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Between so many titles, announcements and launches, it’s completely normal that someone goes behind the scenes without our knowledge. However, I can pride myself on having a certain sense of smell for raw gems, ideal for alerting you when a game slips past the radar and grabs our attention. This is the case of Synduality: Echo of Ada, a very special and personal project from Bandai Namco, because it is a whole new universe created from scratch by the brand, which includes this title and… an animated series .
Indeed, this project from the Japanese distributor is transmedia and it already exists a 24-episode series called Synduality Noir and that, fortunately, which you can see in Europe and Latin America on Disney+, yes, in original Japanese with Spanish subtitles. It’s a lot of fun to watch, as the fact that the protagonists pilot “mechas” makes it visually very appealing, but it’s in the post-apocalyptic world they’ve created that the fun is, since the remaining humans are “the vagabonds”. , pilots of robots called Cradle Coffin, whose management is almost impossible without the Magus, human-looking AIs who help them.
In the world of The syndualities are found in 2222, the Earth suffers the disaster of the Rain of Tears of the New Moon, which eliminated practically the entire human race.
It is here that we will begin to control our “Wanderer” or “Drifter”, in English, and we will be equipped with a Mage of our choice, and a Cradle Coffin, which will be the basic one at the beginning. The way to play will mainly be to explore and fight with the robot, but the packaging and, above all, the playable loop is what made us fall in love with the title.
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Stay true to the name: Synduality Echo of Ada
In principle, what we were able to test is a closed beta, so the state of the title could still be improved in terms of per formance, especially with quite annoying lag when we aim the weapon, but nothing that cannot be fixed in the future, because visually it doesn’t really seem to stand out, but overall we are dealing with a typical JRPG with a decent, useful and very satisfying interface to use. However, Synduality is not solely a role-playing title, but rather a combination of action, adventure and survival, with a significant obsession with resource management.
And that’s it Our main task will be to go out to explore, almost as if we were scrap dealers, collect everything possible and return safely with the loot.. But of course, the encounters with Enders or other enemy Cradle will be continuous, the rains will damage the robot’s armor and the terrain itself, very rugged and strange, will be continually against us. This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for two questions: our Cradle Coffin takes little damage and only has a 16 minute battery to do it all. Enter, scavenge, kill and leave. It sounds easy, but it’s not.
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The moment our Cradle enters survival mode and displays a countdown, everything will be completely lost from the inventory: the weapons we carry, the ammunition, all the materials collected… but we can lose much more than that, our Mage. If we don’t perform the extraction with a combination of buttons and eject, we will return to our workshop with nothing. And piloting a new Cradle without Magus is really crazy: the radar doesn’t work, nor the aim, and we don’t know where to escape either, it’s really impossible not to fail again. Without a doubt, a must-have experience to discover how much we depend on our personal AI (Magus).
And it is precisely in this difficulty and this playable loop that lies the pleasure and the hook that I had with Synduality. Our Mage continually assesses the situation, telling you where enemies are, telling you where to go, and even giving you recommendations on whether we should face another Wanderer or flee. At first it seems like something invasive, but little by little you adapt to the Mage and his instructions, because you can tell that he respects the fact that you are the owner and that he will never deny you anything , but he will try to help you. survive and complete your missions in the best possible way. .
The crystals we collect or other scrap will be used to upgrade our workshop, where we can repair the coffin, adapt the facilities for ourselves or for the AI, or even be able to craft weapons. But we can also directly collect parts or weapons from other Cradles fallen on the map to use them to our advantage, provided that they correspond to our limited carrying capacity, thus maximizing the Risk-Reward duality in favor of pleasure . A reward can be scrumptious, but what happens if you don’t have enough space? Will you have enough battery to deviate from your route to the evacuation point?
A title you can’t leave out
Its playable loop added to that The maps are open world and other players can appear with the Cradle Coffin and attack you without warning, it gives a lot of play, since in principle, everyone belongs to the same Association and if you attack a teammate, you will have a significant penalty. Even if you do this repeatedly, you can be kicked out of it and directly become a Renegade, making you an immediate target for the rest of the pilots.
In short, either because we can see his series on Disney+, or because its combination of a post-apocalyptic world, AI and deadly creatures that you fight in a giant robot, the truth is that the world of Synduality has already conquered me. I just need to see if the rest we can find beyond this kind of brief demo, continues to offer more challenge, more content, and an interesting story that hooks us all. Of course, at the moment we do not know when it will arrive, but in principle its launch was planned for 2023, so I would not be surprised to see it this same 2024.
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