Eternal Ring

Eternal Ring was released in 2000 as a PS2 launch title. It had a lot in common with FromSoftwares already existing King’s Field franchise, so it’s fair to call it a spin off of sorts. The story and introduction of the game is fairly simple. Your father, the king, sends you to a dangerous place called the Island of No Return with the objective of finding a powerful artifact known as the Eternal Ring. The game is an action RPG with a first person view perspective. It has a basic leveling system, complemented with a more advanced ring crafting system. Where the player can use collected gems from fallen enemies to change non magical rings into magical ones with special properties.

Controls

The controls are a mess. There isn’t any other way to say it. I’ve never been confused just looking at the controller configuration in a game before. In red text, it says that the analog sticks will not be used. But then under that, it says that analog sticks can be used to move and look up or down but only if you’re using a dual shock 2. I can move with the analog sticks, but I can’t look up or down. I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong, or if this is some translation issue. So I did some googling and found some ancient gamefaqs posts from over ten years ago talking about the same issue. Only to find other players from back then dealing with the same dilemma. And from what I read the instruction manual is more clear and says the analog sticks are not used. So we’re stuck with what we have and what we have is well, not good. The left analog stick rotates your character when holding either left or right. When holding up or down you move forward and backwards. The right analog stick does exactly the same thing. So you’re probably wondering, how do you move left and right? How do you look up and down? That’s kind of important in a 3d game. L1/R1 is used to strafe, so that’s how you move left and right. L2 is used to look up and R2 is used to look down. And yes, that’s as clunky and unintuitive as it sounds. This might be just barely tolerable in a game without much of a focus on combat, but that’s not what we’re dealing with here. This is a game with real time combat, with projectile spells you’re expected to aim at fairly mobile targets, both low and high up in the air. As soon as you’re confronted with any sort of mildly complicated combat encounter, either dealing with multiple enemies, or avoiding environmental hazards while fighting, everything falls apart.

Combat

The combat of Eternal Ring is very simple. The triangle button does a melee attack with your currently equipped weapon. The square button uses a magical power from your currently active ring. You can equip five rings at a time and pressing the circle button rotates between them to change which one is active. A small amount of cool down is required when switching your active ring. That’s about it as far as mechanics go but the problems arise in the execution. The hitboxes are not particularly good. The active frames on your attacks don’t usually feel quite right depending on what weapon you’re using. The rapier for example has an animation that looks like it would hit twice. First the blade comes down with force and has a hard swinging sound effect, then it’s thrusted forward. Usually when hitting an enemy with it, the point of impact seems to be at an odd place in between the swing and thrust. Magical attacks require fairly precise aim. The starting fireball for example doesn’t have an exceptionally large hitbox. This problem is compounded by the cumbersome controls. Trying to look up to aim at a flying enemy by holding L2 then holding left or right to track them while they try to dodge feels awful. The hurtboxes both on the player and the enemies also don't feel right. When trying to hit small enemies on the ground it looks like your weapon is going right through them. And when enemies are shooting projectiles at you, they can hit from absurd distances away or straight up clip through the environment.

RPG System

The basics of Eternal Ring’s RPG system is very traditional in design. You kill enemies and you get experience points. When you get enough experience points you level up and you get an increase to your stats. The unique aspect brought to the table is the ring crafting system. You can obtain magic rings that you can equip to either get a passive effect or a usable spell. This can range from a fireball, to a heal spell or something to deal with status effects like poison. Having these rings and using them to overcome specific challenges is a key focus of the game. So how exactly are they crafted? You will often find a non-magical ring. Where it has no effect and equipping it does nothing. But if you bring these rings to a crafting location you can use gems to imbue them and turn them into magical rings. You can use up to six gems when crafting a ring. There are gems of each element in the game (Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Light, and Darkness) and many levels of each signifying the gems power. Gems are obtained by killing enemies and are used up when crafting and are also used to buy things. At face value there are some cool concepts at play here. You could create a strong sense of discovery and wonder with a system like this. “What crazy powerful rings can be made?” “What combination of gems create unique spells?” But again, execution is a huge problem here. You can create a ring that’s underwhelming. A ring that prevents poison for twenty seconds just doesn’t feel good after burning through a bunch of gems. Getting gems takes time, and remember, you also need gems to buy things from merchants, so you always need these on hand. This is a game with set save points, so most people are going to feel encouraged to just save scum this system to hell. Your only other alternatives are to either grind like crazy, spending hours killing the same enemies over and over again while slowly mapping out the crafting system, or just looking up a guide. Considering that when this game came out, looking up a guide wasn’t a well known option, most people probably just save scummed. Which is a shame as it defeats the entire point of the system, but at the same time, the game doesn’t need to make it so tedious.

Level Design

The level design of Eternal Ring ranges from boring tedium to frustrating tedium. The biggest problem is the reuse of textures and scenery. I’m assuming they did this to save on disc space. It’s easy to get lost in a dungeon because different rooms will look the same. Sometimes different rooms literally are the same room visually. Enemies respawn as well, so that can also make it hard to tell where you’ve been and where you haven’t. It’s easy to find yourself wandering around in a dungeon finding yourself in the same rooms over and over again. When the game starts adding specific level gimmicks or challenges it goes off the rails. After the tutorial area and the first real level, you encounter a canyon. In this canyon you get poisoned. Why? I’m not sure. Just being in this canyon causes you to get poisoned. You really want the protect ring when you get here because it prevents poison. And thankfully, in the previous area a friendly NPC will give you one assuming you explore the area and find him. The problem is that the protect ring only prevents poison, it does not remove it. And the spell only lasts a brief time. So you need to be reapplying it constantly, which costs MP. Remember that switching your active ring has cool down, so using any of your other spells puts you at risk of not being able to cast protect again before you get poisoned. The poison status lasts for a long time and adds up to a lot of damage. If you don’t have a poison cure you’re either going to die, or burn through a lot of healing items or MP using a cure spell to survive it. Your best bet is to use an item that removes poison. But you need to buy those with gems. This whole ordeal is orders of magnitudes of tedium. Burning through MP to keep up the protect spell. Burning through gems to keep a stock of poison removals. Just to walk through this canyon. Keep in mind, this canyon is a large area with all sorts of enemies. So while doing this you’re still exploring, looking for items and fighting enemies at the same time. 

Story, Characters and Presentation

The story of Eternal Ring is minimal, which is typical of FromSoftwares design style, especially in their older games. You need to look more into the specifics, like the characters and world building through the environments and it’s pretty bad. At the start of the game you quickly find yourself in a town with a small collection of characters. The gate guards even rotate shifts based on the game's day/night cycle system. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense the way it's portrayed, but it’s fine, this is an early PS2 game, even doing something like that is fairly ambitious. For a moment you start to think that this could be a central hub for the player and over the course of the game you will see these characters evolve over time. Seeing how they react to the games' escalating events and how they respond to your accomplishments. But then after the first dungeon, which is essentially a tutorial, the whole town is destroyed and all the NPCs are killed off. I think this is supposed to be a dramatic and emotional moment. You can find the cleric lady just before she dies. But you essentially just met her and had one conversation. It doesn’t work at all. The whole setup with this town feels wasted and makes the games early pacing feel totally off. And after that you’re just kind of exploring a hostile world like any other. So it doesn’t really go anywhere. The voice acting ranges from okay, to comically bad. Cleric lady is fine, especially for an early PS2 game, but then you have characters like Wallace that sound like a New Yorker from Brooklyn, it’s so out of place. It becomes hard to take the game seriously. Graphically, the game is alright for its time, ignoring the reuse of textures. Characters look good and have distinct looks. Environments are at least varied in presentation.

Evaluation

Ultimately Eternal Ring doesn’t do any one thing particularly well. And the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Even if you wanted to play a game in this very specific genre, a first person view action RPG, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind came out only two years later, and blows Eternal Ring out of the water in practically every way. This game currently only exists as a curiosity to people that want to see where the Souls franchise came from. It doesn’t feel good to play, it’s repetitive, the story doesn’t present anything special and the challenge is almost entirely based on tedium instead of skill. Eternal Ring is abysmal.

-MajinSweet