Random VN: Eien no Aselia
I recently got the impulse to go back and replay Eien no Aselia, which sat at the top (mostly by inertia and alphanumeric reasons) of my vndb votes for so long. Eien no Aselia was one of the final games I played in English before I took the dive into Japanese untranslated VNs, and I hadn't replayed it since, though I played Seinarukana within a year of entering the labyrinth.
Eien no Aselia is one of those few 'oldies' I found hadn't lost anything vital in the years since I last played it. I still immensely enjoyed the story (which is only mildly different in Japanese), and I still fell in love with Aselia on first sight (I'm a sucker for bloodstained fushigi-chan girls with big swords). I empathized with Yuuto's struggles as he went from a somewhat whiny standard-issue eroge protagonist to a fully rounded out human being with a lot of admirable qualities.
Eien no Aselia is one of those rare hybrids where the gameplay is something you can pick up easily even though you haven't played it in almost a decade. Oh, there were aspects I had to remember through trial and error, but I was using my old clear save, so I didn't have to bother with leveling or building anything other than ether gates... which made things a lot simpler. I remember just how much pain I suffered on higher difficulties to get those maxed levels... and why I never went back after finishing all the heroine paths, hahaha. The game is long, though it isn't nearly as long as Ikusa Megami Zero or some of the other strategy VNs. Playing it from beginning to end seven times was more than enough for me in the past.
A few aspects of the game have aged poorly (though not really the visuals, which were great for the time it was made). The aspect that bothered me the most was that more effort wasn't put into developing the non-heroine spirits that you fought with. While you could access scenes that did develop them somewhat if you made the right dialog choices and didn't let them die in battle, there is definitely a sense that the writers considered them disposable, despite giving them really distinctive personalities that came out on first meetings.
Another is that more wasn't done to make Shun a better antagonist... to be frank, his twisted mentality is only poorly explained, even with the extra scenes at the beginning that pop up on your second playthrough. Spending some time with him in the Empire would have helped greatly to illustrate his fall from a slightly twisted teenager into true madness.
Replaying Aselia made me remember why I was so eager to see a third Eien Shinken game, and I'm still eagerly awaiting the day when the TBA on the vndb page for Shinyaku Eien no Aselia turns to a real release date.
7 Comments
Recommended Comments