"An early fighting game with many unique features"

Eternal Champions was released on Sega not too far from the release of Mortal Kombat and one of the Street Fighter games. In many respects Eternal Champions was the best of these games; however, it was frequently overlooked and has remained relatively unheard of, despite a strong marketing campaign. Eternal Champions pits nine fighters against each other, with the victor receiving a second chance at his/her life. The nine characters range from the Stone Age up to a couple hundred years into the future. Each character has a level based in their time frame. You can do the Eternal Championship tournament; you can play an elimination match, where each player gets one life with every character and you play until one player has no characters left. You can make large tournament brackets to compete, up to 32 players can do single elimination, 16 for double elimination, making this a good game for a large crowd.

Fighting game control has never been easier. Several types of punches and kicks from the ground, crouching and in the air. All of the characters are different looking as well. All characters have several special attacks which use varying amounts of inner strength to pull off. So unlike Street fighter and Mortal Kombat, you will find it difficult to pin someone by using repeated special attacks. Your character can also taunt other characters, which causes them to lose inner strength. Since there are many moves in Eternal Champions, there are also many combos, some taking as many as eleven hits. The characters match up against each other quite well, making the game balanced but far from identical. The one complaint about the control is if you use a three button controller, which is the Sega default. It's annoying to switch from punch to kicks quickly, especially with the design of the controller. This can be remedied by shelling out a few dollars for a six button one.

Each character has a background of how they died. All of them died while failing to complete a major event in history. Since it’s a fighting game, these stories aren’t very in depth, but they are interesting.

The character graphics are stunning for a 16-bit system. Their attacks flow nicely and smoothly. Special attacks are also spectacular to see, making the already impressive normal attacks look like a child’s drawing. The level backgrounds are luscious with color and full of animation. This is the best part of the art work in the game, a must see. All of the levels have some special features to them as well. The training room is the only spot where you may encounter visual lag. If you set up too many traps and they all come on the screen at once, there is sometimes a slow down.

The sound effects are done right on par with other fighting games. Due to the large amount of special moves there are more of them, but they often use the same sounding effect. A few are good and some are just down right annoying at times. With taunting you can hear the characters voices as well, though only a word or two each. The music is a bit better than the sound effects. Every level has its own theme, including the training room. The problem is of course playing in the same area too often, the songs get rather annoying

There is not a whole lot of time eaten up when playing Eternal Champions. Once you master a single character you can do quite well with them and breeze through the game. You will still have difficulty with other characters though, which is an added challenge. It is doubtful you’ll need more than a couple of hours to play any facet of this game.

Since all the characters are different, you can replay it nine times just for the experience. Multiplayer matches are great against other people. Like all fighting games though, it does eventually become instinct rather than fun.

Scores: For those who prefer numeric data.

Music: 7/10
Sound: 6/10
Graphics: 8/10
Control: 9/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Replay Value: 5/10

Challenge: Above average, the main tournament is quite difficult, far superior to the Street Fighter games of the time. The training room adds a unique feature of getting hit by objects such as buzz saws and fires.

Numerical Overall Average: 7/10
Personal Average: 7/10

A solid fighting game and a good break from the Street Fighter games. Eternal Champions is a good buy and for costing near nothing now, it will still satisfy.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/24/03, Updated 05/03/03