Eternal Fantasy Episode 0: Circus Tries to Make “Not Da Capo”

October 25th, 2007

 

And sucks immensely in the process.

In between spewing out an annual version of Da Capo, Circus has found the time to make Eternal Fantasy, a visual novel/RPG due out in about a month. They decided to release a prologue/demo disk to showcase their new game. As my sarcasm may indicate, Circus is mostly known for the Da Capo series and little else, so this is something new and different for them and looks like their attempt to tap into the popularity of such games as Seinarukana or the Savior series.

Eternal Fantasy OP

Unfortunately, their first foray into something above and beyond a vanilla visual novel is just flat out awful. The graphics aren’t even up to the level of Duel Savior, released half a decade ago, the characters are in their usual style of ripping off whatever was previously successful, the engine is unwieldy, and the AI is inept at best. The whole thing reminds me of a turnbased version of Ragnarok Battle Offline with all the action and twitch gameplay stripped away.

  

Basic Fighting

Despite all the buttons and gauges thrown around, the engine is not complicated in the slightest. You click on where you want your hero to trundle towards, right click to have them defend for a moment, and if their CT gauge is empty, click on an enemy to attack them. Your character will slowly walk to the enemy and when they get close enough, a golf swing gauge will come up and you’ll have to click when the marker gets into the target zone. There is some variance between characters. Caro just has one bar and Arcie has 4 that go further on the bar, with each successive hit requiring that you make the previous one. You can also click on the special attack button if your CT gauge is full to launch a hard hitting attack that immediately hits from anywhere on the screen

 

Party Battle
 

There is party action too, but unfortunately, there’s no much you can do aside from watching your party members throw themselves at the enemy. There’s a little AI controller in the bottom left, but since it only takes two hits for even your frontline warriors to die, there’s no much useful that you can do with it. Combine this with the fact that battles get very crowded quickly and it’s impossible to even see which one person took damage when an ogre swings a club through half your party and it’s just a mess. It does seem that they want to play up the party/mass battle angle though, as one of the demo battles that you can watch (not actually play) is (the rather unfortunately named) Farte and a horde of eternally respawning rabbits versus a horde of similarly respawning slimes.

Mass Battles (Goes forever if left alone)

The game isn’t all bad though. Aside from the ugly as sin battles, the art is pretty nice. The prologue doesn’t offer much in the way of story; just a short scene maybe 5 minutes long for each heroine, so it’s hard to judge the quality of the story. The characters seem to be in the normal Circus variety with the depth of a soup spoon and all eager to ingratiate themselves to the hero. Arcie’s design even looks stolen straight from Seinarukana’s Sacchin. The loli elf is sassy, the loli rabbit girl is spunky, the lead is cheerful and doting, you know the drill. I do feel so sorry for poor poor Faltefierte, which Circus has painfully shortened to Farte-chan. She’s stuck being a loli elf with a name like that. Just… cruel. At least she can use her full name and not be too ashamed. No such luck for Locomoco. Did the writers smoke up while they were naming these characters? I’ll also note that this thing scares the living piss out of me. I don’t even know what it is, aside from absolutely terrifying.

 

To wrap things up then, Eternal Fantasy had better put together one hell of an amazing story when it’s released in just under a month, because everything else about it is simply awful. Everything about the combat engine screams ‘amateur.’ They’d almost be better off cutting it entirely if this is what they’re using to try to entice people into playing more of it. I wasn’t particularly excited for it in the first place, but my interest has dropped to nearly zero after this. Blech. 

     

Posted in Games | 3 Comments »

3 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Wererat42 says:

    Wow… looks like a warrior harem to rival Hakuro’s

  • Tagau says:

    Yeh know, you are the only blog I’m able to stick with.
    I just love your opinion.

    This game look nice, though, I’ll play it if there’ll be an english version.

    Hope to hear from you soon

  • Hinano says:

    Hey that big boob chick looks like a Dragonaut reject.
    Also I attempted to play SAKURA by Circus…got bored of it fast tho