If, on one end of the spectrum, you have Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and the Persona franchise returning turn-based RPGs to critical and commercial acclaim once again, and on the other you have modernized nostalgia packaged as HD-2D RPGs, then Eternal Anima sits somewhere in the middle. It’s a game that finds its own niche in the current, revitalized RPG field, even if it can at times feel a bit too much like a greatest hits compilation for the genre.

An all-new Japanese RPG developed by a team of industry veterans and notable outsiders at Marvelous, Eternal Anima is thematically driven by the responsibility that comes with inheriting the world and then passing it on to the next generation. How do the actions of our past ripple into the present and future, and how do those past choices shape the world that exists today?

Eternal Anima‘s director, Katsuhisa Higuchi, was a programmer on a number of early Final Fantasy games, also worked on Chrono Trigger and more recently served as a director on Capcom’s first two Monster Hunter Stories games. Kazushige Nojima is another Square Enix veteran, having worked on the story for Final Fantasy VII and VIII as well as the Kingdom Hearts series. The game’s narrative, meanwhile, is based on a concept submitted by acclaimed author Keisuke Makino, who has contributed to both Persona 5 and Metaphor: ReFantazio.

The story follows Wade, a man with the ability to see the history of objects merely by touching them.

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