This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on November 3rd, 2018. It has been edited slightly for formatting and repetitious word choices.
Hello, and welcome to another PlayStation Basement. Every Saturday I'm reviewing strange and obscure games for the original PlayStation using a nine-point scale where 7-9 is Good, 6-4 is Neutral, and 3-1 is Bad. Here we go.
Hello, and welcome to another PlayStation Basement. Every Saturday I'm reviewing strange and obscure games for the original PlayStation using a nine-point scale where 7-9 is Good, 6-4 is Neutral, and 3-1 is Bad. Here we go.
This week, let’s talk about Eternal Eyes. This was a very late RPG for the console published by Crave in America (2000) and Sunsoft in Japan (1999) and Europe (2000). It was developed by TamTam who don’t seem to have made any other notable games. Taking after many other games at this time, Eternal Eyes is a monster-raising tactical RPG with a light-hearted feel. Interestingly, the monsters in this game are puppets. Unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to the expectations set by Pokémon.
The cover art for Eternal Eyes isn’t particularly outstanding. The US and European cover is a shot of a shadowy castle wall with glaring red eyes over the top of a strange sword. The Japanese cover has a nice blue color, but the characters are drawn so oddly. I don’t really like either version; they are both generic for their time and place. The US one is a little weirder and more noticeable, almost too generic, so it wins out a bit.
Graphically, Eternal Eyes opens with a nice animated cutscene and has some nice character art in dialogue boxes. The designs are a little out there at times for the human characters. The sprites are okay, the monsters having some really cute and cool designs but also having some limited animation. Some of the sprites are reused with a different coloration a few times as typical for an RPG of this era. The environments these sprites subsist in are 3D, an effect that I like a lot. Unfortunately, the environments are pretty plain and are few in their variety. You won’t find complex layouts or cool details here. The spell effects are pretty neat, especially the strongest spells which play a short FMV that usually reminds me of a kitsch velvet painting you might find at a thrift store featuring giant mushrooms, capped wizards, and roaring storm clouds. There are also some full-screen still images used for story purposes too. These are uncommon and range from awesome to meh. Graphically, Eternal Eyes is a mixed bag.
The sound follows suit. The quality of the sound is fine, and the music is good, if somewhat generic and heavily looped. There is not a vast range of sounds here either. The opening cutscene has a great song to go with the nice animation, and that is the highlight, musically.
As mentioned, Eternal Eyes is a tactical RPG in the style of Arc the Lad, Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, Famicom Wars, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, and many others. The player moves their team of characters across a grid one-by-one and makes attacks on the enemy team(s). Attacks have specific ranges, strengths, and other attributes. The only human character in Eternal Eyes is Luke (called Luca on the box), a boy from the Eternal Eyes/Scarlet Eyes/red-eyed tribe who can control monsters like others from his race of people. All characters level up when making attacks on the enemy, getting different amounts of XP depending on the strength of the enemy, the attack used, the damage done, the health healed, and other factors. You can also power-up your monsters stats or grant them new spells with jewels dropped by defeated enemies. If your monster is strong enough, and depending on the jewel used, the puppet may evolve into a stronger form. Different forms can vary greatly from the monster they came from, so there is some luck and planning here. Like Fire Emblem, Eternal Eyes has permadeath for your characters - if one of your puppets falls in battle, they will revert to puppet form and have to be built up from the beginning. Thankfully, this game is very easy, the enemy AI making incredibly odd choices, so I never had to do that.
While the battles are short, Eternal Eyes is too easy with little payoff. The story is the standard save-the-world-from-a-person-who-wants-to-resurrect-a-monster plot, and the characters are very basic. Though there are other characters besides the hero, Luke, they don’t do much. Elena, Nicol, and Mouse have things to say in the breaks between each chapter, consisting of a series of battles in one area with breaks in between, but there isn’t much development with these characters, the plot utilizing them as people to rescue or as exposition. The translation is poor as well with dialogue that usually ends up terse, unintuitive, or just grammatically incorrect. There are some lines where I seriously was unsure of what was being said. The plot is overall pretty easy to follow despite this, but it’s so cookie-cutter and somewhat uneven as to how light-hearted versus serious it is intended to be, that that isn’t much to praise really.
The game has some other issues too. While Luke is the only character to equip armor and weapons, to use items, and to place jewels on the field as traps, he overall just seems weaker than the monsters. I suppose that is intentional, but I’d rather see a few more human characters available and an ability to select a larger team out of that variety. Then there would be more strategy as to using humans or monsters. The monsters spells are pretty unwieldy at times, the translation making it hard to understand what the spells do. Once I got the strongest spells in the game, it was best to use these nearly every turn; despite the high MP cost, advancing a level restores your stats and therefore allows you to cast again and again. Sometimes the battles ended before the enemy could even act anyway. I appreciate that TamTam developed a light-hearted and simple RPG, but this could have used a bit more strategy. I also have to mention that the controls are unintuitive, both during exploration of towns and moving the cursor in battle, the latter taking a bit of time to get used to.
Eternal Eyes is a beginner RPG that doesn’t have a lot to it. I really enjoyed powering up my monsters and seeing what they would change into; there is a new game plus feature if you really want to collect them all. I liked the fast combat. The serious lack of difficulty and variety throughout the game made it somewhat of a chore to play, and the lack of an interesting story, sidequests, or exploration did not help either. It was fun to see the monsters, but Eternal Eyes could have used a better writer or at least a better translation, an obvious victim of its late release date.
Eternal Eyes receives a rating of Neutral (5).
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