Eternal Darkness was the second Gamecube game I ever bought. I remember playing it and very much enjoying it. The sanity effects were amazing, I remember the first time I got the black screen with the green "VIDEO" text in the upper right corner I scrambled for my remote thinking I had accidentally hit the input button on it. I never finished the game and I always regretted this, it just seemed like such an great game.
I remember this game being incredibly spooky, I remember this game being amazing, I remember this game... wrong?
Having replayed and beaten Eternal Darkness I can honestly say that I don't exactly see what I saw in this game. Don't get me wrong, Eternal Darkness is a good game, or could have been a good game, if it weren't saddled with gameplay problems.
Here's a rule I go by with video games: I should never die due to poor camera angles. Sure, in all games you're going to have it where you might die once or twice because the camera went wonky for a second... but in Eternal Darkness I died many times due to the poor camera angles. It wasn't that the camera angle was occasionally bad, it's that the camera angle was almost ALWAYS bad. I understand that the camera angles in horror/survival games tend to be different, they don't want you to be able to see what's going to jump out at you long before it does. However, Eternal Darkness takes this and makes it ten times worse. When running down a hall the camera should not be facing toward my characters face looking behind me, and yet it was... constantly. The camera angles in this game were absolutely atrocious and got me killed many times, or made the game harder than it needed to be. I was killed several times because the camera was so high above me I couldn't tell what was actually killing my character. The camera wasn't the only thing wrong with this game, but it was certainly the worst thing wrong with this game.
While playing this game there were so many things that aggravated me I started making a list because I wasn't sure I would be able to remember them all. That's a pretty bad sign for a game, so here it is, my list. I'm sure there are still things missing because I started this about halfway through the game.
- Magick sometimes takes too long to cast. In the game you have different powers of magick, ranging from three point to seven point. Three point magick takes the shortest time to cast, and seven is the longest. I'm not going to say that this is necessarily a problem because I know this is how it's supposed to actually be in the game. For the most part it's fine, but occasionally there are times when you just don't have the time you need to cast a certain spell when you need to.
- Finishing moves take too long. When you kill an enemy you have to "finish him" to regain back your sanity that you lost from seeing this enemy. The problem being that for the most part these finishing moves take just a little too long for my taste. If you fight a group of four zombies you can't kill one and finish it, because the other three will wail on you while you do. So you have to kill all four before you finish off the first one... the only problem with that is that if you wait too long to finish them off, occasionally they come back to life.
- Not enough sanity given back. This has to do with my last point. When you see an enemy you lose sanity, when you kill and finish off that enemy you regain sanity... but not enough. It very much feels like you regain about 3/4 of the sanity you lost. I may be wrong, but it just doesn't seem like you get enough back. Which constantly leads to you having to refill your sanity meter via magick.
- Enemies in groups suck. I mentioned above that killing off a group of enemies and finishing them is a hassle, but groups of enemies in general just kind of suck. I had it where they would corner me and kill me and there was pretty much nothing I could do about it. Every time I would try to fight back one of them would hit me interrupting my attack. I had it where one enemy would hit me and knock me back into another enemy who would hit me and knock me back into the first... usually this would end in either my death or serious injury. This wasn't a huge problem and didn't happen a lot, but it happened enough times to aggravate me.
- Targeting kind of sucked. The targeting in this game was kind of awful. I would tend to accidentally attack an enemies arm when I mean to hit his head. And if there was an enemy who had a weak spot I guarantee targeting and attacking that spot is going to be a pain in the ass. And trying to switch from targeting one enemy to another? Forget it.
- Swords are a pain to use in closed quarters. I know, you're thinking "duh... of course they are." and I completely agree... kind of. Any time you were on stairs or in a hall, fighting with a sword was pretty horrible. I only bring this up because for the most part you're almost always fighting in closed quarters, and most of your characters only have a sword for a weapon. See how that could be a problem?
- Moving while using magic stops the spell but still uses up MP. This one I'm kind of torn on, because it makes sense... but still aggravated me. Mostly I don't know how times I accidentally bumped my controller and screwed up a spell. It mostly just got kind of annoying after a while, especially since some spells take a while to cast.
- Speaking of moving... are all of my characters out of shape, asthmatic, smokers? I know this is something that is used in a lot of survival horror games. Your character can only run so far until they have to catch their breath. I guess walking adds to the tension and makes it harder to run away from enemies... but for the love of god, can my character run more than five feet without having to stop and catch their breath? Please? I won't say I'm the pinnacle of physical fitness, but hell even I when faced by a zombie think I could run down a forty foot hallway without stopping to catch my breath. My character however could not.
- Still speaking of moving... that's how you regain MP. This idea seemed kind of cool at first. No health potions, you just regain MP while you move. It seemed like a good idea till I had to cast three spells but only had enough MP for two. You know what you get to do then? Run around in circles trying to regain MP until you have enough to cast that third spell. Boy, sounds like fun doesn't it? I would have enjoyed either MP "potions" or mixture of both. Make it so I regain MP while running but also have potions in the game. As it is, running in circles to regain MP is kind of lame.
- Reloading and moving. This is kind of like the magick spells and moving problems. If you move while reloading a gun you just stopped reloading... the problem being is that you only get to reload when your gun is empty. So if your revolver takes five bullets and you move while you're reloading and have only put in three bullets, you have three bullets and can't reload again until you shoot them. Again, super annoying and serves no real purpose.
- The sanity effects. Okay, I will admit they're still pretty awesome... but they have a ton of them and I saw a small portion, but I did see a lot of them over and over. I went and looked at a list of sanity effect and realized I didn't see about half of them. It would have been nice to see some new ones instead of seeing the same ones again and again.
- The voice acting is kind of crappy. It's not horrible, but it's certainly not good either.
The next two have to deal specifically with dying:
- You've died, it takes too long to back to the game. You've died. You now have to see the Nintendo logo, the dolby surround sound screen, the main title screen, the load screen, choose a game to load, are you sure you want to load this game? Part of what makes a survival horror game scary is being in the moment... when you have to do all this crap to get back to the game it takes you out of the moment. Couldn't you just give me a simple "reload from last save?" option when I die?
- Die right before a cut scene? You get to enjoy it again! I hate this in games. Cut scenes should be skippable for this very reason. I don't want to HAVE to watch a cut scene more than once.
The next two are going to be about the story/game itself:
- The story is too long. I know, I know you're all going "He's lost his mind!" but hear me out. I probably spent about twenty-four or so hours beating this game. Towards the end it felt like a chore. The game felt like it dragged on. There was definitely a few "Congratulations! You've made it to the point B! Now go all the way back to point A because you can open up a door there now!" There seemed to be a lot of backtracking. If this game would have been 15-20 hours long I don't think that some of things I found so aggravating would have felt that way.
- The story is also a little garbled. I paid attention and still was somewhat lost. I think it's because there are WAY too many characters. You control twelve characters throughout the game, each in a different time period and each telling a different part of the story. In my opinion it was just a few too many people to keep track of. I think the story would have been a lot better if you had cut out about half of the characters and fleshed out the rest. None of the characters stories really stood out to me because I only got to play them for a brief period of time before I had to control a different character and learn their story.
Like I said, this is a good game that was ruined by its gameplay. I can understand why they did the story the way they did, and overall it wasn't a bad story. But if you take a pretty good story and pile on a ton of aggravating gameplay aspects you get a bad game that could have been so much better.
Squid.
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