Sometimes I feel like the only person who's ever heard of Egglia, let alone actually played it. I think I probably found the original mobile version when looking for other stuff Yoko Shimomura had done, and I was really surprised to find what looked like another Legend of Mana. LoM was definitely a flawed game in a lot of ways, but I really liked it when I was younger. A bunch of stuff isn't super well explained and it doesn't always come together quite right, but the art and music was amazing and the overall tone of it and way it's built out of a bunch of little pieces of the world with little snippets of stories with a bunch of different characters was something different in a good way.
Nothing else was quite like it, but then one day I stumble across this mobile game with a bunch of the same people involved, and it's suspiciously similar? It didn't run great on my phone, and I think most chapters/episodes of it weren't ever released outside Japan, so I only played a little of the beginning.
And now a few years later I just happen to be scrolling through upcoming Switch games and see it listed there with a date of Very Soon. That was completely unexpected. I waited until I could find a review or two of it just to make sure it was a decent port, but it's the first thing I've bought right away at launch in a while.
And it's good! It's full of absolutely gorgeous art that looks even better on the Switch than on my janky old phone, the music is great, the overall vibe is great, and whoever did both the original writing and the localization clearly was having tons of fun. And even though it was originally a mobile game it was a purchased mobile game and avoided the usual stuff that ruins f2p ones, so it translates pretty well to a full console release.
I'm not going to pretend it's for everyone or that it's perfect or anything, and I can't disagree with some of the 7/10 reviews I've seen, but it's the kind of thing where if it's your kind of thing it could really be your thing. I'd throw in some pretty screenshots but it's way too much of a pain to move them from my Switch to my phone (thanks, Nintendo), so I guess I'll just mumble something about being bffs with an aloe and feeding potatoes to elemental spirits...
