Eternal Ring, FromSoftware's first game on the PS2, is another entry into the King's Field-like spiritual series that was initially expanded upon with Shadow Tower. There's ambition here, but unfortunately I think they dropped the ball.
In what I interpret as an attempt to make this a more welcoming iteration of King's Field, the movement speed is upped considerably, enabled by the stable performance of the PS2. Unfortunately the environments had to be made larger to account for this. This wouldn't be such an issue if we were doing the kingdom-spanning sprawl of King's Field III, but instead we're bound to an island, more akin to King's Field II. KF2 worked so well due to its compactness, which facilitated wonderful interconnectivity. Eternal Ring gestures in the direction of interconnectivity, but instead only achieves a series of oversized, mostly-linear themed levels stacked on top of each other, separated by loading screens.
The game is centred around its magic system, making less use of melee as it progresses. It's interesting but flawed. The story is conceptually fantastic, but hampered by poor in-engine cutscenes and voice acting... I'm struggling to get into detail here because honestly this game doesn't inspire a whole lot of passion from me. It's fine. It's ok. It's good enough for the worst King's Field game.
To reflect positivity, there are some developments that I'm hoping bode well for the the last two King's Field-likes I've yet to play. For one it does run quite well, a far cry from the PSX titles. More importantly, From have seriously stepped up their attack indications here, a big step towards something for which they'd achieve serious acclaim for once Dark Souls took off. Hit-boxes aren't great, but like, in the player's favour? I swear enemy attacks would wiff far more often than they should. Better to be shitty in favour of the player than against I suppose.
In what I interpret as an attempt to make this a more welcoming iteration of King's Field, the movement speed is upped considerably, enabled by the stable performance of the PS2. Unfortunately the environments had to be made larger to account for this. This wouldn't be such an issue if we were doing the kingdom-spanning sprawl of King's Field III, but instead we're bound to an island, more akin to King's Field II. KF2 worked so well due to its compactness, which facilitated wonderful interconnectivity. Eternal Ring gestures in the direction of interconnectivity, but instead only achieves a series of oversized, mostly-linear themed levels stacked on top of each other, separated by loading screens.
The game is centred around its magic system, making less use of melee as it progresses. It's interesting but flawed. The story is conceptually fantastic, but hampered by poor in-engine cutscenes and voice acting... I'm struggling to get into detail here because honestly this game doesn't inspire a whole lot of passion from me. It's fine. It's ok. It's good enough for the worst King's Field game.
To reflect positivity, there are some developments that I'm hoping bode well for the the last two King's Field-likes I've yet to play. For one it does run quite well, a far cry from the PSX titles. More importantly, From have seriously stepped up their attack indications here, a big step towards something for which they'd achieve serious acclaim for once Dark Souls took off. Hit-boxes aren't great, but like, in the player's favour? I swear enemy attacks would wiff far more often than they should. Better to be shitty in favour of the player than against I suppose.