Gamertell

When Atlus announced that Pink Poison for the Playstation 2 would be hitting the US as Eternal Poison on November 11, 2008, I’m sure many were ecstatic and pleasantly surprised. Eternal Poison definitely caters to the gothic niche in all of us and that element is probably what lures most gamers into its grasp.

Eternal Poison presents itself as a strategy role-playing bundled with a Pokemon-esque collecting theme. Through the collection of a multitude of demons, players have the ability to attain new skills, equipment, and more. EP’s story slowly unfolds via specific character chapters which upon successful completion, rewards players with additional story arcs in order to complete the tale altogether.

EP does make use of voiced story segments between battles in order to advance the plot and they are a lot. However, don’t be scared because, for once, this isn’t actually what ruins the game. The overall voice acting is actually quite decent if not good and many players may be familiar with quite a few of them. This element of EP is a thankful break to the onslaught of text.

Armed with highly stylized character designs, gothic themes, decent voice acting and unique game play aspects, this game sounds like it could be pretty enjoyable. Unfortunately, the minute you step onto the battlefield and engage your first enemy, you will know what went horribly wrong with this game.

Every single time an enemy attacks you or you attack an enemy, the game segues into a pre-rendered cut-scene that completely disrupts the flow of battle. For example, a simple jab from an enemy results in the initiation of an unbelievably bland and unexciting animation sequence. While you’re able to skip every single one of these scenes, you’re not able to skip the loading times. There’s no getting around it and such an unforgivable mistake will easily encourage players to quickly stow this game away if not try to pawn it off on some other unsuspecting soul on eBay.

I’m sure EP’s development crew thought they were on to a good thing. Who doesn’t like watching a CG movie every once in a while?

I’m usually a sucker for FMV’s like when I first started playing Final Fantasy Crisis Core on the PSP and watched the exhilarating CG for the Bahamut summon. However, no such masterpieces will arise from Eternal Poison‘s lackluster performances. The memory wasted on these scenes could have probably gone to better use such as properly designed character models that do justice to the original artist’s renditions.

It would have made more sense to have selectively created CGs for summons or powerful spells but, unfortunately, what was meant to have your eyes bulge with excitement will have most rolling their eyes with frustration. Players daring enough to test their patience with this game may find themselves thinking about gifting this to someone who they genuinely want to torture: looking like a diamond in the rough, the unsuspecting receiver will slowly realize after the first 30 minutes of playing it how they’ve been duped.

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