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A Game About Defeating a Supreme

Intro
Eternal Twilight is a turn-based RPG Maker game with a lot of equipment customizations. The game has 3 selectable difficulties with up to 5 playable, unique party members.

Graphics
The graphics are amazing. Every map is done beautifully with the special effects that make them stand out even more. The only thing that bugs me is the tree in the first forest because my head can't seem to ignore the fact that I'm looking at a forest with trees that are looking like a bunch of rectangles like that. But again, that's not a big thing.

However, I think the graphics cause the game to run slow on low-spec devices. There are a lot of occasions where I had to mash a button like crazy just to make a selection and I even had to wait for a long time until the attack animation to finish. This becomes worse when I had to go to a certain place (Runecrafting Shrine). Luckily, sometimes it returns to normal speed near the end of the game.

There are also several occasions where doors in an area aren't noticeable enough. One example is in Surox Mayor's house; it's kinda hard to see the entrance to the bottom right area.

Story
You might notice that this game has a lot of story content from my playtime. Well, you're right. Even though you spend most of your time exploring dungeons and fighting monsters, the story in this game isn't all that simple. You'll start with a girl who is camping in a forest before it shifts into running away from the empire. I admit that the story flows well between each cutscene and I always excited to know what will happen next. The interaction between each character is always amusing to watch, especially when Ryudo and Trish do their thing; there's not a single occasion where I didn't smile because of their silly act.

There is also a "one-on-one conversation" feature that will show up as you progress the main story. It's completely optional to do but doing so will tell you more about each character. I like how the game doesn't neglect any of its main character backgrounds and focus on improving them. Every character also has a unique personality and charm.

However, the ending doesn't give a proper conclusion to me. The story might have a conclusion for the overall story but not for the characters. It has been hinted about what the characters will do afterward before the final fight but seeing that the ending is just a bunch of cutscenes that show how the areas have become, it kinda breaks my expectations since it feels like it's too long and unnecessary.

The game
As I said before, it's a turn-based game with up to 5 party members. You'll start playing with one and more will join as you progress the story. Each character will have their role, skill, and specialty. There is a character that will deal more critical damage than the others, a character that can heal all of your party members from hitting the enemy, and so on. You might want to read the manual to fully understand them. Honestly, I didn't know most of the character's unique traits until I almost finished the game because it wasn't covered in the tutorial. I understand though; this is a lot of information to take in.

The game has 3 different difficulties in this game: normal, hard, and hell. I choose the easiest difficulty because I didn't like to grind and sure enough, you don't need to grind to finish the main story. You can always change the difficulty after you reach a certain point in the main story by paying a certain amount of gold.

You'll need to read a lot to fully understand this game. Luckily, there is a Manual menu where you can read and understand the game mechanics. It's also fine if you're too lazy to read them all though because the tutorial already covered the basic things; I myself didn't read them until I'm nearing the end game.

There are two types of skills in this game: instant and normal. Instant skills can be used without taking up your turns while normal skills will take up your turn. Some skills also have a cooldown while some are not.

The game has the usual MP and TP mechanics, where skills require either of them to cast. You can recover MP either from your equipment effect, a certain party member's skill (Trish), or items and you can recover TP from casting a skill, receiving an attack, being given a buff by a certain party member (Damien), or using items. There is also a certain party member that has HP as the skill requirement (Minerva) and certain skills that require both MP and TP to cast. TP is also carried over battles so that's a plus.

I find that the healer's (Damien) heal is a bit lacking at some point in the game. I'm not sure if it's because of my equipment that needs to be upgraded or not though. His skills also require a lot of MP to cast that I had trouble with it sometimes.

You can get AP and EXP by defeating enemies. EXP is used to level up your characters while AP is used to learn skills. There are a lot of skills that your character can learn. You can upgrade them to a higher level if you have learned all of their basic skills. It's possible to learn all of the basic skills so you don't have to worry about being left out. However, I find the animation that shows up after you learn all the basic skills to be long and unnecessary.

This game will also offer a class upgrade at some point in the game by doing certain things. This class upgrade will give you a unique skill and an extra accessory slot.

This game also has a Soul Trigger ability. Soul Trigger is a buff that will affect your party members with a lot of benefits. It can be activated through your skill page and you can use it if you have enough bar that can be filled by dealing damage, taking damage, or casting a certain skill.

Another feature that I find to be interesting is the Absorption Shield. You can heal your party member to full HP and if you heal them again, you'll get an Absorption Shield buff instead that will act as a shield to take a certain amount of damage based on the amount of the shield that you have. This shield is very useful when you're fighting a strong enemy that might kill your party member in one turn. However, I find that it's hard to stack these shields because even though you can heal a party member from less than half HP to full HP, you still won't be able to stack a lot of these shields if the party member that you heal isn't in full HP. These shields will also decay by 20% every turn so that's kind of a letdown.

This game uses touch-based encounters in the dungeons and random encounters in the overworld. However, the enemies in the second dungeon tend to show up suddenly that can surprise people with a weak heart. These type of enemies also take a long time to beat because you need to set up your party member before you can deal some damage. Although the battle itself isn't a problem for me, I tend to forget where to go next afterward because of this and the fast enemy respawn time. I finished the second dungeon in 5 hours because I kept on forgetting where to go next and reexploring the same place over and over. Also, you can speed the battle up with the shift button. However, this setting isn't saved so you have to press the button every time you restart the game.

One of the charms of this game is its boss mechanics. Each boss has their unique mechanics and you need to plan your actions and build your character right to beat them. However, I find that the last boss to be kinda disappointing though because of one of his skills (the instant death one). That aside, I like the music at the beginning of this battle.

You can customize your character as you wish from its equipment system. Each equipment has different abilities and stats which makes them unique. You need to mix and match the equipment based on your party member's strength to bring their true potential. However, since you can only get these equipments from crafting or defeating enemies, it might be quite grindy just to get the right equipment. This becomes worse with the rarity system the game has since you also need to get the equipment in high quality to get a better stat.

This game also has a crafting system. You can craft items and equipments by using a certain item. These items can be obtained by defeating enemies or salvaging some items. However, if you decide to craft an equipment, the rarity of the crafted item will be randomly generated. Luckily, you can always save before you craft an item and load your save if you don't like the crafting result.

There is also a minigame in the game. There are 3 different minigames that you can play and I like them all, especially Button Mash. They serve well as a refreshment from the normal battles and you can earn something that might be useful to your adventure.

This game also has a trophy system where you can get some rewards by doing a certain thing. However, I find that some of them (especially the ones where you have to beat a certain boss several times) to be grindy.

Well, I think that's all that I can think of. My point is, this game has a lot of features that you might not expect and I enjoyed most of them. I didn't use all of them until I run into the optional content though. My only complaint is that this game runs too slow. It might be because of my low-spec device and I suspected that it happened because of the special effects but I couldn't seem to find an option to turn them off.

Seraphic Dungeon (Optional Content)
I think it's better to put this in a separate section because this content differs greatly from the main content. The optional content is a boss fight mode where you have to fight 11 boss fights to complete it.

This content will be unlocked right before you defeat the final boss. The first thing that you should notice after you unlock it is the introduction of POWER system. POWER is basically a measurement of your party member's strength. I actually didn't know where this POWER is located when it was introduced before I decided to ignore it and head to the dungeon. Later on, I figured out that the POWER is written in both the warp and boss locations.

You'll get some new items after you defeat the bosses. The most important item is Seraph Crystal, which can help you to craft ultimate armor, accessories, and augments. Remember how each piece of equipment has a unique ability? These augments will let you embed one of its effect on the equipment so you can build your party member with ease.

To be honest, I didn't know that you can stack a lot of the augments (such as Death, Breaker, Venom, etc) at once because it is said that it's not stackable. I also didn't know how to mix and match the augments for my party members efficiently. Sure, you can test them out and see how it works, but it'll cost you a lot if you were wrong because the augments won't give you a lot of Seraph Crystal if you salvage them.

I noticed that the difficulty spiked in this content because I got wiped out several times from the first boss even though I can beat the final boss without any problems. Actually, it's kinda obvious since my POWER is below the recommended and I was being stubborn to tackle the boss since I'm too lazy to grind. The thing is, there is hardly anything that I can do to increase my POWER apart from farming AP to increase my skill or crafting better equipment. I didn't want to do both because farming is too boring and crafting is too luck-based. I ended up giving up and did the second thing though because I couldn't seem to beat the boss without doing anything. Since crafting is luck-based, I need to save and load a lot just to get the equipment that I wanted. It took me hours until I crafted legendary equipments with decent stats for all of my party members. I wish the crafting rate is increased at that point because it was so tiring to save and load for hours.

Anyway, even though I had upgraded my equipment and had POWER above the recommended, it's still not an easy task to beat the bosses. There are several times where my party got wiped out because the boss attack is too strong to kill my party members in one turn even though they are in full health. I even had to resort to spam Soul Trigger and items which I usually never use in battle. Applying the right buff and taking the right action in each turn becomes vital in these fights that you need to pay attention to the boss' mechanics to beat them. These bosses take around 30 minutes to finish which can be greatly reduced or increased based on your equipment.

However, just knowing the mechanics and having the recommended POWER aren't enough. You also need to build your character right. I only boosted whatever the primary stat of my party member is and I suffer greatly from that. The boss fight becomes much easier after I use t28nguye's equipment build because I didn't need to worry about the lack of MP and TP generation of my party members anymore. Note that I only change my build on the final boss of this dungeon so my original build still works until then. I wanted to test it with my original build after I defeated the final boss but I overwrite my save before I changed my build and I was too lazy to set up my current build to the previous one.

These boss fights actually give me more headaches than the main story because of its difficulty, but I believe that hardcore people will enjoy them. It's just that I didn't expect that I will have such difficulties in defeating the bosses in the easiest difficulty and the slow performance of the game which is caused by my low-spec device didn't help.

Pros:
- 3 difficulty options
- 5 unique playable party members
- Skill learning system
- Fully customizable equipments
- Unique bosses
- Crafting system
- Minigames

Cons:
- Sometimes the game can be slow on low-spec devices
- A massive spike in difficulty on the optional content
- Grindy trophy
- Hard to stack Absorption Shields

Conclusion
It's a challenging turn-based RPG Maker game with a lot of customization options and features that will be enjoyed for hardcore gamers. I didn't recommend this to casual gamers though because the optional content is too difficult.

Posts

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Thank you for putting the time to write up this beefy review! I truly appreciate you for doing this. There's a lot of great feedback in here for me when (or if) I get around to making another game that I'll be able to put to use.

I'm sad to see that low-end spec computers are having trouble running the game though. I know it's from a handful of different plugins running in the background and some of the map effects/lighting going on.

Glad you finished the game and even got through all the optional stuff too!
Thank you for playing! :)
No problem! There was another game that also has the same problem like this too that i played recently. I think it's time for me to upgrade my laptop, haha.

Anyways, thanks for making such a great game!
Instead of asking if your PC can run Crysis, we should ask if it can run a RPG Maker game with a lot of plugins and special effects.

I confirmed the difficulty setting is ignored in the Seraphic Shrine, since the bosses' HP is the same on every difficulty. The Seraphic Shrine bosses are balanced to require Hell mode tactics, so I imagine the jump from Normal must be shocking. At least it's not like Tales of Destiny R where the bonus boss deliberately punishes the player for using the easiest setting.
Perhaps turning special effects on and off can be an option. It's hard to see how many plugins that a game can handle before it runs slowly on some devices though, especially if you are testing on high spec device.

I'm not sure why hell mode tactics are needed for the normal mode since people have their difficulty preference.

I think there is also a game on this site that gives extra content for beating the game in the hardest difficulty setting. I don't really like it though because i'm not suited for those difficulty and it ruins the experience since i won't be able to get everything that the game has to offer. I end up uninstalling the game without finishing it because i can't seem to kill the boss at some point.
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