Eternal Paradise

Eternal Paradise Review
by Theryan

Well, Ephiam asked me what I thought of the game after I finished, so I figured I'd make a review out of it. Here we go:

STORY 6/10
The story starts off pretty slowly and remains that way through most of the game. At the beginning, the story is “Some guy did stuff to ruin the main characters' lives apparently. Now they want to kill him so they went to Venaitura.” Eh. That's bland at best, but it does pick up later on (I'm not going to reveal any spoilers though) which is good.

CHARACTERS 4/10
I didn't like the characters very much. They all seemed very... generic. They each had very one-dimensional personalities, both heroes and villains. Also, there's too much talking, a lot of which is repeated over and over, so I end up mashing the “z” key repeatedly to get back to the game, usually missing the one important piece of dialogue buried in the myriad of dry text.

DUNGEONS/MAP DESIGN 4/10
This was probably my least favorite part of the game. There were a lot of really large maps that contained little to no out-of-battle challenges and puzzles. After navigating through a plethora of purple, purple mazes and castles, I would have killed for a change of scenery at least. In a dungeon-crawler, you really need something to keep the player occupied out of battle since there's no towns, overworld, or sidequests. I played DF: V, which did a good job with puzzles and challenges, so I had higher hopes for Eternal Paradise.

GAMEPLAY 8/10
I'm going to focus mostly on in-battle gameplay since I wrote about out-of-battle gameplay above. Although there weren't any custom battle systems, I liked the battles in this game. I think that giving characters a relatively low MP amount coupled with an easy way to regain it through defending worked really well. It forces you to plan how to manage your MP better.
Touch encounters were a nice addition as well. That's not really new, but it lets the player control how much time is spent battling, and gets rid of the oh-so annoying random encounter 1 step away from the exit scenario.
Boss battles were really awesome later on in the game. They get healed of all status ailments every once in a while, so you can't just spend the first few turns using stat magic and depending on that throughout the battle. You really need to prioritize because you only have a few turns to take advantage of their status.

GRAPHICS/MUSIC 9/10
Not much to say here. Good graphics and music all around. Even though the graphics and music came from several different games, they all seemed to mix well together.

OVERALL 31/50
Well, it was pretty fun. Walking through the dungeons got pretty boring after a while, and the characters were pretty boring, but the battles were fun, it had a decent story, and the graphics and music were good. The New Game+ is a good idea, but I haven't played it yet, so I've nothing more to say about that.