The new year is upon us, and despite the fact that it’s been a pretty awful year so far there have been a few good points too. A few glimpses of light to brighten this dark and dreary January. One of those lights is an excellent CRPG by Blossomsoft, called Eternal Eden. “What’s a CRPG,” I hear you wonder. It’s short for Console Role-Playing Game, and essentially means “kinda like the good ol’ RPG games you played on 16-bit systems like the SNES.” You can also call this JRPG if you wish. I don’t care.
In this game you assume the role of young Noah, an inhabitant in the eternal land of Eden. Together with your friend Downey and other assorted heroic types you roam the obligatory two dimensions (there’s always a light world and a dark world isn’t there?) and try to set things straight after someone messed things up by eating the forbidden fruits whom the enigmatic Father explicitly told everyone to leave well alone. The game is obviously quite inspired by Christian mythology and the Bible, and as an atheist fascinated with these things, that is exactly what drew me to the game in the first place.
Unfortunately Eternal Eden doesn’t follow up on the promise of religious interpretation very well; I was let down a bit by the common, secular storyline that emerged from this extremely promising beginning. Maybe I’m simply missing some of the more religious points, but it feels that Blossomsoft missed out on an opportunity to create something deeper and more thought-provoking. Still, what the game delivers is a well-designed and interesting RPG experience that lasted some 15-16 hours. Much of it was filled with battles and the usual leveling up, but there was surprisingly little forced level grinding – not a single time did I have to backtrack and fight stuff in order to become stronger.
One of the reason for this is that there are no random battles. Hallelujah! Praise the lawd and all that jazz. All the enemies are clearly visible and avoidable if one chooses. Much appreciated move. What this means is that the game is more streamlined, more simple in a way since the designer placed enough enemies so that you’ll always be prepared for what comes next as long as you fight your alloted fights. But it also means that you always see how many fights you have ahead of you – at least in the current area. This may not seem like a big deal but to me it felt like an enormous relief to be able to plan how many of the sodding sasquatches I had to slay before I got to where I wanted.
There are other neat things about the game. The graphics are good (although fairly simple compared to games like FF IV, FF V, FF VI, etc), the sound is good (but nothing special), and there are a few interesting minigames like bounty hunting and turtle hunting. Yes, turtle hunting. You go around an island looking for turtles. It sounds insane, but it really is fun! I never found all those stealth turtles though…
The most important thing about the game is that it has that elusive addictive quality, though. The areas never become too big or long-winded, and there is always more to see just around the corner. The scope of the game is much smaller than FF IV or FF V or FF VI (yes yes, I use them as examples again), but I most definitely think that that’s one of its major strengths as well. Because of its limited length this is a game I wanted to buy and finish, unlike most RPGs I’ve played lately. The relative shortness of the game might even be why it felt so addictive – it wasn’t stuffed with too much filler content. Kudos to you for that, Blossomsoft.
Graphics
Good graphics and special FX. Even though the resolution is higher than that of SNES RPGs, the latter win in comparison by virtue of better animation, design and variation.
3/5
Sound
Decent music, although a bit synthetic. The sound effects were okay. In the end I chose to not have the audio on throughout the whole game.
2/5
Gameplay
If you like the standard JRPG/CRPG deal you’ll definitely like this.
4/5
Addictiveness
Could it be? Could this be the first game I review to get a full score in addictiveness? Indeed it is! I couldn’t put the game down. I rarely buy games, but this was well worth the dough.
5/5
Technical notes
Eternal Eden was made with Game Maker or RPG Maker or some other kind of engine like that, but it’s not very noticeable – it performed well and felt like a solid game. One annoyance is that I’d like a larger window, more resolution choices or a scalable window – I want to play windowed, but the default resolution is just too small on my laptop! Also, when I alt-tab the game is paused (good!) but that music just keeps on playing (bad!)
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