I have more nostalgia for the 16-bit era, but it's arguable that Squaresoft's PSX offerings were their golden age, full of unqualified slam dunks (FFVII), flawed masterpieces (Xenogears) and excellent forays into hybrid-style RPGs (Parasite Eve) and even other genres (Bushido Blade). In this era, Ehrgeiz stands out as one of the rare mediocre titles: a hodgepodge of different influences which couldn't quite match up to the games that influenced it.
Its most obvious influence is Tekken, and it certainly matches up with Tekken when viewed purely as a spectacle. The art style is gorgeous, and while the character models look rather uncanny-valley by today's standards they were excellent for the time; this is one of the best-looking and smoothest-animated games on the Playstation. The graphics, music and general aesthetic are the game's main strength, and for a good hour or so made it feel more fun than it actually was. Unfortunately, the gameplay pales in comparison with Tekken, and also lacks depth when compared to another of its contemporaries - Destrega (which by the way is a Pretty Cool Game you should try if you have the chance). Ehrgeiz and Destrega share the same free-moving 3D arenas and a similar control scheme, but while Destrega added depth with a rock-paper-scissors system for special attacks, Ehrgeiz feels more clunky and seems to favor spamming your longest-reaching or highest-priority move rather than picking the right move for the right situation. The lack of character movelists in the practice mode does seem to highlight how the game subtly nudges the player towards spamming/mashing. The characters are also largely forgettable - I wish more time had been spent on fleshing them out and integrating them into the story more, and I'd have happily have gone without the FF7 cameos if it meant more effort went into giving them more personality.
The PSX port comes bundled with the 'Quest Mode', a dungeon crawler featuring just one dungeon and one town a la Azure Dreams. It has the framework of a good game, but it's let down by needless complexity - you need to constantly eat food in the dungeon to replenish your hunger meter, but you also need to mind what you eat as an unbalanced diet will lead to erratic stat gains on level-up. This, combined with breakable equipment and the fact that you essentially need to complete the dungeon twice with two characters make it too bloated for me to want to finish. It also feels strangely rushed and unpolished; many of the music tracks fade out and restart instead of looping, and finishing the quest mode leads to a very hasty text outro that's little better than the 'CONGLATURATION' text crawls from the NES days.
After a largely negative write-up, I'm surprised to find myself giving it a neutral rating of 2.5 stars. In the end, it looked and sounded great, and provided me with some genuinely fun moments, short-lived as they were. I just wish it could have been more! The ingredients were certainly there.
Its most obvious influence is Tekken, and it certainly matches up with Tekken when viewed purely as a spectacle. The art style is gorgeous, and while the character models look rather uncanny-valley by today's standards they were excellent for the time; this is one of the best-looking and smoothest-animated games on the Playstation. The graphics, music and general aesthetic are the game's main strength, and for a good hour or so made it feel more fun than it actually was. Unfortunately, the gameplay pales in comparison with Tekken, and also lacks depth when compared to another of its contemporaries - Destrega (which by the way is a Pretty Cool Game you should try if you have the chance). Ehrgeiz and Destrega share the same free-moving 3D arenas and a similar control scheme, but while Destrega added depth with a rock-paper-scissors system for special attacks, Ehrgeiz feels more clunky and seems to favor spamming your longest-reaching or highest-priority move rather than picking the right move for the right situation. The lack of character movelists in the practice mode does seem to highlight how the game subtly nudges the player towards spamming/mashing. The characters are also largely forgettable - I wish more time had been spent on fleshing them out and integrating them into the story more, and I'd have happily have gone without the FF7 cameos if it meant more effort went into giving them more personality.
The PSX port comes bundled with the 'Quest Mode', a dungeon crawler featuring just one dungeon and one town a la Azure Dreams. It has the framework of a good game, but it's let down by needless complexity - you need to constantly eat food in the dungeon to replenish your hunger meter, but you also need to mind what you eat as an unbalanced diet will lead to erratic stat gains on level-up. This, combined with breakable equipment and the fact that you essentially need to complete the dungeon twice with two characters make it too bloated for me to want to finish. It also feels strangely rushed and unpolished; many of the music tracks fade out and restart instead of looping, and finishing the quest mode leads to a very hasty text outro that's little better than the 'CONGLATURATION' text crawls from the NES days.
After a largely negative write-up, I'm surprised to find myself giving it a neutral rating of 2.5 stars. In the end, it looked and sounded great, and provided me with some genuinely fun moments, short-lived as they were. I just wish it could have been more! The ingredients were certainly there.