Eternal Ring

It’s games like Eternal Ring that make RPG fans lose all hope in the PS2. The system lacks the great RPG titles that the original Playstation had, and Eternal Ring certainly didn’t help the lineup any. I’ll be honest, this is among the worst RPGs I’ve ever played.

The story goes like this- An advisor to the King of Heingaria overhears the elders speaking of strange happenings on the Island of No Return. These elders hold considerable power in the kingdom and refuse to acknowledge the king’s queries into the events on the island. The King then sends his son, Cain Morgan, to the island to investigate. When he arrives he finds the island filled with monsters, and discovers that many of the people there are transforming into strange beasts. A monster who claims to be searching for “The Ring” attacks a small outpost and kills everyone there. Cain chases the creature deep into the Island of No Return where he learns of his secret past and unravels the mystery of the Eternal Ring. The story is explained sparingly throughout the game and doesn’t end up being a very good one. Nothing particularly interesting EVER happens and there is absolutely no high point in the plot. I’d like to mention the characters a bit, but they’re hardly worth it. You rarely run into anyone else on your journey and none of them have much of a story. Even your main character,Cain, doesn’t have much background to him. Late in the game you find out a little bit about Cain and a character named Lyla, but it’s nothing interesting and by that point no one really cares.

The graphics in Eternal Ring have their highs and lows. There’s a really nice opening cinema, which is sadly the game’s best feature. There’s a few highly detailed and all around cool looking dragons in the game and some of the effects like fire and water were decent too. Unfortunately, the backgrounds were dull and repetitive, and most of the characters didn’t look too convincing either. Character movements weren’t a high point to the game either, but most of the monsters really only had one or two attacks. This made combat even more boring, but saved you from having to see additional crappy movement. Half the game you’re cooped up in a cave somewhere and it’s often a little too dark to be able to play comfortably. The game went into the detail of adding day and night, which was an interesting feature. But it was an addition that grew really annoying when you could hardly see at night and fell off every cliff around, or walked right into a river and drowned (stepping into any water would kill you…even if it’s only the very edge of the river). The item shops, few as they are, also close when night comes, so if you need some items then you might as well just throw your controller down and grab a snack because you’re gonna have to wait for the item shop guy to get out of bed. In nearly any other game you wouldn’t have this problem because you could just go level your character up while you wait, but combat is just too bad in this game to actually want to fight. I also had a lot of trouble with monsters clipping right through walls. Don’t walk along the wall if you play this game because if there’s a monster on the other side of that wall he’ll likely be able to stab right through and get you. It happened quite often and got really annoying when the monsters could attack me and I couldn’t fight back!

I don’t recommend this game to anyone unless you’re really desperate for an RPG and you’ve played 99% of the other games on the PS2. Even then you’d be better off to play an original Playstation game. With any luck the upcoming titles on the PS2 will more than make up for what this game lacks as well as for the current shortage of great RPGs on the system right now.