EDENS ZERO Review: A Scrappy, Sincere Trip Through Hiro Mashima's Cosmos

An anime adaptation that plays it surprisingly straight

EDENS ZERO arrived on Steam on 15 July 2025 with almost no marketing fanfare, which is a strange fate for a KONAMI-published action-RPG built around Hiro Mashima's manga and anime of the same name. Mashima is best known for Fairy Tail, and EDENS ZERO trades that series' medieval fantasy trappings for a space-opera setting: Shiki, a boy raised in an abandoned amusement park by robots, sets out across the cosmos aboard the living ship Edens Zero with a crew of "B-Cubers" chasing rumors of a wish-granting being called Mother. The game retells the manga's opening arcs in an episodic story mode, then opens up an exploration mode across the hub planet Blue Garden and beyond, where side quests, collectibles, and optional bosses pad out the runtime well past the main campaign.

What's notable, and what shows up again and again in player reviews, is how many people came to this completely cold. Several of the most upvoted reviews on Steam open with some version of "I've never read the manga or watched the anime" and go on to say they enjoyed it anyway — a reasonable outcome, since the game front-loads its lore and treats newcomers as the default audience rather than an afterthought.

Combat that punishes first impressions

The most consistent criticism across the review population is that combat starts slow, stiff, and unsatisfying. Enemies absorb an inordinate amount of damage relative to how much they can be staggered, and early skill trees give players little to work with beyond basic combos. It's a real problem for a game that leads with its action, and it's the single biggest reason some players bounce off entirely — one of the more detailed negative reviews describes the combat as "stiffer than anything I've ever played," with enemies that rarely flinch while punishing every opening.

The saving grace, echoed by a large majority of the positive reviews, is that the system genuinely improves once players unlock more skills and get comfortable swapping between the roster's four playable characters mid-combo. Each character has a distinct gimmick (Shiki's melee-focused Ether Gear, Rebecca's gunplay, Homura's swordplay, Weisz's mechanical tinkering), and switching between them fluidly during fights is where the combat finds its identity — closer to a lightweight musou than a technical action game, but serviceable once it clicks. The damage-sponge problem never fully disappears, though, and it's a fair criticism to level at a full-price release in 2025.

A story that stops short

EDENS ZERO adapts roughly the first hundred chapters of the manga across ten story chapters, and reviewers are near-unanimous that it ends at an unsatisfying point — right as a major plot thread involving the character Homura and a promised reunion is left hanging. This isn't a case of players wanting more of something they loved; it's a structural complaint that the game trims cutscenes and skips story beats to fit its budget and scope, then stops before delivering a resolution. One reviewer who otherwise enjoyed the game called it "frustrating when a game sets up an intriguing story hook and then fails to deliver," which is a fair summary of the consensus. Anyone expecting a complete story arc, adapted or otherwise, will be disappointed; anyone looking for a faithful highlight reel of the manga's opening will get exactly that, cutscenes intact for the most part and character writing left mostly untouched.

There's also a real, if narrower, complaint about localization quality in the side quest text specifically, with reports of contextual translation errors including a character being misgendered in text ("he" instead of "she," and vice versa). It doesn't affect the main story scenes, which read cleanly, but it's a rough patch that a publisher with KONAMI's resources shouldn't have shipped.

The costume system carries more weight than it should have to

If there's one place EDENS ZERO genuinely overdelivers, it's character customization. Every playable character can equip an enormous pool of costumes — one reviewer counted upward of 30 unique outfits from exploration and side quests alone, describing it as "not even half" the total available, each piece independently color-customizable and layerable through a transmog system that decouples appearance from stats entirely. For context, several reviewers note that other anime licensed games would gate a fraction of this content behind a paid season pass; here it's baked into the base $59.99 purchase. It's a strange thing to be a game's standout feature, but for an audience that clearly cares (fan-service framing shows up constantly in the review text, jiggle physics included), it's a real point in the game's favor and one of the more common reasons players report sinking 20-30+ hours in despite the story's short main-campaign length.

Visuals, performance, and the budget ceiling

EDENS ZERO looks and runs like a game built on a constrained budget. Character models are serviceable and expressive in cutscenes, but the open-world environments are frequently described as "barren" or "a bit outdated," and multiple reviews report stutter and frame-rate drops on modern hardware that have nothing to do with the graphical fidelity on screen — suggesting the Unreal Engine implementation wasn't given the optimization pass a $59.99 release warrants. Steam Deck compatibility wasn't rated well at launch. None of this is disqualifying on its own, but it does undercut the case for a full-price purchase versus waiting for a discount, which is the single most common piece of practical advice littered through the review sample.

The achievement data backs up the shape of the story complaints: over 85% of players clear the game's first chapter, but that percentage nearly halves by the point where the main campaign concludes, and continues dropping through the postgame's optional superboss content — consistent with a game whose main hook (the story) runs out of momentum well before the side content does.

Verdict

EDENS ZERO is a modest, sincere adaptation that punches above its budget in exactly one area — character customization — while falling short of expectations in the areas that usually define a $59.99 action-RPG: combat feel, story completeness, and technical polish. It earns its Very Positive Steam standing not because it's a great game in absolute terms, but because it delivers honestly on what it promises to the audience most likely to buy it: fans of Mashima's work who want to see Shiki and the Edens Zero crew rendered in 3D, and newcomers willing to meet a slow-starting combat system halfway. Wait for a sale unless the license alone is worth full price to you.