End of Eternity Japanese Demo Impressions

For the first time in what I’ve been led to believe ever, RPG powerhouse tri-Ace is partnering with someone besides SquareEnix. Yes, that’s right, tri-Ace has removed itself from the safe and supple nipples of Square and latched itself onto SEGA’s increasingly good selection of games with their new RPG, End of Eternity (or Resonance of Fate for us here in North America).

Taking a note from SEGA’s previous success, Valkyrie Chronicles, End of Eternity (PS3 and 360) uses a semi turn based battle system, utilizing both the advantages of classic turn based games, with the fun and intensity of real time action. Not only does End of Eternity do this, it does it exceedingly well.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I speak or read a word of Japanese, so a lot of the game mechanics that are explained could be completely lost on me, but after close to 13 hours of fiddling around through the short demo, which seems to be solely a demo of the battle system and battle system only, i think I’ve at least got the just of it.

You start of controlling one of the three characters you are given. From here you can choose to move around for a certain amount of time, which also allows any enemies in the area to move around as well. After moving, or before even doing so, you can press square to go into what I’ve come to refer to has “Jump Mode”… Creative I know. From here your character will run in the direction you specify, targeting an enemy and gain what I can only assume to be damage multipliers by letting the circle around the target go around as many times as possible before pressing X to open fire. The closer you are to the enemy, the quicker the multipliers come. You can also press square again at this stage to jump into the air, and rain heavy fire from above.

Speaking of heavy fire, this is where the game really shines. For starters, I’m absolutely in love with the style of the game, and when you start to shoot at your enemies, that style comes out full force. Your characters will preform anime style shootout maneuvers from both on the ground and in the air in an almost cut-scene style format, without feeling like your being taken out of the action.

You also get the chance to toy with what seems to be non lethal weapons, which weaken defenses, allowing characters with lethal force to finish them off with ease. On top of that, you also get a chance to play with explosives, in both grenade and environmental format. For instance, when you come to the boss of the demo, its pretty hard to take him down without utilizing the explosive barrels on legs, waiting for them to be in a good position to shoot them a deal heavy damage from the explosion.

You don’t see much of the leveling system in the demo, but it seems to be based on weapons as apposed to characters. Only one of your characters has grenades available for use, and apparently doesn’t start out very good with them, limiting you to 1 or 2 damage multipliers per attack. As you use them though, you begin to level up in that area, drastically adding to the amount of times you can watch the little circle go around.

The game is absolutely gorgeous, and shaping up to be something I’ll defiantly be throwing down my cash for. A nice fresh take on battle systems, and a little break from the overall medieval style RPG’s we’ve been getting lately (although Final Fantasy 13 will break that trend before we get to Resonance of Fate as it’ll be titled here). I urge you to go brave the language barrier and give this demo a download from the Japanese PSN. Can’t wait to see what else they have in store for me in the full game.

Tags: Demo End of Eternity Japanese PSN Resonance of Fate