’s ignoring the different final bosses, which I believe always have the same behaviors. That doesn’t sound so bad compared to the boss count in Battle Network 3. There are around 20 bosses in total, and each of them can have up to five different behavior sets.

So that’s around 100 behaviors you need to learn and beat, right? By that comparison, one step from Eden sounds like a cakewalk, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Battle Network 3 is a traditional RPG, and as part of being an RPG, it has a progression system.

Oh, but one step from Eden has a progression system too. So what’s the difference? The difference is that any Battle Network game knows ahead of time what you have access to and can tune the difficulty of any boss in response to that. The number of areas and virus types you have access to

Are always known to the developer. You don’t have to consider that the player got lucky and got an extremely powerful giga chip early in the game and has been destroying every encounter in their path. Unless you played the Wii U versions, but let’s ignore those for now.

You can’t even get to Flame Hand B5 before you get the means to beat them. One step from Eden can only guess at how powerful the player is at any given point. And because of the variance for all the different items you draft, you might’ve gotten unusable garbage

No matter how well you play. Well, you still have your main weapon, and as long as you play well, you can beat any boss. Okay, but how is that fun exactly? Having to beat and end game boss with a garbage loadout every one in 10 runs is fine,

But when I have to do it every four out of five runs, it becomes a boring slog at best and extremely annoying and unfair at worst. Some bosses are easier than others, but the harder bosses, I’m looking at you, Terra, are extremely unfun to fight with a suboptimal deck and artifact pool.

And I guess that brings us to my next point. [MUSIC] Here is the best way to beat every encounter. Get as much mana and mana regen as you can. Get lots of cars that do lots of damage and or have great field coverage.

Launch as many cards at the enemy as fast as you can before the enemy can fully fill your field with projectiles. Repeat until you get to a boss. Bosses have a lot more help, so you will likely need to launch all of your cards at them multiple times.

There is no combination of weaker cards that outweigh singular, big damage, large area of effect cards. Period. So you better have the mana to cast them when the game deigns to let you pick a good card. There isn’t really a lot of strategy to this.

Speaking of strategy, One Step from Eden certainly has combos with its cards, and synergies with its artifacts, but it doesn’t have strategy. How can that be? Well, to start, let’s assume you have the cards for your combo already. The order in which you were given cards during battle is

Random, so you need to keep track of where those cards are in your hand before you can line up the combo. Good luck keeping track of your combo cards with all the projectiles on the screen. The enemies can move too, by the way, so make sure you keep

Track of that too, and that’s just the part you have a modicum of control over. The third zone you enter adds more enemies to encounters, makes the enemies move and fire significantly faster, and enemies have a lot more health. This escalates as you complete more zones, so you’re going

To need to keep up with their health pools by being able to deal more damage. I said it before, just build the most cost effective, highest damaging cards with the largest amount of coverage possible, then spam those cards as much as you can before you take too much damage.

The cards you use to achieve this don’t matter, as long as the cards meet my criteria, and you have a lot to choose from, that is to say, if you even get the opportunity to choose. You can escape most encounters unscathed by following my instructions, but probably not bosses.

Bosses have way too much health to be fun at the endgame. I think Saffron’s weapon attack sums up the spam pretty well. She is the first hero you start with, and her base weapon could not be more unlike Mega Man’s Mega Buster. Saffron’s attack is a machine gun, where

You hold down the button to do small bits of damage in rapid succession. The Buster could fire smaller shots, but it was nuanced, and encouraged you to charge your shot to quickly deal a lot of damage between chips. The Buster, battle chips, and even moving were mutually exclusive combat options.

You could only do one of them at a time. These tradeoffs do not exist for Saffron, or really any hero. You can fire the hero’s weapon attack, cast cards, and move as much as you want, with a few exceptions. And that’s just it. It’s the exception.

I think Saffron’s base kit perfectly describes the gameplay philosophy of One Step from Eden, launching as many attacks as often and efficiently as possible. I’m aware there are other heroes, like Shiso, whose weapon requires you to stand still, but after what I’ve shown you, I think you

Can see a league of difference between the quality of Saffron’s weapon vs his. There are very few heroes where holding down the right trigger won’t produce a positive outcome in most situations. [MUSIC] Like in Mega Man Battle Network, you and your opponent stand on a grid-based battlefield

And maneuver around it in order to kill each other. You can modify the field in a few ways. Cracking a tile. This causes it to break when you move on and then off of the cracked tile. breaking a tile. This makes it so you and enemies

Cannot walk on the tile in most situations. putting a damaging effect on the tile, such as fire or spikes. putting an obstacle on the tile, such as a stone or a turret. There are others, but you get the idea. You will be moving a lot, mostly because the grid size has been expanded

From Battle Networks 3×3 to 4×4. The movement is snappy, but you are required to press the buttons a lot just to move out of the way. It also has the knock-on effect of making you think about how to use certain cards, and not in a good way. Consider the Air Hockey Battle Chip,

Originally from Mega Man Battle Network 4. It moves in a diagonal line and bounces when it hits a wall. Due to the smaller 3×3 grid, it’s a lot easier to tell where the puck is going to go when you use it, or when an enemy uses it against you.

There are only a few patterns the puck can actually travel down. Compare that to the Diag beam card in One Step from Eden, suddenly there’s a lot more to think about. And you’re not really sure where the puck is going to go at a moment’s notice.

I have to really think about where it’s supposed to go, which is antithetical to One Step from Eden’s gameplay. By the time I have the angle I want, the enemy moves. In Battle Network, even when the games got fast, it was usually slow enough that I could properly aim my air

Hockey chip most of the time. Air hockey is one of the easiest chips to use in the Battle Network series. I have seen a few people claim that adding the extra complexity to air hockey helps balance it out, considering how busted the chip is. All the extra complexity does

Is make me not want to use it, because there are many, many cars that do damage in a straight line, or in another much friendlier pattern. And all of those cars are significantly easier to use. Yet another problem that gets worse the longer your run goes on.

What do you really gain from a bigger field size? Here are the things that I noticed. You are able to put more enemies and obstacles on the screen. You can put more projectiles on the player screen because you have more room to dodge! You have to move more and press more buttons.

You can design cards with very strange and dumb patterns that you couldn’t do in a three by three grid without being overpowered. You can claim that you have more room to dodge, therefore the game can be harder because the game is more fair. I have a contention with that last one.

Despite the bigger field size, there are still enemy attack patterns where you will get hit with no recourse. Did I mention that the enemy spam projectiles? Are you getting this? Maybe this sounds nitpicky to you, but I’ve played a few of these inspired by Mega Man Battle Network games

That mess with the field size. The hero.exe demo. and cycle versus. The Nlanders first encounter, I really didn’t like that one. Grid Force, ugh, whatever. And I’m sure there are more. They all put the grid size in different ways that make battling worse. You can see that all those games

Are trying to be something different. Sure, but different doesn’t mean better or good. And if you’re gonna be this different, why even say your game is like Battle Network? These games are all superficially like Mega Man Battle Network, just to different degrees. Not a single game released so far has convinced me

That moving away from the three by three grid was the right choice for these style of games. I think the reason we never saw too much experimentation in the main series outside of Battle Network Five. – I spin my drink. – Is because the developers for those games

Came to the same conclusion that I did. Expanding the grid size does not meaningfully improve anything and can actually make things worse. I’m very much not a fan. Also Air Hockey is my favorite chip and you ruined it! Worst game ever! [laughs] Alright. One Step from Eden has some nice graphics that become hard to look at the more visual clutter enters the screen. The more clutter, the harder the game is to play and not in a fun or fair way. This game approaches and likely exceeds the limit of human attention, reaction

And the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time. And all of that is done by the graphics. The lack of contrast and obnoxious overlap between all the different visual elements make the game hard to play and inaccessible. And when I say inaccessible,

I mean that in a, I can’t physically play it which is distinct from, the game is too hard, please add an easy mode where I can’t die. which is what the developer did. I’m okay with dying. When it comes to games, I’m a live fast, die fast,

One HP is all you need kind of guy. But the graphics in this game impair my ability to keep track of what’s happening on the screen. And it’s not just one thing, it’s everything. The enemies and projectiles are too fast and not contrasted well enough for me to track them consistently.

The field is so big that moving my head around causes delays in action, which is life or death at endgame. Having all the different UI elements spread out makes keeping track of things difficult. The indicators on tiles about to be hit overlap in the most absurd way possible,

Making it hard to tell where it’s even safe to move. I know how to beat the shopkeeper due to muscle memory, not visual stimuli, and it shouldn’t be that way. And it’s not like I had to try very hard to find these examples.

You can find them pretty quickly by playing the game once. I guess at some point you see it so often you get used to it and think, it’s fine. I mean, it’s always been like that, whatever. On the other hand, art is expensive and time consuming, so it might not be feasible to

Fix the graphics, if you can even do that. That’s probably why it took so long for all the heroes to get redone base sprites. I’ll also say this, I don’t see them as lazy like I do for a lot of indie games. I’ve never seen the developer claim

His graphics are just his art style. I think that Thomas Moon Kang knows that one step from Eden’s graphics can lead a lot to be desired, which is why he bothered to go back and improve them for free. That was a really nice thing for him to do.

He easily could have sold the improvements his DLC, but he didn’t. Now I’m not against the concept of variants and roguelikes. It’s the nature of the beast. I love many roguelikes, including Diablo II. Dead Cells. 30xx. Blade Assault, and my most recent favorite, Peglin! In these games, some to a larger degree than others, variance is a factor in terms of how

Well you do and how much fun you can have. I am okay with some runs being worse than others, and that it’s entirely possible your run will be catastrophically awful. I am aware that not every run is going to be a winner, but good roguelikes allow you

To have some control over the variance. One Step from Eden decided that it would make some of its artifacts clearly better than others, and if an artifact was too good, a stupid, annoying, negative effect was added to it. This was to make sure that nobody would ever want to take

It if literally anything else with no downsides was available, or in most cases, just take nothing. Once you figure out what cards are bad, and there are a lot of them, Taking nothing is often the preferable option. You probably don’t want to blow at your deck with trash cards,

Especially when you can just use good ones. You also probably don’t want an artifact that causes you to die faster. Remember in the Binding of Isaac, where every single item you picked up made you question if it was even worth it? Me neither. The Binding of Isaac did have some items

That had negative effects to balance them out. But there are still a lot of really great ones with no downsides. Brimstone, for example, completely changes how you approach the game after you get it. It’s an amazing runmaker that also drastically improves your damage output with zero downsides.

I can’t name a single card or artifact from one step from Eden that does a fraction of what Brimstone does for you in The Binding of Isaac. But how does variance play into this? Well there are so many artifacts and cards that you will never have perfect cohesion in your deck. Never.

Not that the artifacts matter anyway. In most cases, Maximum Mana is the best choice compared to any other artifacts for a few reasons. 1. You need Maximum Mana to cast bigger and often better cards. 2. diverge xD enemies start moving so fast that your damage output becomes more important than maneuvering.

It’s better to stop the damage than it is to try and avoid it. Whenever I have a choice between more mana slash mana regen, and something else, I almost always take the mana, because being able to cast one additional card is almost always better than

“Do 20 more poison damage” or “Deal 10 damage if you do at least 40 damage” or “Poison tick slow enemies”. Why would I need to slow enemies that would die from another card instead? Then you have that whole deck building thing that the Steam trailers keep telling you about. Why don’t we take a look at drafting and deck building? Shall we? I like the concept of poison in games a lot. Any game with damage over time effects has me interested.

Well, how would I go about getting more poison cards? Well that’s easy. In between encounters, pick two of the esoteric symbols labeled “Misery.” Those symbols are called “Brands,” and there are many poison cards in that brand. At the end of an encounter, eventually, maybe, you’ll get a card from that brand.

Sounds easy, right? Well I hate to break it to you, but whether or not you get a card of a particular brand, even if you pick two of the same esoteric symbols, is still up to chance. You can go entire zones without getting a card in your chosen symbol.

This leaves you with two options. One, just keep waiting for the cards you want and let your damage scaling suffer. Which means that encounters and bosses are harder, more annoying, take longer, and will soon become impossible. Or, number two, take cards that don’t fit your theme, do

Lots of damage, and have a low amount of downsides. No matter how hard I try, four out of five of my runs end up with me getting only a few cards I actually want. The rest of my deck contains cards I took to stay competitive with enemy health pools.

We are not quite ready to talk about the luck stat yet, but I want to be clear that the luck stat does not really improve your chances of getting exactly the cards you want in a linear fashion. So stacking luck won’t help you if you are looking for a specific card.

As a perfect example of how awful it is to draft in one step from Eden, let’s look at the jam mechanic. I’m not against the jam concept outright, but it does stand out. Jams are 100% a downside no matter how many mitigations you have. Building a deck around cards that put other cards

In your deck that do no damage, waste mana, make you stand in place, and makes it harder to get to the cards you actually want to use sounds bad. But the actual implementation is worse. There are a few artifacts that can change the negative effects of jams, but I don’t know

Why you would take cards that give you jams unless you already have these artifacts. But why would you take those when you can take artifacts that give you maximum mana or unconditional benefits? And if you aren’t taking the jam mitigation artifacts, there’s no incentive for you to take the jam creating cards.

Who would want to go an entire game screwing themselves over in the hopes they get an artifact that solves their problem? Oh wait, it doesn’t even solve the problem. It merely makes the problem more manageable. And it’s not like the jam theme is even that good. When you compare the collection of cards

With literally any other better card, you realize a couple things. If you want jam cards in your deck, sucks for you because you have four cards from your starter deck that probably won’t work with your theme. The variance of drafting means that even with two symbols for the card you want,

You may never get the exact cards you’re looking for. If you want consistency with your jam cards, you would need to spend money on card removals instead of things like upgrades, additional artifacts, or even better cards at the shop. There are better artifacts and card combinations

That do the damage that jams do, but with zero downsides. In that way, I don’t think any theme is worth pursuing over keeping your damage output high in any way you can. Jams are 100%, a created problem that you purposefully inflict on yourself. That you also need specific artifacts to fix

Instead of being a viable strategy from the get go. But at least they’re a theme, I guess. Too bad you need all the pieces for it to be viable. I have played many roguelikes and so many of them fall into the trap of very good items must always be balanced by terrible additional effects. Nothing can be strictly better than something else without a painful cost. The luck stat exemplifies this balance problem in spades.

Luck is a systemic problem as the difficulty of encounters and the quality of the cards you get are tied entirely to this mechanic. In addition, the effects of the luck stat are intangible to the player without looking up exactly what luck does. So what does luck do exactly?

Luck increases the chance that a rare item will appear, be that a card or artifact and or augments on a card. Each zone you visit increases your luck stat by one. You can also acquire luck in a few other ways, including but not limited to

A bonus challenge incentive at the start of a run. taking a challenge from a shop. obtaining an artifact with luck on it. killing the bunny when out of the campfire. Sounds great, right? Well, it also increases the difficulty. Luck does things like increases the enemy difficulty tiers,

Increases the amount of enemies per encounter, gives enemies their own artifacts, adding additional effects to them, separate from their tiers, and increases the number of hazards on the battlefield. The luck stat doesn’t actually benefit you directly. It merely moves you further along the difficulty curve

With the promise of better drops in the future. If you have a trash deck and you decide you want to start stacking luck, the game is going to quickly become impossible for you to beat. Your luck stat only affects things after you get it, which means you at the very least need

To start and complete another encounter before you can even notice the benefit. That is, if you can even notice the benefit at all. You are still at the mercy of the drafting system’s variance. I would say that no single card you can potentially get is good enough to outweigh luck’s downsides.

Not to mention luck does not make any one particular card more available to you via the drafting system. Let’s say you have a card you want in the legendary rarity tier. Increasing your luck stat will improve its availability in your draft selection. However, you have only tangentially improved your chance of getting it.

There are lots of cards in every rarity tier, so even if the legendary tier has a 100% chance to drop, you are still competing with every other card in that tier. What’s more annoying is that you are blocked out of an entire rarity tier until you stack enough luck.

That’s right, you can’t even get Calamity tier cards, the highest tier of cards, without at least 16 luck. How would you even know this? I’m sure you could just look it up on the wiki. If I want to make the games more difficult in an “official”

Capacity, I can just add more Hell Passes. I don’t need fake upgrade stats that keep me in place while making my numbers higher. It’s just another thing to keep track of that isn’t clear. There isn’t enough information in the game that describes the additional effects your current luck stat causes.

It’s yet another thing you need to look up on the wiki. That’s right, luck has several thresholds that all track separately based on the amount of luck you have, with no way for you to know exactly how it affects your run, unless you look it up on the wiki,

And I’d prefer not to have to do that. As part of the nature of Roguelikes, you unlock things in this game. Which is a nice idea, except that variance thing rears its ugly head here again. there are 50 levels of unlocks to reach. And no matter how well you do in a run,

It seems like you always get one or two levels. If you wanna get all the content right away, my advice is to just run to the first shopkeeper you see and half her kill you until you reach level 50. So where’s the problem? Once again, the variance in one step from Eden

Works against you. There is nothing more disheartening than unlocking a card with a rarity of legendary or calamity and then realizing it could be hours before you even see it in a run, if you even see it at all. Or worse, it does show up in a run,

But my drops were so bad, I didn’t have enough Maximal mana to cast it. I can draft it and let the card take up space, being worse than useless in my deck forever. Or I can leave it be and hope I see it in another 30 hours. Both choices suck. A lot.

The number of times this happened to me was enough to make me quit the game the first time I played. I’m almost level 50 and I still haven’t seen the cards on the screen in a single run. Not that I’d want to use some of these.

Cast all the cards in my deck and then lose them for the rest of the fight? Totally gonna put this in my deck, especially with that mana cost. Deal a lot of damage, but put three jams in my deck. So glad I unlocked this!

To think, these cards would have been any other card. I don’t think I’ve ever played another game where unlocking things made me this unhappy and the gameplay worse. Oh hey, is that a reference? I might have mentioned this, but I’ve played Path of Exile.

To think I could be playing Path of Exile right now, instead of taking this artifact. Speaking of references. There are a lot of references to other games and media in ones different Eden. Too many. Come on! Hiyah! And they aren’t subtle or tasteful. I really don’t like it when games do this. It cheapens your game and adds nothing of value. The type of people who like this stuff are brainwashed consumers

Whose pattern recognition is being used against them. I get it dude, you love Yu-Gi-Oh! I also harbor a love for Yu-Gi-Oh! in various parts of its life. But this is not endearing. It’s distracting. and disappointing. and disgusting. I’m pretty sure dual discs make shuffling easier in the series, especially

Considering that it does it for you. So why does this artifact have a downside? What’s wrong with you? This kind of stuff reminds me of a very, very old video called “The Village of DDR.” It had everything I liked in it at the time it came out. Kingdom Hearts 2…

I knew I shouldn’t have let you drive the gummy ship. What was my first time? Naruto… Countless have strayed from the ways of the ninja to attain the level of the DDR master! DDR… No! The power of DDR! Stop! Star Wars… My level up voice!

What? But you’re a harder level than me now! Too bad. I have become more powerful than any Jedi. Yu-Gi-Oh! I summon the Dance Master! Wait a minute! Oh my god, I just realized, you know what? That’s what this game is! That’s it! This game has everything I liked it when I was 14!

This is actually the best game ever made! Man, I haven’t watched this video in years. What a blast from the past. You know, shame is a pretty useful tool for– You know what, never mind. I don’t think it matters. Oh man, I’ve never seen this joke before.

I’m so happy that there are jokes in the game I already know I’m supposed to laugh at. Heheh… What do you honestly think the genuine reaction to this stuff is? Whoa, whoa, hold on, wait a second! A double reference? I know what that’s from! That’s from “King of the Hill”!

“King of the Hill” is my favorite anime! Remember when Garra and Dale fought Khan and Orochimaru to determine who would own the hidden propane village? That 38-episode fight was epic! Especially all those flashbacks to episodes we already watched! Oh, man! [SIREN] Oh my god! I know what that’s from!

I had one of those! I used it exactly once to get Jirachi from that special bonus disc from GameStop! I’ve never used that Pokemon once! Wow! [SIREN] Oh my god! Is that Cyrano from Tuhu? I love Tuhu! And I love Cyrano! Cyrano is the smartest and the greatest!

I have a cloth doll of this cartoon character here on my bed, and a provocative poster of her on my wall! I love her so much! Aaahhh! Oh my god! A reference to a better game I could be playing right now! Time to bust out Mega Man

Battle Network 3 for the 50th time! I love Mei-Maze and I love references to other things I like! I really like Mega Man Battle Network! Don’t you dare bring Shut Up and Jam Gaiden into this! You don’t want people to draw comparisons to Barkley Part 1, especially considering it’s

Both a joke parody game and a really great traditional RPG, something your game is not. We’re never getting Part 2, are we bros? Oh no. for balance purposes) This is extremely degenerate. How could you do this? The Life Sword program Advance isn’t even close to busted in the Battle Network series.

There are so many others that are more egregious. Did Life Sword personally harm you? Did it steal your girlfriend? Did you lose a PvP battle into Life Sword or something? What is it about this program advance that caused you enough mental anguish that you felt the need to nerf it?

Or maybe you think it’s “more balanced now”? Duh, it didn’t have Life in it before, so now it does. This is disgusting. Wait, you improved things? I’m happy you didn’t feel the need to include variable sword in your game. What a disgrace. Honestly, I would much rather you

Make something original in your game. Even if it never becomes iconic, at least it will be your idea and not somebody else’s. I could definitely keep complaining, especially about the quotes on the cards and artifacts. But the funny thing was, I couldn’t figure out where they all went.

I remembered them being on the cards when I first played, but checking back years later, they were gone. I thought the developer might have removed them out of embarrassment. Then I found out one of the options, Readability Mode, removes them. If anything, that makes them less readable.

But I can totally see why this option does exist. They are, quite frankly, pretty embarrassing. How can you read these and not cringe in pain? For your enjoyment, I would recommend turning Readability Mode on and leaving it on. I thought the card text size was fine

With it off, honestly, but to its credit, the option actually does make the important text on the card more readable. Real shame it doesn’t make the combat more readable, though. Ohhhh! You can look up the flavor text on the wiki if you really want, but you know what I think

About looking up stuff on the wiki. As nice as this game looks when scaled up, I wouldn’t actually recommend playing it in full screen. That is, unless your screen is around 7 inches or less. So, if you have a Steam Deck, this is probably right up your alley. Having to consistently move your head and or eyes back and

Forth is not conducive to staying alive. Especially when so much is going on during encounters. I recorded all of my footage in full screen at 1080p so it would look good. But when I was playing in my personal time, I was playing at a resolution of 1128 by 634.

A comparatively tiny window and resolution compared to modern games. You can argue that this makes the pixel graphics look nicer and I can sort of see your point. I just think it’s a problem that making the window smaller improves your ability to keep track of everything that’s happening.

I think the bigger 4×4 field also contributes to this problem, but I think you get it by now. [MUSIC] It is very clear that the developer’s vision for an improved Mega Man Battle Network-like game is one where it moves too fast and has too much happening on screen for normal people to parse.

While I am not a developer, and game design is unfathomably hard, I think I’ve played enough games to see where things could be improved beyond the graphics. Let’s say I can’t start over, or remove anything. Here’s a few things that I think would make the game more fun, while playing to the game’s

Strengths and leaving the base game untouched. People have been asking for this one since the game came out, so I doubt the developer would bother now. But being able to make your own starting deck would add a lot of replay value, and help deal with the stupid amount of variance in every run. Having a working strategy at the

Beginning of a run would allow you to… 1. Make the game feel fairer even if it’s a bit hard. 2. Mitigate the disaster of having awful cards midway through your run due to bad luck ruining your card and artifact choices. You can make the game harder because

You have some idea of the power threshold that a player has at the start of a run. It would also allow a lot of strategy for build optimizations. I would love to do a poison build from the beginning of a run without having to take a lot of

Garbage cards to keep my damage competitive. I do need my damage to scale for the endgame, after all. I don’t really see a reason not to add something so many people want. It’s not like there isn’t a mechanism for adding cards to your deck, but hey, it’s not my game. This one ups the variance even more, but it does give you some more control over the quality of your deck at the beginning of the game. It also does it in a way that I think would be more interesting and add some semblance of strategy to the game.

I was inspired by Dota 2’s draft mode and Magic the Gathering’s draft format. Here’s how it goes. You pick from three heroes of the total available. Maybe up the variance by only having one style of play per hero available. You are Time Wizard Saffron or you are somebody else.

You pick cards from a small but decently sized pool of cards eight to 10 times. This would work like it does at the end of encounters, but a lot more than three cards are available per pick. You then pick four cards from the cards you drafted.

You end up drafting more cards than you were allowed to start your run with, but this would allow you to be on the fence about two or three themes before you start your run. This way you can do a cost benefit analysis if your picks don’t 100% work out.

This would allow you to start a theme before your first encounter or build around the hero you decided to pick. And don’t tell me this can’t be done for balance reasons or whatever, or that it would be too difficult to implement. Your entire game is too difficult for

The cards you get in any particular run. It was so difficult, you panicked and added an easy mode slider. All of these systems already exist in some form already, just at a different scale. What this really does is provide you some control over your run. The rest of the game can go untouched.

[MUSIC] So if it wasn’t clear, I’m not a very big fan of One Step from Eden. I certainly got my money’s worth playing it, but I don’t think I’ll be returning to it in the future. The fun stops right after the first half of a run,

And I really don’t feel like learning different mechanics and patterns that change based on variables I don’t always have control over. One Step from Eden wears its inspirations on its sleeve. It’s very long, disgusting, accidentally dipped in ketchup sleeves. It’s that cousin who keeps getting invited to family gatherings,

Despite the fact that he’s 26 and should know by now not to let hot chocolate drip down his front while he’s drinking it. The desire to make more Mega Man Battle Network games because Capcom stopped making them is a worthwhile endeavor, but the game that was produced is merely an inaccurate

Imitation of the games that inspired it. Its connections are superficially related to the Battle Network series. Many of the things I like about the Battle Network series aren’t even there, and the things One Step from Eden does on its own are repulsive in their own right.

To say it more simply, One Step from Eden is the degenerate child of Mega Man Battle Network 5. Maybe you think I’m being unfair. After all, the Battle Network series of games were made by teams of professionals. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the official Kickstarter page

For One Step from Eden directly claims the Battle Network series as an inspiration. They themselves were asking for comparisons to be made between One Step from Eden and the Battle Network series. Not to mention this game was shilled in various spaces purely occupied by Battle Network fans,

Mostly in the speed running and net battle PvP circles. My dislike for One Step from Eden aside, I do think that there is some overlap. Some Battle Network fans might enjoy One Step from Eden, but let’s not pretend you didn’t target a specific group of people who have shown an interest

In a specific thing. You can’t tell me that this game is its own thing and that I can’t compare it to another game it claims to be inspired by. You don’t get to have it both ways. The fun on the Battle Network series mostly comes from the combat.

I don’t think you can dispute that, but the Battle Network series was much more than its battle system. When you have nothing but battling to do, I can see how you might reach the conclusion that more and faster are the only ways you can push the gameplay and innovate.

And with only the battle system left to improve, you end up here, where the battle system and all the systems that support it are too much. One Step from Eden was the inspired by Battle Network game that dropped me down this rabbit hole of derivative games. Not a single original game

Aping Battle Network style is being made today. I feel so disgusted every time I see inspired by Mega Man Battle Network and then see that the game being made is extremely distant from its inspiration. An endless cycle of people who cannot capture the magic that Capcom did so long ago.

Like Mega Man Star Force, One Step from Eden is similar to the thing it was inspired by, but also like Star Force. One Step from Eden is not enough like its inspiration. It really is a shame that nobody is making an original true followup to Mega Man Battle Network 6. One step from Eden was the game that made me want to start writing Steam reviews. I just couldn’t understand the praise this game was getting. It’s not the most horrible game ever made. There certainly are some things to like, but this game left enough of an impression on me

That I wanted to see what other people felt. Was I wrong or was everyone else? Praise is cheap. I think the real value in deciding if a game is good based on reviews is not what people like, but what people dislike. And more importantly than that,

The consistency in which people don’t like it. One guy who hates the game because it uses the color purple isn’t very useful. Everybody complaining about the music being bad, probably useful. Then you realize steam reviews are filled with awful, annoying garbage reviews that are not useful unless you wanna laugh.

Or cringe, but I did want to go over a few that caught my eye because they were experiencing the same issues I was. I’m extremely arrogant, so I like it when people agree with me. Some of these are kind of law, but I left the names of the reviewers in the picture

So you can look them up if you don’t want to read them on the screen. Alex J Murphy. So, not a review per se, but I did want to talk about the comments I received on my original Steam review. For context, my Steam review is very similar to this one, but with far less detail. Among other things, he complains about the variants, a particular frustration with deck building,

And the scaling difficulty of the bosses. Now, to be fair to one step from Eden, my Steam review was originally made in 2020. Since then, the difficulty curve has been smoothed out from projectile spam at the third boss to projectile spam at the fifth boss. But his criticisms are still valid.

Not much has changed since then. And I think the phrase “How can a human being even do this sometimes?” perfectly sums up what I think about the limits of human potential and approaching the endgame of a run in One Step from Eden. Why yes, Winteia. I agree that the game is faster than it should be. Don’t feel bad. I don’t think it’s your fault. DISC O seems to have played long enough to get a good sample size for what it’s like to draft cards in this game. Given the variance in the cards you actually get to choose from, it’s more beneficial to pick fewer, but more similar cards, and or

Zero cost cards you can use immediately with no downsides. Ignite Hawk’s review is pretty long, and I’m not a fan of the tone he wrote it in. You should never apologize if you had a bad time because of a game. But I do want to go over his complaints. Specifically, the deck building leaves a lot to be desired

Because it’s better to take high-damage cards than it is to take weird ones that don’t do damage. The game is too fast to allow for strategic gameplay, and pointing out that the cards that require you to catch them are impossible to work around with the high speeds needed at the end game.

It’s these in case you were wondering. Ignite Hawk states that most runs feel the same due to the spam. The cards are slightly different, but because it’s better to take the 200 damage spell over the 10 damage spell that pushes your enemy one tile north, all the runs boil down to

The same thing. You do not have enough control over the order of the cards you get. Robot. This guy found out what I found out pretty quickly. When you play in full screen, you have to move your head a lot. And in a game that requires fast reflexes, the half second you need to move your head matters a lot. Now, I recorded all of my footage in full screen

So that it would look better, but my advice to people with robots problem would be to play in windowed mode at a small enough resolution where you don’t have to move your head that much. Why yes, that does undermine the nice new graphics quite a bit. Oh well. I don’t know how to say this guy’s name, so I’m just gonna call him Moon Canoe. Moon Canoe figured out my grand strategy for dealing with encounters every run. Picked the cards with the highest damage, the largest AOE coverage, and used them as quickly as possible.

Moon Canoo also figured out that combo cards need to be played in a specific order for the combo to work. And you don’t get to choose the order of the cards you receive from your deck. If you have a combo that requires three cards, good luck.

I think this one gives Creedence to disc O’s review and vice versa. Twisted Gears. This guy says a bunch of stuff we’ve heard before, but it’s the last part of his review that I want to highlight. But comparisons to Binding of Isaac or Slay the Spire, or really any sort of existing roguelike or deck builder, simply doesn’t properly describe what the game is.

Grammar aside, I do sometimes feel like I was tricked into buying the game. Okay, not tricked exactly, but I don’t think that my expectations were properly met, given what this game touts itself to be. It is very different from other games that purport themselves to be roguelikes,

Deck builders, and especially like Battle Network. It’s to the point that when I hear a game is inspired by Mega Man Battle Network, I no longer get excited. I think Twisted Gears is channeling that sentiment as well. I should probably mention that at the time of this video’s release, the developer, Thomas Moon Kang, is making another game. Duelists of Eden. This is a PvP-focused game with a lot of the same heroes. It still has the 4×4 grid, so take that as you will, but… Hold on.

Wait a second, is that the ability to pick the cards you want? Oh, but only for PvP, huh? Great. I might give it a look, but PvP was never a selling point for me when it came to the Battle Network games. There actually is a PvP in

Two-person co-op mode in one step from Eden, but nobody wants to play this game with me after watching me play it, so I can’t say if it’s any good. I probably won’t like it. [MUSIC] When I said that nobody was making a proper, true, traditional Battle Network game,

I only meant it in an official or original capacity. If you were looking to scratch that Mega Man Battle Network itch, and wanted to play something new, instead of just replaying the Battle Network collection on Steam, I’d recommend a few games. Shanghai EXC Genso Network I think that’s how you say it.

This is a free fan game that uses Touhou characters, but uses a proper battle network style of combat. Don’t know what Touhou is or does? No worries, I don’t either. But I still had a blast, and I would recommend this game to anybody. You can get it from the game’s GitLab page.

I’ll link it in the description below. The post game wasn’t finished when I last played, but this game has more than enough content in the main story, so that shouldn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned, Shanghai.exe is a full game. Shanghai.exe is a proper RPG. In that there are things like towns,

People to talk to, unique items to find, and a plot. A real one, and not just an afterthought. Even the number trader is here! Maybe that’s a little unfair to one step from Eden. You know what, nevermind, your lore is made up of memes that were stale when the game was new!

Shanghai’s plot is a proper adventure, even if I don’t really understand the references or the characters history with each other. I’m sure it has something to do with them shooting energy balls at each other a lot, but I hate bullet hell shooters, so I’ll never know. I’m also not Japanese if you couldn’t

Tell. Man, I really should play Raiden again. Anyway, if there was an example of what happens when you naturally expand on Mega Man Battle Network’s accomplishments, but you still wanted to experiment a little, this is it. Here are a few things this game has that are unique to it.

A virus breeding minigame distinct from Battle Network 3 (I didn’t bother with it, but apparently it’s really good) It expanded the style system’s utility by incorporating all the good things from Battle Network 3, 5, and 6. A natural expansion to the bug frag system for Battle Networks 2 and 3. Usable Dark Chips

I’m not going to get into an argument about the validity of Dark Chips in the Battle Network series. I’ll take it all the time and leave me alone with new additional elements with their own strengths and weaknesses. A reasonable difficulty curve. There’s no PvP net battling though. Oh well.

I mean, look at this. Some random guy made this with passion and love. For free! I should mention this was originally developed in Japanese, and I’m currently playing an extended translation with additional content. The original developer was cease and desist by Capcom when he started asking for money,

Specifically because he was using Capcom assets. The current developer slash translator is developing the endgame based on some concepts of the original developer. Honestly, there is a lot of drama for a game this good that you can still legally download and play today. This is why I don’t have a problem with an

Original take on the Battle Network series. I just wish it was closer to the source material without blatant infringement. So go ahead and tell me that something like this can’t be made and still be great. Chasing the traditional Mega Man Battle Network Dragon is a waste of time, and I should embrace

People making worse versions of a game they don’t understand. This game is proof that I don’t have to, and you don’t either. Shanghai.exe is a whole ass game. It’s got the look, it’s properly balanced, and it’s got a lot of fun content. I would definitely recommend Shanghai.exe Genso Network to anyone.

I had so much fun getting footage for this section that I ended up playing more than I needed to. Oops. Once again, the link to the GitLab is in the description. Go download and play it. And I guess it’s open source, so contribute to it too. [MUSIC]

Mega Man Chrono X, another free fan game. I actually played the 5.0.1 demo for my Let’s Play channel. This game is in a much more incomplete state than Shanghai. How incomplete? It feels like if you were to make it halfway through Mega Man Battle Network 3 story, and then it abruptly ends.

You can keep playing, but there’s no plot. The developers were apparently still working on it, but there hasn’t been a playable update in years. I am tantalized by the screenshots in their Discord, however. Still, I think you can PvP Net Battle with real people, which is cool. You can also join their Discord

To check in on the development, but I don’t think we’re ever going to get another updated playable demo. It’ll be out when it’s out. Still, I would recommend playing Chrono X. Like Shanghai.exe, Chrono X is a proper RPG with NPCs, towns, you get the idea, but unlike Shanghai.exe, Chrono X seeks to keep

In continuity with the original series. You can see this as a Battle Network 7, but Capcom might actually make a real Battle Network 7, considering how well the Battle Network Collection sold. The changes to existing battleships are quite nice with many buffs or usability tweaks,

And there are a lot of unique enemies that don’t exist in the real Battle Network games. All the bosses are unique, and in particular, I really like CactusMan.exe. You are offered quite a lot of variety for what is in there. The music is also very good, with my favorite being the

Battle theme and the boss theme. Michael Staple, the musician, really knows how to make music. You should check out his YouTube channel, maybe commission him for some music? Please pay this man’s livelihood so I can keep enjoying his music, I need more! Now that I think about it,

He’s made music for a lot of games I’ve enjoyed. Anyway, the link for this game will also be in the description, as well as a link to my Let’s Play channel if you want to watch more gameplay of Chrono X. The audio is kinda bad though.

And if you guys over at Team Chrono X or whatever you guys are called are listening, just release another demo! I don’t care if it’s not done, I can play the old demo if I hate your new one! It’s been five years! Just release a new demo, or release the game! Thank you!

I want to thank you all for watching this. I plan on making more videos in the future, so please subscribe. I have a few ideas of what I want to do next, but it probably won’t be related to Mega Man or its derivatives. At least not the next one.

Though I do want to say I have my eye on Isotope Ash. It’s messing with the battle grid… again. But it also appears to want to be a traditional RPG like Battle Network was. So we’ll see. Maybe Isotope Ash will perfect what One Step From Eden fumbled. If it ever comes out.

See you next time!

## Description
I regularly see One Step From Eden being mentioned whenever somebody asks “what else should I play?” after they finish with the Mega Man Battle Network series. Really, I don’t think there are any original games that can scratch that itch exactly, but today we will dissect the derivative I see recommended most often; One Step From Eden.

## Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:49 The Mega Man Battle Network Series
00:03:06 One Step From Eden’s History
00:03:44 Divergences
00:06:38 Graphics (First Impressions)
00:08:55 Music
00:09:47 Game Performance
00:10:40 Story
00:11:24 Cards
00:14:36 Artifacts
00:15:34 Heroes
00:16:10 Saffron
00:16:47 Reva
00:17:38 Gunner
00:18:31 Selicy
00:19:05 Hazel
00:19:58 Shiso
00:21:23 Terra
00:22:09 Violette
00:23:20 Shop Keeper
00:24:09 Alternate Play Styles
00:24:34 Shops
00:25:48 Roguelike
00:26:47 Endings
00:27:53 Player Knowledge
00:30:47 Encounters
00:33:29 A Conversation About Difficulty
00:35:29 Combat & Complaints
00:37:30 Bosses
00:39:56 Spam
00:42:34 The Battlefield
00:46:04 The Graphics as They Pertain to Gameplay
00:48:02 Variance
00:50:34 Drafting Cards
00:53:37 The Luck Stat
00:56:24 Unlocking Things
00:58:02 Memes and References
01:03:31 Screen Size and Window Size
01:04:19 Improvements I’d Like to See
01:04:48 Custom Deck Building
01:05:39 Draft Mode
01:06:51 Conclusion
01:09:32 Steam Reviews
01:10:29 Alex J. Murphy
01:11:14 Wintiea
01:11:25 Disc-OH!
01:11:44 Ignitehawk
01:12:31 Robot
01:12:59 Moon_Canoe
01:13:30 TwistedGears
01:14:15 The Other Game
01:14:54 Game Recommendations
01:15:13 Shanghai.Exe Genso Network
01:18:07 Mega Man Battle Network – Chrono X
01:20:01 Video End

_______________
## Download Links
Mega Man Battle Network Chrono X: https://mmbnchronox.com/download
Shanghai_EXE Genso Network: https://gitgud.io/SHNecro/shanghaiexe

## Playlists
Chrono X 5.0.1 Demo Playthrough (stream):