• Price: $19.99 USD
• Publisher: Brownies
• Release Date: 🇯🇵: December 16, 2021
  • Western Release: February 10, 2022

EGGLIA Rebirth, a fantasy RPG previously released on smartphones, has been “reborn” on Nintendo Switch with all of the original smartphone content as well as additional content. The game is currently only available on the Japanese eShop, but has an English option available. It will be released in the West next month, but I was eager to try it out, as it looks cute and was easy for me to download from the Japanese eShop for 2,200 yen.

Note: Shinichi Kameoka and Koji Tsuda, who both worked on the popular Mana series, formed the company behind this game (Brownies). Here is an interesting article from DualShockers four years ago that talks more about the origins of the game!

Starting up the game, the music by Yoko Shimomura and Yoshitaka Hirota is absolutely lovely. I really like the character art as well. You, as “Chabo,” are a Redcap Goblin, a race known for its aggression. However, you wake up as an amnesiac with your horns missing, which are what apparently contributed to Redcap Goblins’ violent dispositions in the first place. You first meet Robin and her faerie friend named Marigold, who tell you that they’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Apparently, goblins are capable of breaking magical seals, which is a much needed service in the world of Egglia after war broke out and portions of the land were sealed away in “niebel eggs.” (I suppose they don’t find many hornless, placid Redcap Goblins, so finding Chabo was great luck for Robin and Marigold!)

Robin says it is her duty to unseal these eggs and restore Egglia. You unseal the first egg and enter the new location. In order to move around the field, you have to roll dice to see how many spaces you can move. You have a specific amount of turns with which to complete the stage. (If you run out of the allotted turns, a monster that kills you in a single blow shows up, so get to the “clear stage” spot as quickly as possible while still gathering wood and other ingredients.) The first stage just has you gather wood to help construct a building. Interestingly enough, simply clearing the stage had me level up despite the lack of enemies!

Naturally, other stages include enemies for you to defeat; however, you do not have to defeat all enemies in order to clear the stage – even if there’s a “boss” for that area. You can bring two characters with you but they do not go into battle with you as combatants. Instead, they seem to hang out in the background (off-screen) and comment on ingredients they gather for you.

Unfortunately, there is a “vitality” system where they slowly run out of energy; you have to wait for their energy to be restored in real time – I understand that this originates from smartphones, but that’s a feature I could have done without. It felt unnecessary to have to wait for energy to be restored for a game on Switch. Perhaps they could have made it so that you could have characters for one battle and then have them sit out the next one or two to restore their energy instead?

Thankfully, once you unlock the shop, you can simply buy any items you have previously acquired. It’s a lot more convenient than taking party members with you who run out of energy to gather for you. I also really like Baba and Yaga, the gremlin twins who run the shop. (The music that plays when they appear on screen is almost sinisterly playful in a way. 🎶 😈)

The character interactions before and after stages are really funny – Marigold is definitely my favorite character so far because she is hilarious.

Once you return to town, you’ll get to name it. Did I name my town “Egg” in Japanese just for the title-related pun? Yes, yes, I did. 🥚 You are able to increase your friendship levels with the people you meet by completing quests for them or giving them gifts. Build up your town, meet and befriend new people of different races, and have some fun while restoring the world of EGGLIA!

Once you have reached a certain level of friendship with a resident, they’ll give you a “symbol” to commemorate your friendship! Then you can place those symbols (only one at a time) in the center of town.

Some of the townspeople are more important to the plot than others. Stix the Pixie, for example, is frequently in major scenes, while Razzel or Zots (also pixies) are not. These minor townspeople serve as additional assistants in gathering ingredients for when others run out of energy, and also add to the sense of an ever expanding community in EGGLIA.

You’ll also be able to summon spirits to help you out in the field. To summon spirits you’ll need to gather ingredients for different dishes and wait (in real time again) for them to appear, with different dishes attracting different spirits. Again, it’s an odd choice to require you to wait in real time for something to happen in-game here for a Switch game. You can use aptly named “Tick-tock” items to speed things up, which can be acquired by beating certain stages.

I really like the spirits’ designs. You can bring up to 3 of them with you at a time, with different combinations having different effects. Changing between assault and support modes will change the effects on your stats and available spells.

Using the spirits’ abilities in battle, you’ll have to take elemental affinities into account. If an enemy’s affinity is water, for example, go after them with your wind spirit. You’ll have to wait until you have enough mana – which starts at zero but increases one point every turn – to use the spirits’ abilities, though.

Once your spirits reach their initial level cap (often at level 40 or 50), you can evolve them, which will increase the level cap and also change the spirit’s appearance slightly. I will say that by a certain point in the game, I consistently used Maxiavelli, Cleffe, and Uffa Luffa as my team regardless of the elemental affinities in the stage I was going into because they had abilities that could attack across longer distances than other spirits I acquired. I really didn’t use any other spirits after making that team.

You can even talk with your spirits, and I love the dialogue. EGGLIA Rebirth’s English localization seems pretty high quality for the most part (only a few missing words or typos here and there), and I keep chuckling at the silly things the characters say. What’s great is that the game allows you to rewatch important cutscenes under the “quest” tab on the menu!

You can also grow potatoes with the help of Tao Xin; giving the potatoes you grow to your spirits will give them additional experience points. Growing jewels with Tekko will help you to evolve your spirits. Again, you have to wait in real time for these to grow unless you use the Tick-tock item to speed things up. Unfortunately, you’re limited to three spaces for both the potatoes and jewels. It doesn’t seem to be possible to expand the fields here like we can with the houses in town.

What I’m extremely excited about is being able to decorate Chabo’s home in town! You’ll be asked to gather materials to build homes for other new residents, as well as places of business. You can expand and decorate them, too! Helping the other residents fix up their homes will make them happy – especially if you select the right kind of home upgrade for them. Paru, for example, is an orc. It was mentioned that orcs like rocks, so I correctly assumed that they’d like the “Un Roc” rocky house model.

I expanded my own home for the first time, which required me to wait ten minutes for it to be finished. (I eventually realized that I could use the Tick-tock items to speed up house related changes as well.) You have to wait to further expand your house until the Builders hut is expanded enough for that particular upgrade, then you can make your house bigger. Unfortunately, we can’t change the style of our house’s exterior like we can with those of our townspeople.

Once you have decorated and expanded the town’s housing as much as possible for the point you’re at in the game, you might want to keep advancing the plot! 😂 Placing the niebel eggs you’ve acquired on the world map will open up additional locations to explore. If you put certain complementary eggs and their locations next to each other, it will activate an additional bonus stage in that area.

When I reached a certain portion of the game, I unlocked the paint shop and elixir shop, where you can change the color of your house furnishings and buy elixirs to restore your comrades’ energy. You’ll also be able to access “Event Isle.”

There is also a lottery shop where you can redeem lottery tickets obtained from clearing certain stages later in the game! Some of the lottery prizes involve furniture that is unavailable for purchase at the furniture store.

After spending about 70 hours on EGGLIA, it started to feel very grindy. It was harder and took longer to acquire new eggs to unlock new stages in order to advance the plot. I had to complete even more requests for the characters in charge of advancing the plot in order to raise their affection levels enough to get to the next plot point.

Overall, despite some pacing issues, I’m quite impressed and pleased with EGGLIA Rebirth. The game lasted me over 100 hours, and I honestly had a better time with this than I did with the most recent Animal Crossing release on Switch. EGGLIA is really a cute town-building RPG where you gather townspeople of all different races, and you start to feel a real sense of community. The combat is relatively simple, with only your character serving as a combatant, and therefore you don’t have to grind for levels quite as much. There’s no equipment besides your spirits serving as your attack and defense boosters. However, unlocking later stages takes longer than one would hope, as does farming for crafting/building ingredients and funds to pay for renovations later on.

While the game originally was published for smartphones, Brownies was indeed “smart” about the way they ported it to Nintendo Switch. While it’s true that the potato and crystal fields, spirit lures, and house renovations all occur in real time, many of the tasks take between 5-30 minutes, which isn’t too long – and you can always use Tick-tock items to speed things along. They very well could have used microtransactions in the Switch port and had players pay for Tick-tock items, furniture items, and more, as mobile games often tend to do. But they avoided that trap and instead ported the game quite cleverly without having to change up much of the game’s systems.

Switch it ON or Switch it OFF? At a mere $19.99, I’m incredibly impressed with the quality of EGGLIA Rebirth. The combat is basic, but it doesn’t detract from the game for me. Chabo and friends coming together in harmony to rebuild their world despite their differences was a nice theme and brought me joy. I enjoyed playing a game where we can consider the feelings and comfort of others, build them a house based on their preferences, and help them become part of our community. 8.5/10