by Pete Davison

Created on: January 09, 2009   Last Updated: January 12, 2009

Japanese RPGs are ten-a-penny on the consoles. In recent years, developers have had to start trying new things to keep the genre a little more fresh - people have long since moved beyond the simplicity of the early Final Fantasy games and we now have titles such as Persona 3 marrying traditional RPG action with "dating-sim" style socialization, Final Fantasy XII ditching traditional turn-based combat altogether in favour of a quasi-real-time system and many other games attempting innovative things to keep audiences interested.

Enter Eternal Eden, which does none of these things. Part of this is perhaps due to the underlying game engine being based on Enterbrain's RPG Maker software which, although it puts professional-looking titles within reach of users by virtue of the fact it provides a huge variety of stock content to use, it also makes it very easy to produce tired, cliched Final Fantasy knock-offs. With the gameplay itself being anything but innovative, it is down to the writing and narrative to inspire interest in a game like this.

Fortunately, this is Eternal Eden's strong point. Taking its cues from Genesis, it tells a tale saturated in Christianity based on a creative reinterpretation of Eve's fall from grace. The religious themes stay just about clear of being preachy and serve to produce an interesting game world filled with entertaining characters, including the princess who likes pie more than anything else in the world, the knight who apologises to the Father for his companions not being as awesome as he is and the well-intentioned but blundering best friend. The hero himself is a walking cliche, but his companions make up for this.

Eternal Eden seems willing to face its own limitations, with more focus being put on story progression than combat. Enemies are visible in the field, so it is possible to sidestep tedious combats altogether for the most part, should the player desire. There is also a potentially interesting focus on scavenging for items in the field for survival, though in practice this simply becomes a case of wandering into every corner and alcove in a given room and hitting Enter until you find something.

Eternal Eden isn't bad. The story is an interesting enough twist on the "save the princess, save the world" trope and the visual presentation is pretty good for the genre. Sound fares less well, with stock looping MIDIs from RPG Maker forming the soundtrack for much of the game. It would have been nice to see a little more creativity on the presentational front, though when it comes down to it the writing is the most important thing about an RPG of this style, and Eternal Eden certainly has that, with the writer clearly making his passion for his art shown both through the witty dialogue and his blog of the game's development and reception.

Is it worth buying? If you're a fan of SNES-era RPGs and can't get enough, then yes, absolutely, it is. Other gamers with more "modern" tastes may want to give it a miss.

3/5

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