Eternal Legacy HD — Review

EvilNinjaPhil
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

The phrase “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is something that the world of video games has taken to heart. No other genre applies this rule like the Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) and Eternal Legacy HD is a prime example of this both in a good and a bad way.

Taking it’s inspiration from the modern Final Fantasy games, Eternal Legacy HD casts you as Astrian, a blonde young man with an oversized sword and a mysterious past. He is part of a revolutionary group looking to overthrow the government and to discover the truth about his heritage. The story is a bag full of JRPG clichés which isn’t helped by some appalling voice acting and stiffly animated characters that seem to have had all the charm ironed out of them.

This isn’t to say that the game looks bad. On the iPad, Eternal Legacy HD looks an absolute treat and if it wasn’t for recent games like Rage and Infinity Blade, it would be one of the best looking on the platform. The main chunk of the game has you running around environments using on screen controls with a camera that you can rotate round in any direction. There is no hyperbole in saying that it looks like a PlayStation 2 game and is only let down by a lack of imagination in the art design of the world of Algoad.

Enemies show up in the game world and if you get too close you are taken to the battle screen. You can dodge them if you don’t want to battle them which stops the game being disturbed by lots of random encounters. When a battle does start, the enemies line up in front of your characters and off you go. Everything is menu driven with three action slots at the top of the screen which you can assign to attacks, spells, using items and the like. A time bar fills up and when it fills up all the way your character performs the next selected action in the queue. You have up to two partners in your party which are controlled by the computer, but you have some degree of control in that you can set them to heal everyone or constantly attack and a few others in between. It’s not the deepest combat system but it’s good fun thanks to the touch driven menus making it easy to use.

This is a tricky game to judge. For anyone who has even the briefest experience of playing JRPGs then you won’t find anything new here. You’ll know where the story is going to go from the first cut-scene and it won’t have the depth to really hook you in. For the majority of the people picking up Eternal Legacy, it’ll be their first time playing this type of game and, if so, it’s a pretty good introduction to the genre.

Three stars out of five

Reviewed on iPad

Originally published on 9th January 2011

The SquareGo Years

A collection of the words I produced for a now defunct website

EvilNinjaPhil

Written by

Writer, Podcaster, Man of The Internet

The SquareGo Years

A collection of the words I produced for a now defunct website

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