Eternal Ring

"Zzzz... *snore*"

Introduction:
This title was one of the first Playstation 2 titles that I purchased. I was amazed by its $15 price tag in a time of all Playstation 2 titles being sold for $49 and snatched it up immediately. The fact that it was a RPG only made me think that my purchase was that much better. It only took a short while of playing the game to realize that the old saying is true; you get what you pay for. Eternal Ring was not created to enertain its audience, but instead to put them to sleep. Extreme head and eye aches are also side effects of playing this... "game".

Graphics: 6/10
I have to admit, at the time it was released, Eternal Ring had pretty decent graphics. Too bad that there are only a few parts that it gets to show off at it. There is only ONE town in the entire game. Besides that there are only dungeons and paths to dungeons. Some dungeons look cool for a while, that is, until you realize that you are going to be looking at the same exact thing for the next hour or so while your traverse the dungeon. It seems like the dungeons get blander and blander as the game goes on. You go from really brown cave to really dark brown cave to grayish cave. Then there may be a forest. It can be hard to tell what a dungeon is at first due to the insane fog system that covers everything 3 feet in front of you in fog. Back to the town, the town consists of only a few houses. Many featuring nothing interesting.

Music/Sound: 1/10
This is the reason why I had to play the game on mute. The music was so irritating that it would seriously give me a headache to hear it for more than 10 minutes or so. If you have ever played Quest 64 on the Nintendo 64, think of that music. But worst. Yes, worst. I think it is actually an insult to music itself to call the noise in Eternal Ring by the same name. The voices aren't much better. The main character speaks a little at the beginning of the game and then forgets that he can talk throughout the rest of the game. The other characters... well, sound terrible. It seems that instead of casting quality voice actors, From Software simply chose whoever was available in the immediate area.

Story: 3/10
Generic. There is an island where there is an super-uber-duper powerful ring called the Eternal Ring. The king of some random country sends you to find it and stuff. You go to the island where lots of random bad things happen. Then some more bad things happen. And you fight some random bosses. And the ending doesn't make much sense.

Gameplay: 1/10
Eternal Ring is a first person RPG. You see what the character can see, kinda like in First Person Shooter games. Just instead of shooting enemies with a gun, you kinda poke them with a sword. And you get EXP for doing so. You can also try to aim your generic FIRE, ICE, ETC. magic at them. The game itself is just a test to see how fast you can mash the attack button to kill each enemy. Some enemies require that you use highly advanced attack methods though. Such as: run around the enemy in circles and hit him, run behind the enemy and hit him, run around the enemy and use random magic. Its really... repetitive.

Replayability: 1/10
If you were able to play through this game even once (have to have been on mute) then you would never want to play it again. There are no secrets to unlock by beating the game. There isn't even a new game plus. NOTHING.

Overall: 3/10
This game should really be scored lower but I don't want to rate it as low as Hellboy: Asylum Seeker. Its not THAT bad. Just really close. The developers tried, but ultimately fell on their butts. And they fell hard.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 02/14/05