I finished Eternal Eyes yesterday. It bravely asks the question “what if Pokemon was a shitty SRPG on the PSX?” And it pretty much rules in all the ways I love games (ambitious in weird ways, extremely odd, not achieving its own goals, weirdly translated) and sucks in all the ways I can ignore (extremely easy, somewhat repetitive, obscure mechanics that turn out to actually be really simple).
I got this game when it came out (2000) for some fucking reason and I’ll never really know why. It’s haunted me since then, because I got intimidated by it and quit the game, but for some reason felt like I should 100% finish it some day. Well, that day was yesterday.
this is the level of translation we’re working with by the way. That’s a full sentence - it’s preceded by another character talking, so that’s all this guy said. There’s lots of weird shit like that.
Anyway, Eternal Eyes is an SRPG where you throw jewels at puppets (which are variously referred to as Magical Puppets, Magical Pappets, and Mappemon, but are clearly marionettes) to turn them into little monsters. Then you evolve the monsters by throwing more jewels at them, but it never reallllly tells you how that works. Instead, it comes down to trial and error. The spritework in this game for the puppets is so good though, like look at some of these little fuckers
There are a lot of palette swaps but I’m willing to be generous when the sprites are this good.
Anyway the strategy part of this is utterly laughable. The beginning of the game is “hit enemies until they die,” and there’s no real strategy except maybe retreating sometimes if your health is low. The mid-game is mostly discovering what spells are good (spoiler, most of them are the same to the point of having descriptions like “Same effect as Hammer”), and trying to figure out the sequence of jewels that will evolve your puppets.
The last third of the game game is figuring out the evolution method and just blasting your puppets to their last evolution which inevitably gives them spells that damage every enemy on the field, trivializing the entire game except for the last 3 battles which are extremely stupid.
The screen-clearing spells all have these incredible cutscenes that often don’t match the description at all. In fact, many of the descriptions for spells in this game are mixed up - the clearest case is that Sleep spells cause the poison ailment, and Poison spells make enemies go to sleep.
I am baffled that nobody has ripped and uploaded all the eternal eyes spell videos, they’re fucking weird and cool.
Also, the rarest and most powerful puppet is just straight-up named Alicia:
The last few battles are absurd because they’re practically the only battles where the enemy can heal, and all healing spells basically heal to full. So unless you can kill the healer in one turn, they’ll just keep healing themselves to full until they run out of MP, which can take upwards of 10 turns. Incredible shit.
They also seemed to realize that the screen-clearing magic was too powerful, so they gave most of the final enemies massive magic defense, but since I was so underleveled, I just kept leveling up in the middle of battle (which fully heals and restores MP) so I used the magic over and over until everyone else was dead, then just surrounded the boss and attacked until they ran out of MP or randomly decided to pass.
It’s such a bad game, I can’t recommend playing it at all, but I had a blast with it. The music is chill, the spritework is incredible at times, the translation is weird and funny, and it’s not very hard. Notably I streamed every second of it in Discord so that certainly made a difference. I don’t think I would have continued playing this if I couldn’t share it with my friends.
I didn’t even get close to completing the puppet list - since you have to evolve them all from scratch no capture mechanic) there was no way I was going to do that. But my final team (Hawking the magical broom, Alicia the…alicia, and Medusa Ball the beholder) were good enough for me.
The dream team:
The game’s plot is so straightforward as to be deceptive - @AutomaticTiger was convinced there was going to be a plot twist. There’s not.
My favorite dialogue boxes were these two, which were during an emotional moment where the main characters met their parents who were supposed to be dead. These two happen one after another, and it’s incredible:
Amazing game. Anyway, thanks to tigress, @stavekoff, @shrug, @Closed , @lonelyfrontier , and anyone else who hung out with me and got me through this weird fucken game. If you need me you can either find me chilling with the King of Gross or sailing in the Goondocks.