Imageepoch is a fascinating developer. I’ve run into their games several times over the past few years, and each one, while far from being a paragon of its respective genre, had something about it, some glimmer of innovation or ambition forcing itself through thick layers of budget restrictions and/or cliché writing. Luminous Arc was a competent yet unremarkable SRPG, but it was delightfully campy and had an intriguing multiplayer component. Fate/Extra had weird (but respectably fast-paced), gimmicky combat and little to do outside of the main story path, but its script was a bold, compelling, alternate reality take on an already beloved (albeit a little esoteric in North America) franchise. Black Rock Shooter: The Game went in a direction that made little diegetic sense for the character, but was nonetheless clever in its design as well as being one of the most gorgeous games on the PSP. So it makes sense that its latest effort, an HD console JRPG called Time and Eternity, is riddled with problems that mostly revolve around its budget. It also sports one of the most fun and interesting combat systems I’ve encountered in a console JRPG in quite a while.

Time and Eternity has a heck of a selling point: It claims, above all else, to be a playable anime, something familiar to its target audience. It’s just like any other show you might be watching, but it’s also interactive! Cool, right? Unfortunately, such an ambitious idea requires a ton of resources to pull off effectively, and Imageepoch just doesn’t have what it takes. All of the characters are hand drawn, which is impressive, and are juxtaposed against polygonal backgrounds. In scenes vaguely reminiscent of visual novels, the characters often sit around a table, not unlike a slice-of-life anime series, and convey all needed exposition in-between quests. It sounds good on paper, but the problem lies in the production values. Most of the time, the game is pretty ugly. The animations seem to be missing frames all over the place and also replay themselves at ostensibly random intervals, often resulting in a character wildly jerking their legs around, crossing and uncrossing them several times in a row. I often found myself reminded of the infamous Hotel Mario when watching these scenes. It is certainly entertaining, but not for the reasons intended. In addition, NPCs are such an afterthought that they look like paper cutouts, and palette swapping runs rampant throughout. It works for enemies for reasons that I’ll get to in a bit, but as far as general world-building goes, it comes off as lazy and awkward regardless of how much work actually went into getting it all together. You can see the beginnings of something special underneath the aesthetic missteps, but unless a more prolific developer revisits the idea, it isn’t going to go according to plan.

The writing is a mixed bag, which is natural for a game clearly intended as a comedy. You play as Toki, the princess of the local kingdom, but for some reason the namable “main character” is the knight she is set to marry. It’s odd, almost as if having a female protagonist full-stop was something Imageepoch was afraid of doing. The knight is a severely unlikable character, based entirely around the fact that he’s a gross pervert that is somehow getting married to royalty (which is supposed to be funny, but really isn’t), but the game seems to recognize it by killing him off in the first few minutes and jettisoning his soul into a cartoony mascot dragon. Time and Eternity isn’t quite smart enough to pull off a satirical angle, however, and most of the characters are flat anime archetypes. Luckily, Toki is far more interesting. She’s a docile, sheltered princess, but her body is also host to an alternate personality that literally transforms her into Towa, a physically stronger version of Toki that isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Toki/Towa is reminiscent of Dragon Ball’s Launch, but is played surprisingly straight despite the game’s overall comedic tone and clear effort is made to make her a more dynamic character than the rest of the cast. It took some effort to get past the problematic main character, but once I did, I found myself paying attention to how Toki and Towa developed. The payoff is never great, but they manage to be likable, against the odds.

The characterization may be rough but Time and Eternity’s overall plot is a fun take on time travel, featuring some almost Doctor Who-esque mythology as well as a fair share of hit-or-miss humor. The game is definitely pulling itself in several directions at once, much to its overall detriment, but it has plenty of genuine moments that at the very least kept me playing the game. That, and the battle system. I really, really like the combat in this game.

Time and Eternity’s combat very much builds on a mechanical theme I’ve noticed in the past few Imageepoch games I’ve played, specifically Fate/Extra and Black Rock Shooter. The name of the game is action-based combat with a heavy emphasis on pattern recognition. Fate/Extra was turn-based, of course, but it had the beginnings of a few aspects that heavily come into play in the other two games. Like I mentioned earlier, Time and Eternity has a lot of palette swapping. Most enemies are just differently colored or sized versions of other enemies. The same was true of Fate/Extra and Black Rock Shooter as well. It stands out more in Time and Eternity because of the other budget-related issues, but is a necessary evil for the way combat is designed.

For those unfamiliar, Fate/Extra had a system based on rock-paper-scissors—picking the right types of attacks would allow you to hit your enemy and defend yourself. However, it wasn’t entirely random. If you figured out your enemies’ patterns you could shut them down entirely. In fact, in each dungeon, as you fought enemies over and over their patterns would fill in and you wouldn’t have to worry as much about rote memorization. But you would always start each dungeon blind. More enemy types were introduced as the game went on, of course, and the repeated enemies didn’t repeat the exact same patterns, but they were pretty close. Close enough to give you some leeway in your guesswork. Becoming familiar with the different enemy types was paramount to saving yourself a lot of trouble.

Black Rock Shooter was much more active. The titular character was largely immobile, but enemies had full range of the battlefield and you had to keep track of what they were capable of. You had a guard technique that was only useful against certain attacks, and a dodge move that could cause dangerous overheating if you used it too much. So knowing what your enemy was going to do and figuring out what you could and couldn’t get away with was the difference between winning and losing. Enemy types repeated themselves because as the game grew more difficult, botching your defense became less and less forgivable, and you needed to at least have some idea of what to expect.

Time and Eternity is very similar. Toki and Towa (you automatically switch each time you level up) have limited movement capabilities. You start battles at range from your opponent, but you can jump in close or they can charge you themselves. You can guard, which only absorbs some of the damage from attacks and can eventually be broken, or you can dodge to the side, avoiding damage entirely if timed properly. It is very fast and reliant on reading frames of animation, which lends itself oh so well to the hand-drawn visuals. Once you’re actively controlling Toki/Towa, the game actually looks pretty good. When you’re running around, the camera zooms in behind her shoulders, and the environments are much more colorful and whimsical. Bloom effects are abused some, but it works in capturing a surreal look. In battle, it becomes immediately apparent where all the animation budget went, as the girls are a spectacle in action, hair and clothes flowing smoothly as they whip around, slashing and shooting until the (sometimes long) battles are over. A lot goes on during combat, so having everything big, bright, and well-animated makes everything work as close to perfectly as the surrounding conditions allow.

Toki is better at ranged combat, and Towa excels with her knife. The switching element adds a little extra depth to the combat, as you often don’t get to choose who to play as. You’re forced to learn both characters, and while they’re mechanically similar, adjusting to both frequent changes in damage output on top of enemy behavior always keeps you on your toes. Additional skill trees add more stuff to play around with, ultimately giving Toki and Towa quite a varied arsenal.

Back to the palette swapped enemies: it works, because even though many of these shared enemy designs gain some new attacks or behave differently, being able to predict what they might do as the game progresses becomes just as important to getting the most out of the system as your ability to react quickly. It’s another tool with which to give you an upper hand during battles, of which there are many. Time and Eternity also offers three difficulty settings, giving more weight to its worth as an action game even though it often doesn’t present itself as such.

Time and Eternity is very much an Imageepoch game, for better or worse. If your primary investment in the genre is story and/or aesthetics, it might not be for you. It lacks any sense of self-seriousness and can be borderline offensive. However, if you’ve been digging the trend of experimentation in JRPGs as of late, you’ll definitely want to give it a shot. Time and Eternity’s core mechanics are fast, involved, complex, and generally just a lot of fun to toy around with. It is far from revolutionary, even sloppy, but sometimes a little overzealous ambition can lead to something super cool under the surface.

Hint: Don’t mash! Mashing the attack buttons is tempting at first, but a good way to get slapped around. Time and Eternity has a lot of nuance and emphasis on committal, so timing is everything.

by Lucas White