Endless Ages

Some combinations do untold good to the world: peanut butter and jelly, artificial cherry flavor and Coca-Cola, chocolate and just about anything. But a first person shooter merged with a role-playing game? Yes, many RPGs have elements of other genres in them while still maintaining the essential feel of an RPG. No, “Endless Ages” is not one of them.

The motion sickness soon wore off, the dying, alas, did not. There are four races for players to choose from. The idea of the game is that when beings die, they are reincarnated on a world named IIa. If they were weak in their previous life, they can be strong in their new one, if they were lacking in brainpower, they can acquire wisdom. In short, they can realize their full potential. I chose a Human Female. Boring, I know. I already know what it’s like to be a Human Female, why play as one? But I don’t have an Uzi in real life, so there were differences.

I was sadly disappointed by the “customization” available for the characters. A handful of hair color, eye options and poorly designed clothing were all I had to choose from. I tried out a little bikini bottom and thigh high boots number, only to discover when I started the game and saw myself from behind that I was wearing a thong. It’s hard to have respect for yourself when you’re running through the forest and all of a sudden all you can see on your screen is a butt, because the camera suddenly decides to zoom in on your posterior.

But let’s get back to killing things. I went to the area outside the human city to find the creatures she specified, Flobs. Flobs are giant and blue, they look like a cross between pill bugs and shrimp, and they attack you by rolling at you. They are the weakest creatures in the game, and I died fighting them, many, many times. I finally conceived of a strategy in which I ran backwards while shooting, keeping a large distance between the target and myself. In spite of this impressive strategy that usually ended with me pinned against a tree or a mountain, I was eradicated with alarming regularity. For the first few days the message “You have been killed by (insert name of creature here)” flashed on my chat screen often.

After I grew in experience, it wasn’t so bad, but then I discovered something else. Even if you can kill a Flob, there are many other creatures out there that can still hand your thong-clad bottom to you. I grew too bold after completing the Flob quest and thought that Celeste’s other assignments were going to be easy. I was wrong. I discovered that in order to successfully complete quests I had to either kill the same creatures over and over for the experience, or find someone with a character much stronger than mine to act as a bodyguard.

I wish that the NPCs were as helpful as the real players. Aside from Celeste, there were other characters scattered throughout the area that I explored. These characters could supposedly send me on a fabulous quest with treasure as my reward but…none of them would talk to me. So I was a weakling. Did they have to snub me so? What is with the lack of beginner quests? I thought that I had found something to do when a secretary begged me to clear out a cave infested with Infant Diliriums, until something huge and unspeakably ugly lurched out the shadows and dispatched me with its tongue.

Besides the annoying speech tendencies, the NPCs were horribly unhelpful. I tried out the one newbie quest that the manual mentions, which is to check in with all of the guards. I found most of them, but the “I’m so pretty” guard told me that the next one was at the rock beyond hers. I never did find that rock. Why? When I went to find it, I suddenly found myself outside of the safe zone. I was told that all the guards are inside the safe zone. Either someone was lying, or I’m blind.

The lack of useful information was perhaps my biggest stumbling block. If I did manage to get an NPC to offer me a quest, they offered very little information about it. I was continually lost because there is no map inside the game to refer to, and it was tedious to keep pulling out the manual map each time. I tried browsing the message boards at the web site, but none of them really had the information that I needed, and most of the links to helpful web sites either did not work, or were not helpful.