Eternal Ring

Recently I've been reviewing some good games (or at least games I like a lot) so I wanted to find one of the games I own that I just hate and think is an utter pile of crap. When I think of bad games I often think of this one, a release date RPG for the PS2 called Eternal Ring.

Eternal Ring

Overall:

This is a first person RPG dungeon crawler made in the early early days of the PS2. You (Cain) have have been sent by your king to an island that is being explored by some excavation team and your goal is see what's really going on there and I think to find the Eternal Ring (though it might be that you find out about it after you arrive). You explore different parts of the island with a sword and the ability to use various magics depending on what rings you've found or made and have equipped. There is no separate screen for battles, you see the enemy on the screen and then you fight them or run by them ect.

Pros:

Having one world with enemies on it you can see instead of random battles is good, I can deal with random battles but it's a lot more fun to have something else where you can see enemies like say, Chrono Trigger. I also thought the ring creation system could have had potential (not to say that it did it well, just that I could see a decent system being made from the idea).

Cons:

This game has a paper thin story. That wouldn't be a big deal if it was a racing game, or a football game, or something else where a story is of relatively minor importance. This is an RPG and they try to push this terrible story talking about the king that sent you and how he's trying to struggle free from the advisers that have the real power in the kingdom.

Another issue with the game is one of gameplay. The sword you start the game with is worthless and crappy, it's subpar in the starting dungeon and quickly becomes unusuable later on, even when you find an upgrade for it. Not only is it so weak that you shouldn't use it, but the first person combat is clumsy, meleeing in Goldeneye is an apt description of it. This wouldn't be a huge problem if the magic aspect of it was well done but sadly it's not. The process to make the rings is confusing and you have little measure for what elements are good against which monsters as the damage you do isn't shown, but it's very possible you could sit there and hit the same monster with an element it's resistant to and have no idea whether you're using the wrong element or whether it's a strong monster.

In general it's rather difficult to know whether you're underleveled or over leveled and if you do want to level up it can be difficult to find a good place to do it. There is no inn or place to get your health and mp back so wasting mp could literally get you stuck in the game since your sword is too weak to help you and you have no place to go get mp back from that isn't a finite item you find somewhere. They have a village but it gets destroyed after the first dungeon, I kept assuming they would have some place to rest and get your health back. So being stuck with finite items for mp and hp, and not being able to tell how to hurt monsters effectively makes you constantly feel like you're on the verge of being stuck forever. I literally just ran through most of the dungeons after a while and got lucky enough to find a monster that was weak to one of my rings and use it to level up on for a bit so I wouldn't be too far behind.

Also the last boss is a giant fetus in a bubble that joins you on the trip back to your kingdom and then turns into a naked man thing. Don't usually spoil the ending here but that was so special I felt it needed to be said.

The music was non-remarkable and the back of the box makes fun of Final Fantasy (Who said fantasies had to be final?). Not that Final Fantasy is above being made fun of, but you need to bring something to the table a little better then this or it's just laughable.

The dungeons were bleak looking and fairly linear with no puzzles either. Nothing sticks out about this game besides how bad it was.

Overall Rating:2/10

Closing Remarks:

Besides passable graphics for it's time and a magic creation system that could have POTENTIALLY been decent (but wasn't) this game has nothing going for it besides not having random encounters. If your best feature is not having a bad feature common in other games, you know you're stretching. Don't get this game, you'll thank me.