One Step From Eden is one of my favorite games of all time, a fast and frenetic roguelike that takes the fun battle system of the Mega Man Battle Network games and amps everything up to eleven. Duelists Of Eden is a sequel/spinoff that focuses purely on PvP matches. I'm not even going to pretend like this game might be bad, it's very obvious that Duelists is a worthy sequel to OSFE, a great PvP battler in its own right, and a game that you should just get because it's only $5. Seriously, get it.
As I mentioned, One Step From/Duelists Of Eden is pretty much an expanded version of Mega Man Battle Network. You and your opponent are on a 8x4 arena divided into two halves, meaning each player has 4x4 squares to move around on. You get a deck of cards that you can use as your main attacks, along with a primary attack you can do whenever you want (OSFE has one, DoE gives you two). Compared to its predecessor, Duelists is a bit slower-paced to accomodate for the PvP battling. You can't upgrade your stats like in OSFE, so your deck size stays at around 8-10, and your mana for using attacks stays at 6. However, where Duelists evolves the formula is in its focus on comboes. Right from the tutorial, this game encourages you to chain cards in a way that can allow you to deal large amounts of damage. The most common example is closing the distance between you and your opponent before doing a close-range attack, but there's a lot of potential combinations and builds you can come up with since you get free reign to make whatever decks you want. Despite the slight change in focus, Duelists still feels incredible to play and will get just as frenetic as OSFE before long. Battle Network has always worked perfectly for PvP play, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise that One Step From Eden made the transition very comfortably.
Duelists Of Eden brings back all the main characters from its predecessor, though with some slight moveset tweaks to balance them out for PvP play. There isn't as much disparity between the characters as in One Step From Eden, so I feel like most if not all the characters in Duelists feel pretty viable to play as. The creator of these games, Thomas Moon Kang, made a point to redesign the cast to look a bit older than OSFE to give off the impression that time has passed, and I think they look pretty great. In addition, there's six new characters. Chiretta and Harissa are the two new original characters to the cast, with the latter being one of my new favorite characters in the series for her fun design and chaotic movement. The other four are cameos from other indie games, including Dreadwyrm from Maiden & Spell, Queen from Quantum Protocol, Maypul from Rivals Of Aether, and Neera from Freedom Planet! Once again, they're all fun to play as, and I particularly like the heavy-hitting primary attacks of Dreadwyrm and the aggressive frost attacks of Neera.
As far as content goes, Duelists is fine for a $5 PvP game. The online functionality is great as it includes rollback netcode, ranked and unranked matches, lobbies, tournaments, and local play. There's a leveling up system that gets you banners and titles and over 100 different color palettes you can buy for the characters (many of which are references to other media ranging from Mega Man to Touhou to Ace Attorney to Bocchi to vtubers). The offline content, on the other hand, is a bit lacking. There's a solidly robust training mode that lets you fight bots, but no standalone VS CPU mode. The only real mode for offline play is the Gauntlet Mode where you face off against 10 bosses with increasing amounts of health. It's fun and I appreciate that you can get coins and XP from it, but I do wish there was a bit more to do outside of online battles, especially as a person who generally really dislikes online gaming. I also wish there was a way to customize which music plays. Duelists has an incredible soundtrack and it's a shame tracks seem to play somewhat randomly.
Speaking of which, Duelists Of Eden has as strong of a presentation as its predecessor, if not even better. The spritework is even more impressive and fluid than in OSFE, with some truly lush and visually-impressive character animations. I did have a few issues with the UI, though, like a bit of overlapping text and the resolution button not working for me. I'll assume it's an issue with my computer, though, because it usually is. The soundtrack is once again done by STEEL_PLUS, who has been becoming one of my favorite video game composers between One Step From Eden, the Crosscode DLC, and his tracks in Cotton Fantasy. While most of Duelists' music is reused from OSFE, we did get a bunch of new tracks for the new characters and stages, and they sound as fantastic as ever. The high-energy techno that defined OSFE's music is completely intact, and it's cool to see the cameo characters get OSFE-sounding remixes of music from their games, with Dreadwyrm's Starry Night being the best example of this. However, my favorite track by a country mile has to be Harissa's theme Wildstyle, a funky sampled track that sounds unlike anything else in either game. Man, we're only a third into 2024 and there's been some truly stellar soundtracks.
So yeah, Duelists Of Eden is great, a fantastic compliment to One Step From Eden that perfectly capitalizes on the potential it had for PvP play. It's super polished, solidly balanced, has great online and incredible music, and once again, it's only $5 and you can even play it on Mac, so there's no excuse.
4.5/5 Stars
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