天下制覇

Almost like a light novel name ahead of its time.

I already briefly mentioned a bunch of the games that I think deserve to be translated some day, so this time, I think I’ll go back to an extremely mediocre/poor one that I nonetheless have something of a soft spot for as one of the first games I played in Japanese. Eternal Kingdom: The Witch of Destruction and the Legendary Sword is a game from 2008 and Studio e.go’s twilight days before they rebranded themselves as Debonosu and decided to release nothing but games where you corrupt underaged dragon girls under the guise of being a parental figure. I kid. They also make monster rape roguelikes. And their upcoming rhino-poaching, mech-hunting game that they’ve specified as belonging to the "kimono swordsgirl RPG" genre. No, really.

Anyway. If you’ve seen any piece of any fantasy media ever, you know the story. Magical sword found in ruins, ancient whatevers, evil witches, elves with bows, dwaves with axes, catgirls with tanks, etc, etc, etc. Like most e.go/Debonosu games, the writing is best kept at arm’s length because any closer and you might get some of the vomit on you. It’s made even worse by a particularly poor route system, or to be more precise, a lack of any kind of meaningful one besides the obligatory boning. Similar to Galaxy Angel, the story’s linear while between battles, you get the choice to go talk to someone (only one) and either score points or don’t depending on if you make the right choice. But everything marches on regardless, so there’s little weight or meaning to any of it. I do like that the main character is voiced, and the little pre-battle sprite art is often cute (not to mention all the Engrish), but that’s about it.

The combat system is where it could have been a lot more fun. On paper, it sounds great. Big battles where your party is usually dozens of units, often against large armies or creatures half the size of the screen, and an RPG-like progression adding more skills, options, and items as you proceed. It’s quite amusing seeing your entire swarm of elves, dwarves, dragon riders, etc go charging across the screen and getting into a huge melee with the enemy troops while also getting to mix it up yourself. There’s also a good variety of enemies and settings, especially early on. Almost every battle through the game brings something different.

Buuuuut there’s a ton of little annoying things that add up and just sink almost everything… above and beyond the writing. You’re not given enough tools in battle to keep it interesting for starters. You can attack, and jump. That’s it. There are a few variations on those themes, like spinning the stick (or mashing the keyboard arrows and hoping for the best) lets you do a spin attack that’s not any stronger than a regular attack, or a dash, or an uppercut that knocks enemies back, but mashing attack is pretty much it as far as strategy usually goes. And speaking of strategy, while it gives you a partner that you can supposedly give orders to, those orders are limited to attack or defend, and I’ll be buggered if I have any idea what the difference in AI behavior is between the two. They don’t even really follow you around any more than the rest of your troops do.

There are also treasures in battle, typically shoved out of the way so it takes time and often going through extra enemies to get them, but then you’re forced to manually equip literally everything AND no part of the battles, least of all the slow movement speed where you have to abandon your army to wander off, are designed for that kind of exploration. There’s also some real problems with damage and health in general. It’s horrible with the giant trolls in the third battle of the game. For being the size of houses, they hit like damp paper towels yet need to be knocked over so you can wail on their heads about 10 times before they’ll finally die. And there are bloody two of them. It’s just tedium incarnate.

So it has a lot of problems that keep the potentially interesting ideas from actually working. It would have almost probably been better as a pure RTS (and interestingly, that’s what its spiritual sequel pretty much was, albeit stripped of all RPG and action elements… making it quite like Madou Kokaku 5 years ahead of its time but with less tree planting). Or it needed a lot more strategy and things to do for the action. Hell, even a block button would have helped immensely. Had they at least evened out the damage better, had a few more special moves, and better implemented items and searching thereof, it still could have been simplistic but rather fun. Alas, nothing in it is executed particularly well and without a compelling story or characters any deeper than a half empty kiddie pool, this will probably be the most notoriety it ever gets in the English world and possibly more than it deserves.