Clephas' VN home

One thing I should add... Titith is probably the most powerful anti-dragon character you get in Kai's path, because you can unlock her special sword skill that not only does double-damage to dragons but can also strike at middle distance (two spaces adjacent, versus one with normal sword techs).

shizuma looks so much like kirito from art sword online it can't be a coincidence 

He's a different character though, through and through.  Kirito, for better or worse, is a 'good guy'.  I really wouldn't call Shizuma a good guy after a while...

Not a fan of grinding *wrinkles nose*. I view it as poor game design.

The idea that people can become mechs and swords is interesting though. 

Edited October 30, 2015 by Rooke

So is this a game I could pick up without playing prior titles from Eternal?  Are there specific titles I have to play?  Specific routes I need to do?

And wow, the EGS scores are really low: in the 30's.  I haven't seen scores this low from a prominent RPG developer since XUSE's Shinsei Mokushiroku ~Death March~.

Mmm... I wouldn't say it is bad enough to rate that low a rating so far, but it definitely has problems.  I'd say that a lot of the bad ratings are from the nearly game-breaking bug in Kai's path that prevents you from progressing if you take certain random actions in certain battles and take too long to complete one of the battles.  Most of this can be fixed by just turning off battle animations (except for the latter bug), but it drove me a bit crazy the first time I ran into it.  The other part is from the way they did the story... choosing Kai or Shizuma sets you on the equivalent of a completely different game, story-wise, which are only connected at certain fairly minor points.  Supposedly, the third, main path appears after you've completed both, but I've yet to hear any remarks about it online... to be honest, the entire setup feels like they went the lazy route.  Instead of automatically progressing into the other route when you are done, you get the choice to setup new game plus, where you take the data into your next playthrough (with the other character presumably), though that basically just means that the tokuten character - Yumina - is OP early in the game rather than being a rather weak assistant character.  It isn't like you can use the items from Kai's path on Shizuma's path or Shizuma's path's characters are given the same levels as the ones on Kai's route, lol. 

Do I need to play Eternal's other games to enjoy this and get the backstory?

Mmm... to be honest, it is hard to tell if they made the game world consistent with Yumina and Corona (which are based in the same universe).  While Yoopshilla, Veridadear, and a number of other characters from the previous games are major characters in this one, I honestly can't tell how it is chronologically related to this one.  Logically, because of a certain event that occurs with Veridadear, it should be after Corona and Yumina, but a lot of other things are going on that make it confusing.

How would you say the game matches up to Yumina and Corona so far both story and gameplay-wise?

Gameplay, they went in a completely different direction.  As I said above, it is a straight-out srpg.  After playing both sides... the one thing I noticed is that there is very little advantage to using the mech-people, whereas using the sword-people is usually a pretty good one.  Both cost you in experience gain, but considering that you can stack the benefits of the sword people with items and you can't with the mech people... it isn't worth it.  Early in the game, there is an advantage in a few thousand extra hp, but late in the game it gradually grows to be close to worthless, outside of the Kai/Alfaria/Veridadear combo.  Unless they seriously rebalance the game in a future update, I honestly can't say that the system was a good idea as a whole. 

Story-wise... any game without Yumina as a character is a good one?  lol

More seriously... I honestly thought that Corona's story was the most solid of the three.  It had its problems, but it was a lot more interesting than Yumina, at least to me.  To be honest, the angsty psychopathy of Shizuma in his path (yes, he's that bad) is making me more than a little tired.  He has only gotten worse as the story has gone on.  Kai was at least manageable, but Shizuma is like a neurotic dictator driven crazy by paranoid distrust of everyone around him.  Being in his mind is exhausting, especially since it has been like this to one degree or another for the entire path (enemy levels are approaching those of Kai's path, so I assume I'm approaching the cut-off point). 

Sounds like the EGS reviewers were unduly harsh then.  It sounds like a solid gameplay title with a major yet fixable bug.  The English market needs more H-RPGs that actually tell a worthwhile story.  Hopefully JAST will consider it, though I wonder if they'd want to do Corona first.

EGS is almost always wrong... whether it is positive or negative.  The reasons?

1.  Most negative votes for non-moege come from people who didn't finish the game/games in question because they weren't moe-focused.  EGS is a moe-focused site, so it is quite naturally untrustworthy on anything else except a relativistic rating on moege and moege sub-genres.

2.  People who actually read VNs for their story in Japan don't use EGS, for the most part.

3.  EGS suffers the same troll-voting problem as vndb, with a worse corruption tilt because more money is involved.

4.  Generally speaking, EGS ratings are much more trustworthy if you go back eight to ten years ago, before it shifted to a moe-site.

5.  EGS (as a system) suffers from the typical 'illiterate reader syndrome' that tends to result in down-ratings for anything with any sort of reading complexity or heavy infodumping.

6.  Referring to the troll voting issue... once VNs actually became a moderately large part of the otaku market, EGS became a major target for corporate vote-bots.  This is responsible for at least some of the positive votes on large-budget moege that are - quite frankly - terrible.