Fighting games were everywhere in the early 90. I know I complain a lot about open world games and FPS' now, but it was just as bad, if not worse, with tournament fighters in the 90's. You couldn't go to an arcade or a game store and not see what felt like millions of these things.
There were a huge amount of these everywhere, and that glut of similar games was due to the impact of two titles we've discussed at length here: Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. These two series' were the cream of the crop when it came to tournament fighters, they were critically and commercially successful and logically, they led to imitators. I already discussed some of the various Street Fighter clones out there and I think the games I covered are a good microcosm of all of them. Some are bad, some are good, some are even great. I kind of wanted to look at some MK clones, but I just don't have access to any and honestly, I'm glad. It seems like developers did a pretty good job of copying SF, but they were waaaaaaay less successful in aping MK. I guess Primal Rage was an MK clone and it was alright, but most MK clones are just straight up awful. Most fighting games from this era copied one series or the other, but some did take elements from both.
Like MK, Eternal Champions puts quite a bit of focus on its story, or at least it tries to. The plot focuses on a collection of fighters throughout history, all of whom met unfortunate ends while working towards their goals. An entity called the Eternal Champion has summoned these fighters for an interdimensional tournament, promising the winner a second chance at life. I've always liked the character design in EC, there's a good range of futuristic and ancient, fantastical and realistic, sensible and strange. On one hand. you have characters like Larcen, a 1920's mobster, Jetta, a Russian circus performer from the 1910's and Shadow, a secret agent from modern times. On the other, there's Trident, an Atlantian merman from ancient Rome, Slash, a caveman from 65 million BC and Midknight, a CIA agent turned into a vampire by a freak accident. It's kind of strange that everyone in the lineup is essentially a "good guy," all of their pursuits in life were noble, or at least their intentions were. You can check out their surprisingly detailed bios in the options menu if you are so inclined, something that I did for at least a few of the competitors.
That's great, but how do all these characters actually play? That kind of depends on who you ask. Personally, I have always liked fighting games like this. Eternal Champions is more focused on making use of your character's special moves rather than trying to pull off combos. There are no dial-a-combos or super moves, but each character's move list is extremely extensive. It's almost too much, some of these fighters feel like they have something mapped to every possible input. There are still ways to put together attacks in succession and successfully doing so will often dizzy your opponent. But at the end of the day, the focus is still on the specials, even more so than it was in MK or SF games of this era. The game polices your use of specials through the inner strength meter, with each move requiring one quarter or half of the meter to pull off. It regenerates rather quickly, but it's still long enough of a cooldown to prevent spamming of moves. Each character has a taunt that will reduce their opponent's inner strength, though doing this to the computer is a waste of your time as the AI cheats and can use specials when its meter is empty.
Overall, the control is solid, but you really need a 6-button controller to play effectively. The computer is absolutely brutal and even though the game doesn't play particularly fast, you don't have time to be switching your inputs. The hit detection is a bit wonky, I felt like attacks missed when they should have hit and vice versa. A lot of the attack animations aren't intuitive as to whether those attacks will hit high or low, or whether they can be ducked, which can be frustrating. The priority system is also weird, it's hard to tell what is going to cancel what and when. That being said, the game is pretty consistent in its weirdness with this stuff, which is important. To me, that consistency is the difference between a game being difficult to figure out versus being broken. What wasn't consistent though were the special move inputs. This could just be me, but I feel like it was harder to pull off some specials than others. I struggled to get Larcen to perform any of his special moves consistently, but when I played as Xavier, I was able to get his specials to go off without fail. And these weren't different inputs either, they were the same but with different characters. It wasn't unique to these two, I found it happened with others as well. That was frustrating, but I didn't find it gamebreaking, it's not like I was attached to a particular character.
As I mentioned before, each stage has a unique fatality that can be performed by defeating an opponent at a certain spot in the stage. Some of these are obvious (If you grew up on MK, how could you not think it was possible to knock someone into the fan in Blade's stage?) while others are less so. These are incredibly difficult to trigger, but its rewarding when you do. I went years as a kid without seeing a single one of these, though I was able to pull off the aforementioned fan fatality in my longplay video. I kind of like that they didn't give the characters individual fatalities, it really helps differentiate the EC from Mortal Kombat. But it also keeps the violence level a step above Street Fighter while providing gamers something else to seek out.
I think the graphics and sound were excellent and did a really good job of creating a unique and interesting atmosphere. Sega did an outstanding job of making Eternal Champions colorful while also keeping everything very dark. And I don't just mean in terms of theme, I mean literally dark. A grand total of one of the stages, Trident's Atlantis arena, are set in broad daylight. The rest are either dawn, dusk or night themed and that really plays into the dark, brooding aesthetic. Something about it just seems to fit with the motif of goals unfulfilled and lives cut short. The color palette is heavy on red, orange and brown, which I usually find makes games look boring at best and messy at worst. But it really works here. The stages are usually on theme for their character, Larcen's is set in front of an old timey theatre in Chicago, Shadow's on a neon lit rooftop in Tokyo, Blade's in a futuristic oil plant in the desert, etc. Only Jetta's is really off, why a Russian acrobat's home stage is what looks like an abandoned Shinto temple is beyond me. The sound, while not of the best quality, is perfect for the game and features a number of memorable tracks. I've said before that the Genesis games with the best sound either go out of their way to work with the sound chip or work around it. Eternal Champions does the former, it doesn't try to be too cute and focuses more on catchy, heavier themes. I don't really know how to describe it other than that it's very "Genesis-y" in a good way.
The biggest problem with Eternal Champions, and its a big one, comes more from how the game is laid out than the actual gameplay. In any 2D fighter, your primary single player mode is going to come from the tournament ladder, where you fight each opponent in succession before taking on the boss. EC is no different, you pick a character and fight each opponent, with enemies getting harder each time you progress. Here's the problem though: when you lose, you get sent back and have to fight previous opponents again. If you have advanced far enough, you will actually get sent back two opponents. This is problematic because it prevents you from getting to practice against the opponent you are struggling with while also making gameplay unnecessarily long. It's frustrating and it may be the single worst part of the game. Oh, and if you do manage to reach the Eternal Champion and lose, you get a game over and have to start from the beginning. And he isn't easy either. This really maximizes the frustration factor and it's the primary reason the game won't end up scoring higher. I do have to give them credit for the variety of game modes though, there are so many unique training modes, including a simulator where you can adjust the difficulty of your opponents. There's also a really cool mode where you can fight in a room with additional hazards, like laser cannons and floor saws. This is okay against the CPU but its awesome with another player.
With all of the reboots and remakes we see these days, I feel like Eternal Champions would make a great candidate for a modern update. It has interesting lore that could be expanded upon with relative ease, it wouldn't be difficult to have cutscenes with the fighters telling their story. Break it up like Twisted Metal: Black did, have an intro at the start, more detail halfway through the tournament ladder and and ending for each character. Get some good voice actors and give everyone and every location a cosmetic update. You could go 3D, but I would keep the actual fighting in 2D like MK 9/X/11. You could amp up or turn down the gore as you see fit. The Sega CD version had some gruesome stage fatalities, you could crank it up to match that and give the characters each a unique finishing move. Or you could keep it the same or tone it down to make things more accessible. Personally, I would keep it the same and fill the same niche EC did in the 90's: the spot halfway between SF and MK. SF has become exponentially sillier and goofier than it was in those days, and MK has become far more violent and gruesome. A game that planted itself firmly in the middle ground would surely stand out.
For now, EC will remain limited to its two titles, this one and it's Sega CD sequel. A planned Saturn version was never released and there was never talk of anything EC related on the Dreamcast. In some ways I understand why the series faded away, as fun and unique as it was there were simply always better fighting games out there. EC is fun, but it lacks the polish of big brothers SF and MK. However, it's still a good, solid fighter that looks and plays different, or at least different enough, than its more famous bretheren and their countless imitators. I'll send my remake proposal off to Sega and I believe they will get working on it in short order. But in the meantime, this old brawler is worth dusting off for a round or two.
Comments
Post a Comment