Eternal Eden, created by Blossomsoft back in 2009, is a great role-playing game which took me back to my childhood when I used to play the Classic Zelda games. You get to control up to four characters that need to correct sins that threaten to destroy their perfect world. You get to fight slimy beasts, huge spiders and many more enemies on your journey. Get ready for long dialogues, mind bending puzzles and old school combat.
Welcome to the world of Eternal Eden, a realm of peace and wealth; it’s their princesses’ 900th birthday bash, as with each birthday she will kiss the man that creates the best pie “Chicken pie or cherry pie”. Downy ? “love the name” driven by pure jealousy commits the worse sin of all, to help him win the competition he steals the Fruits of Wisdom from the Eden Tower, this of course is rule that must never be broken as it was created by someone called the “Father”.
Downy passes the pie to the princess and BOOM she turns in to a beast, the clouds around the area turn dark and the rain gets heavier. Noah “Ok heavy rain, character called Noah, maybe this is the flood” ok back to the story. Noah, Downy and Jean must decide to save the princess, restore the world and bring back peace and tranquillity. A typical story plot for this type of genre, rescue the princess save the world, however you will find out the story is told really well and the communication between the characters is rather amusing.
You must go off and explore the world, full of dungeons, caves and monstrous mountains, as you gain more ground in the game you get to travel by Boat “Boat looks a little small” which allows you to travel to other islands. Regardless of which islands you go to you will end up having to fight your way around, well that’s’ a lie, you do not have to fight but as your team members gain experience from killing mobs, it’s in your best interest to fight everything.
All experience gained, levels your character, this in turn increases your health pool and access to new skills. You will need to gain experience to move onwards and defeat the harder enemies and bosses; the best thing however is the further you go in the game the more you need to use your head a little more to defeat your foes. When exploring the land, I found that a red exclamation mark would appear at times, so I found myself exploring every inch of ground looking for weapons and potions and other items which these exclamations marks dropped for us.
Puzzles – One I wrote down was called the Turtle Hunt, where you need to discover different type of turtles scattered around one of the isolated islands. So what types of turtles are their? Cave Turtles, only found in caves of course, moon turtles only come out at night and finally water turtles that can only be found in water. The more turtles you find the higher your rank gets in turtle hunting. Oh yes before I forget… save points; there is not enough of them and you do not have the facility to quick save.
Something I have to admit right now, it took me some time to get used to the game graphics and the one dimensional graphical characters, however over time I did get used to it and was able to ignore this issue. The story does keep you hooked to the game and I can guarantee you this, if I can look past the old style game graphics, when I personally go for top end graphical games, then anyone can.
Ok down to the gritty issues: No in-game map and no way to control your character skills sets when you gain a level as the game auto upgrades it for you. I would have liked to of been able to choose my skills for my character myself and have more control over what my class can do, but this is no major downfall to the game. Having no map on the other hand is a huge hindrance, as you can imagine with retro style games almost everything looks the same.
So to end our review, Eternal Eden is well worth the price tag of £13.34 with its fantastic story line, great characters and fantastic retro game graphics. With tons of puzzles, mini islands, addictive exploration to find items and much more. Something I totally forgot to say, the game comes with 2 parallel worlds a bit like Zelda: link to the past.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.