Eternal Champions

"I really didn't like it..."

When I heard of all the hype for this game, I was ecstatic. With Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition out, this looked to be another top fighting game for the Genesis but it was actually one of the biggest turkeys I have ever spent $50 on.

This game is about how various important characters have been killed in time, destroying the balance. The Eternal Champion has saved these people and put them in a competition where they must fight each other, the overall winner getting the right to fight the Eternal Champion and be sent back to their time alive.

Eternal Champions has characters from all different time zones so you get a caveman, a lizard man, a warlock and more. Each fighter has lots of punches and kicks (this game uses the same 3 punch and 3 kick button system that Street Fighter 2 has so a 6 button pad is essential). All of the fighters have loads of special moves, but you cannot do them all the time.

You cannot do them all of the time because each time you do a move it depletes a gauge. This gauge has to be re-filled, so don't do special moves for a while to make it fill back up. This is not a good feature as it makes matches boring as you sometimes can only do punches and kicks.

The big 24 meg cartridge size has been put to good use as each character is very large and has lots of animation, and there are plenty of stages. Whilst the characters all look very good, the effects are lame. Nothing looks spectacular enough and the fights can be pretty dull to watch with nothing exciting happening.

Sometimes though you can finish off your opponent in a gruesome, Mortal Kombat fatality like way. There isn't as much blood as in the Mortal Kombat games but some of these finishing moves are fairly interesting to see.

I did not like playing this game. I feel that it is really lacking to other fighting games on the Genesis. The biggest problem has to be the way special moves work, and it does not help that the AI of the opponents is stupidly difficult which almost makes the one player mode unplayable. What's even worse is that if you beat one opponent, then lose to the next, when you continue you are moved back to the opponent you fought before you fought the opponent you lost to.

SEGA have put in lots of extra modes to try and make you play the game more, such as training modes, but they did not keep me playing for long. The 2 player mode is slightly better, and there is also a pointless 32 player tournament mode (there is no way you would ever find 32 people willing to play this game). In the end only the one player and possibly the 2 player vs. mode are the modes you will ever play.

This is one of the most overrated games I have bought. Other Genesis fighting games like Mortal Kombat are much better than this. Eternal Champions is one of the worst fighters on this system.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/28/05