Eve of the Genesis – 8.99 (Kemco)

Now, if you’re familiar with Kemco’s previous iOS releases, Eve of the Genesis is sort of a mixture of Alphadia and Symphony of Eternity. Fantastic story-telling, as well as top-notch translation, completely draws you into the plot, and makes you actually feel, and care for, the characters. The story takes place in the Empire of Gadalia. It’s kind of a matrix type story, with humans battling machines that ruled the empire, but were defeated 2,000 years ago. Now they’re back, and somehow able to travel through space, seemingly appearing anywhere they want to attack. Your characters are on a quest to try and find out how the machines are able to just appear anywhere they want, and eventually find a way to stop them from taking over the empire yet again.

The equip system is pretty basic, giving you 3 slots, one for a weapon, one for armor, and another for one accessory. However, there is a fairly deep skill and orb system that fully makes up for the bland equipping, and then some. Each character is allowed to have 10 different skills from offensive, defensive and healing. These do not increase in skill with your character leveling up, but instead, you will use gems which are collected on your journey, to make your skills stronger. Once you level up an offensive skill with Reinforcing Gems, it will take more and more with each time you level them up. Your defensive skills are leveled up with Diffusing Gems, also requiring more with each level up. There are also elemental skills, which are leveled up with Reinforcing Gems, but can also be changed with Element-changing Gems. This allows for each character to change their element skills based on the types of enemies are in specific areas. You are also able to clone skills, allowing for your character to keep a skill, while still changing it.

There are also orbs which you can use to increase your stats, like evasion, defense, attack, health, sp (magic), agility, and more. These orbs are found scattered throughout the empire, and can also be won in battles, and bought in shops. Once you own one, you can find it in your items section, and immediately use it. As you level up, each of your stats goes up as well, attack, defense, health, ect. On top of this, there are also Ooparts, which once found, offer up various abilities. However, leveling up does not restore health or SP, so if you’re close to death, no matter what, you’ll need to either find an Inn, a blue restoring orb, or use potions to regain your health.

As you explore the empire of Gadalia, you’ll encounter loads of different enemies, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Encounters are mostly random, meaning unlike Symphony of Eternity, you can not tell where enemies are on the map, you will just run into them randomly while walking around. There are a few enemies that you will be able to see before hand, but you will not run into these enemies too often. Completing the game does not require too much grinding, in fact, if you plan on exploring every area of the map, dungeons, forests, deserts, mountains, castles, and buildings, no extra grinding should be required. But if you plan on avoiding a lot areas, you can pretty much expect to need to grind, around towns is the best place, as you can head back to town, and stay in an Inn for 20-50 gold, which completely restores all of your characters.