Review: Eternal Legacy - A New Dawn
by Allan Curtis
December 11, 2010
Overview
Eternal Legacy is an epic RPG that bares more than a passing resemblance to a certain other RPG series, famous for characters with spiky hair and huge weapons. It ties a very long main quest with a dose of traditional RPG gameplay.Features
Eternal Legacy features a 30 hour main quest, numerous sidequests, excellent 3D graphics, an in depth battle system, and fully voice acted dialogue.The good
Eternal Legacy cast you as Astrain, a young man about to enter a fighting arena for unknown reasons. Almost right away things do not go as planned and soon you're fighting evil sorcerers, traveling across deserts and rubbing shoulders with princesses, as you try to uncover what the kingdom is really up to and just what the real purpose of Vash stones, the kingdoms power source is.
EL's plot is pretty good and has some good twists. The game is fully voiced for every character, including NPCs and this adds a lot to the game, even though the acting is sometimes flat, its convincing enough.
ELs main quest is very long and there are a few side quests as well, although these tend to revolve around killing a certain enemy or collecting items, there is sometimes a nice twist in the quest to keep you guessing.
ELs battle system should be familiar to many RPG gamers. The game uses a Final Fantasy style semi turn based system, where characters take turns, but time flows constantly, so if you don't pick what you want to do enemies will keep attacking you.
EL features a AI based party control system, where you can either control Astrain and use orders to tell other parry members what to do as, you queue up attacks for Astrain, or you can simply control the whole party like most RPGs.
AI party control is clever enough, and you can tell your allies to buff your party, debuff enemies, heal you and so on. The AI rarely does stupid things and at any time you can pause and assume control of the whole party, which is useful during the big difficult fights.
At its heart EL is a very traditional RPG experience. You travel though well worn locales, battle monsters to level up and learn new skills and upgrade your equipment regularly at shops.
EL features little character customization, and characters are essentially set in their roles as warriors or healers. However you can attach items known as fragments to weapons or equipment, these add new ability, such as element attacks or extra spells. This adds a bit of strategy to the game, as you can, for example attach a ice fragment before a battle with a fire monster and take advantage of their weakness.
EL's graphics are very impressive. The game is full 3D and features great looking, well detailed environments. Animations are smooth and natural looking, and there are plenty of flashy magic effects and cool moves to use in combat.
Soundwise, the game is equally good. As said before the voice acting is good enough and there is a lot of it. Sound effects are sharp and varied, fitting their roles well, from the crisp clang of a sword hitting home, to the sparkling sound of a heal spell. The music isn't bad either, and while a few, such as the battle theme are quite generic, most of it is good enough.
EL will keep you going for a very long time, because of its mammoth length for an idevice game. Areas are very large and there is a lot of fighting. The game introduces new wrinkles into the gameplay and interesting cutscenes often enough to pull you though the game quite well.
The Bad
There are few problems with EL. Poison seems to be rather overpowered. When you're poisoned you're damaged in real time rather than by turn and thus you can go from full health to dead in seconds, often before you can even act. Luckily poison is quite rare and after you level up high enough, it ceases to be as deadly. This is odd as EL is very easy for the most part. Enemies can barely scratch you much of the time, and battles can get very annoying because of how simple they can seem.
While ELs voice acting is good enough, there are a few pretty woefully acted scenes and people. This is to be expected however. There is a lack of enemy variety. Palette swaps happen quite often and in the first three areas I encountered the same monster among others in three different colors.
