Continuing with our month of pre-Final Fantasy X Playstation 2 games, I’m going to talk about one that was not quite so good as one might hope. It was originally slated for Dreamcast, but got a port to the Playstation 2. Now, just because it was going from a system with less impressive statistics to one that was more solidly established, that doesn’t mean it would be a bad game. If you ignore graphics, like I usually do, it’s quite possible that great battle systems and stories can make such a game really great, even though it might not stand up to contemporaneous games. No, there’s a very good reason why Ephemeral Fantasia is a sub-par game.
The opening of the game follows our silent protagonist, Mouse, as he lands on the island nation of Pandule. Apparently, he’s there to perform at the princess’s wedding. His talking guitar-thing, Pattimo, reveals that the two usually engage in theft as well as performance. He’s met by female stri- oh, wait, that’s the female guards uniform? Ooookay… well, there’s a pervert somewhere in that outfit’s past. Well, whatever. You meet the princess, she’s all melancholy and doesn’t want to marry the guy, who totally can’t be a villain. No one with long silver hair is ever a villain in an RPG. Nope. So, you decide to save the chick, and then Sephiroth-wannabe freezes your behind in place, and when you wake up, you’re coming in on the boat you sailed in on. And it’s five days before the wedding, just like when you arrived. GROUNDHOGDAY! And so, you have to figure out how to make people remember previous iterations and so on. It’s not a terrible story, though it’s not very original even in the RPG world.
Well, now that we’ve got the story out of the way, let’s dive right in to where this game fails. Because of the time sensitive nature of the plot, you have a watch that ticks away the hours. An in-game hour occurs in an out-of-game minute. So, you’ll frequently have to reach spots in town or around the island in what works out to 8 minutes or less. That’s tough, but should be doable. What really makes things problematic is that the island, its main town, and all of its dungeons are set up like mazes, making it very difficult at first to figure out where you’re going. To compound this problem, you have to find pieces of the map to even be able to access a bird’s eye view of your location. So, the first several times you run around the island, you’re going to be late for everything. When the margin for being late is a matter of minutes, or rather seconds, being on time is extremely difficult. And because being on time is how you make the plot advance, things get dicey fast. The quests you have to do to change events on the island, unlock characters, and so on, are hindered by lack of hints, mediocre translation at times, and simple obscurity of what you have to do, quite apart from the necessity to be on time. And if you haven’t reach a certain point in the quest by the end of the week, all your hard work poofs with the next time reliving the week. AAAAAARGH! This is easily the worst aspect of this game, making things controller-breakingly hard in a seriously annoying way.
Now, the characters are actually decent. The royal guard Rummy, who meets you when you first get to the island, has a crush on another character, which causes her to try to murder a romantic rival, until you can stop her. Kyte, the fisherman (who wields fish as his weapon, by the way), has his tragic issues resulting from memories of his comrades who drowned during a mysterious ship wreck. There’s also the leader of the bandits, Galhint, who already knows about everything, but goes along with the script out of fear for his cohorts. Even the villains are pretty sympathetic, with the main baddy having a very legitimate reason for setting things up the way he had. Sure, there’s some characters who are a little bland, like Ano the magic scientist, who doesn’t do much. The characters who are well done, however, are pretty well done indeed. What is especially impressive is that each character has an almost entirely different combat style that makes it so no two characters use exactly the same strategies. The status effect user, who inflicts negative status effects on enemies, is useful against normal enemies, while the buffer character has some good skills for boss fights. There’s a character who has terrible physical skills, but has the best healing magics in the game. And so on. There are characters you may not like as much, but it is easily possible to use each one effectively.
Talking about the battles reminds me that the battle system is quite good. It’s a system similar to the active time battle system, where you wait for all of your characters to charge up before they can act. However, there is no simple “attack” option. Each character has physical skills that frequently deal damage, but can have other effects, like healing or stat buffs. Each of these skills has a different energy rating. The higher the energy rating, the longer it will take a character to act again in battle. And each skill levels up as you use it, which can unlock other skills, especially when the multiple skills are at certain levels. There’s also magic, which you learn at certain character levels, and cost magic points to use. You also have a party level, which dictates the max hp and mp of the characters, while character level dictates defense and attack power. There’s also an incredibly complex elemental system, but I won’t get into that too much. All you need to know is there are four elemental houses (so to speak) with three tiers. There’s an extra 13th element, which just adds to the confusion.
Replay value is another area where this game falls flat. There’s tons of characters to use, and a number of fun minigames that can only be played for a certain portion of the game, but there’s a lot of busy work involved in trekking around the island. Plus, you’ll have a lot of trouble getting through the game in the first place because of the difficulty resulting from poor design. So, I’d give this game “play it once with a walkthrough handy.” The beginning of the game is horribly difficult and annoying, but as you approach the middle and end of the game, there are some great rewards for you, in the story and the battle system. So, if you can get through the early bit without raging, the latter portion of the game is quite fun. The best way to do that is to follow a walkthrough pretty religiously.
So, yeah. This game’s one of them where the premise is pretty decent, but the execution ruins it. And really, it’s only because of one area of bad design. Still, the game’s major failing, the time based puzzles, is the focal point of the game, which means that you can’t really ignore it. So, right down to it, this game’s got a rating of about 7.2 out of 10. I enjoyed it a lot, but I referred constantly to a walkthrough, and even when I did, there were some frustrating parts. It gets as high a score as it does mostly because the battle system is really good, and the characters and story are adequate to good.
Quick Tip: Power Jump is the most useful skill in the game. It allows you to jump to any map square that you have found. You get it by having Rummy use diving kick, which she learns from using hi-kick, from hard punch. Get this skill as early as humanly possible.
How I Broke Game: I beat the final boss with Rinna and Lloyd-L. The loli with no good attacks and the princess with no good attacks or spells. To be fair, I wanted to use Rindrinna, but she froze the game every time. Probably a glitch.
If you liked this game, you should try one of the following games. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is the same groundhog plot device done well, with better-designed puzzles and dungeons. Final Fantasy VI has a similarly large cast of unique characters, each of whom are quite usable in their own right. Okage: Shadow King is an unexpectedly good choice for those who liked Ephemeral Fantasia, because they both have their quirkiness, and both of them have a bit more challenge than your average mainstream RPG.
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