Eternal Sorrow: The Game

"Eternal Sorrow: The Game" is a turn-based RPG developed by ChuJooRi using RPG Maker XP and is another entry in RMN's 5th Anniversary event where developers were tasked with creating a bad adaptation of a book, movie, music video, or comic in five hours. An event that led to a lot of minimalistic and underwhelming projects, but that's to be expected considering the time limit. Though oddly enough "Eternal Sorrow: The Game" isn't an adaptation of anything. Instead it's a game whose few jokes are derived from having a character appear to criticize the game and how it clearly differs from the non-existent source material.



A character you eventually murder for being annoying since adaptations are always forced to deal with the need to subtract material, add material, and combine material for the sake of brevity. And there are a lot of reasons on why this might happen. A person adapting a book into a movie will most likely remove scenes where a character does an internal monologue since this doesn't adapt very well to the big screen in most cases. If anything it just comes across as weird as shown in "Dune" (1984). It's even weird to showcase internal monologues in commercials which led to a joke in the movie "Airplane!" (1980).

At the same time a movie might add additional scenes for more context or to pad out a work in order to make a film feature length. And a film might also combine material in order to shorten a work as well as improve the overall pacing. And these issues essentially apply whenever you adapt a work from one media to another so changes are basically inevitable. Though some changes between media are definitely inexplicable. A good example of this exists within this project even if it isn't a true adaptation by having the game change the gender of the main character.

At any rate I suppose I'm getting a bit sidetracked by the nature of adapting works here and should get back to talking about "Eternal Sorrow: The Game" and more specifically it's very minimal storyline. You play as John, a dude with green hair, whose trying to understand why all of his classmates have disappeared and begins his search by exploring his school where he learns that the principal was behind it. As such you battle the principal and win the game when you slay her. Albeit the game ends with a game over screen as if to give the player a middle finger for playing this game.

A game whose combat is rather boring since none of the enemies are a threat to the player since you begin the game at level 99 and the ability to one-shot the basic enemies you'll run across which pop up in random encounters.



In fact, I question why these encounters exist at all beyond the developer wanting to make a joke about this element being bad on the grounds everyone is supposed to have disappeared at this point in the story. A joke that really isn't worth the hassle of getting jumped every ten steps or so in my opinion. To make matters worse the game only has two basic enemy types so your going to be seeing them quite a bit as you navigate the school in search of the principal.

And while the principal does put up more of a fight. You can still easily cut her down using skills with little concern for your overall health. So much so that I'm not sure why she was designed to withstand about half a dozen hits or so beyond the developer trying to pad this game out so it would be at least five minutes long.

At any rate outside of the boring combat the game also features some very bare bones classrooms that are so barebones that I'm left wondering where the cabinets and bookshelves are.



Jeez, even the classroom for my choir classes had more stuff in it. And you really don't need a lot of stuff for choir beyond a bunch of drawers where the instructor can keep copies of the sheet music with lyrics for the students. And a series of raised platforms for the students to sing on so they can all see the music teacher at the same time if he or she tries to direct the class with hand gestures.

And to make matters worse in the eyes of some people the game relies entirely on the RTP for the soundtrack as well. So the game can be very boring on even an audio level if you've played a lot of RPG Maker XP games over the years that relied on the default assets that come with the engine, but I'd be lying if I said this surprised me considering the time frame this game was made in.

At any rate this is probably one of those projects that has been mostly forgotten and is only worth bringing up again if your looking for a short game to review since it's so barebones it has little to offer. And while a game can be highly addictive while being very basic in my opinion like "Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim". I don't think "Eternal Sorrow: The Game" manages to achieve this. And this is coming from someone who enjoys curb stomping my enemies, but I also have to feel like I earned the right to tower over them like an unstoppable god by putting in the time to get that strong.