[5000] Detailed plot summaries of Another Eden and Final Fantasy Dimensions II

[ZeaLitY]

I took a look at the Final Fantasy Dimensions II TVTropes page, and was able to piece together the basic plot:

• Four elemental gods, seeking to protect humanity/the timeline, come into existence and masquerade as humans.
• Far into the future (think 1999 A.D.), the Final Fantasy polities of East vs. West have a bitter war with one another, to the point that a Flare Weapon is deployed, which utilizes some kind of corrupted, negative energy (just "chaos", or bad spirits, like the corrupted Masamune; can't find good explanations for this).
• The four gods link up into one chief god to stop the weapon, but the bad energy corrupts the chief god, who destroys the entire earth (in a Lavos-style rain of fire) as a result. (And then sits there, alone and bored for the rest of his life, I guess.)
• The party encounter the avatar of the chief god back in their own time (think medieval/modern times) and successfully prevent the weapon from being fired in the future, as well as his exposure to its energy.
• The chaos/negative energy brought into the timeline by the initial events still retains a mind of its own, however, and uses cell cultures taken from the four gods to create its own version of the chief god, causing the ruined future to happen again.
• The four elemental gods then sacrifice themselves to give the party a chance to take down this embodiment of chaos once and for all.

I don't see how this becomes Chrono Break, either. We have an East/West instead of a Central Regime. We have "four elemental gods" (either rehashes the Dragon God or sounds too suspiciously close to it), in a world where gods usually don't exist. We have a god-tier nuclear weapon somehow having "negative/chaotic energy" that's never expanded on. And lastly, this negative chaos energy doesn't have any motives other than "increase entropy in the universe." It makes the story of Lavos look like War and Peace.

[Acacia Sgt]

Well, now that Another Eden is on PC, something of note.

The text, at least extractable text, is stored in files that can be opened in Notepad. The only downside is that they're not ordered, and neither have more than just the text itself. Not denoting who is speaking and stuff. It's the next best thing to have a dumped script, as it were.

They should be, from the game folder in its Steam directory, at "files/i18n/lua_translation". An upside is that every line is grouped with all its translations, so anyone wanting to compare can easily do so.

[ZeaLitY]

Just FYI, using a transcription AI, I've confirmed that Kato discusses Chrono Break in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Q17vJ_bp4

• He was thinking of calling the third game Chrono Break, and started brainstorming ideas around 2000
• It really is "Break", not "Brake", as he was imagining it revolving around the breaking of time (DeepL says, "And the [idea] was something like, 'That's when it all goes to shit.'")
• Final Fantasy Legends 2 ended up recycling the story (!!!!!!!)

Now I'm absolutely itching for a better plot summary of Final Fantasy Dimensions II. We can draw some direct comparisons, I bet. Who would the four gods be that this Lavos-style weapon would steal cell cultures from?

Edit: Here's the segment in particular. It goes without saying that we really need someone who can understand spoken Japanese to listen and translate this for us!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYGvtqvAUOE

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

Fuck this, Zeality.

I bought Final Fantasy Dimensions II on my cell phone years ago and I keep refusing to fire it up. I'm going to play it and give ya'll the details and the goods.

Keep me accountable and call me out.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

I decided to revisit this game. Unfortunately, I haven't played it since ~2021 and have lost access to my account, so I fired up a new save. I'm going to edit my story synopsis post and make some fixes - when I had written it in 2021 it had been two years since I'd played through the main storyline.

Right now I'm breezing through the story and at Chapter 10.

While I love the art of this game, I'm not crazy about the graphics. The soundtrack is awesome and has tons of hidden motifs to Trigger and Cross. Hell, even many of the characters are blatant rip offs. What gets me, though, is the quality of this game -- it *feels* and plays like a jRPG from the late 1990s / early 2000s, and for a freemium gacha game, it holds up surprisingly well. All of the gacha content is optional, and they're generous with the currency.

Having played through part of Final Fantasy Dimensions II (I do intend to finish that at some point for our archival reasons), I do think Another Eden is the better spiritual successor of the two.

I want to finish the first segment of the main quest. While the first 26 chapters tell a complete story (and was where I stopped playing last time), there's since been several other continuations of the main storyline. From my memory, at the end of the game "our" Aldo had resovled the save the real Aldo from his role as being trapped in time and turned into a monster, and the storyline was going to actually provide an explanation for the Ogre Rancorum.

More to come.