Konami Ephemeral Fantasia Roleplaying Review

Overall Rating
 4 of 5

Visitors rate this review
3.00 of 5,
3 votes

Summary:
EF (Ephemeral Fantasia) can be frustrating, (trust me) until I went online to get an FAQ, I hated the game. (You people who haven't played more than 20 hours and without an FAQ or something, you know what I mean!) When I DID get help tho, and I started advancing through the game, it was a blast!

Overall Rating
 3 of 5

Visitors rate this review
5.00 of 5,
1 votes

Price Paid:  $30.00 from Electronic Boutique

Summary:
Overall, definitely not the greatest RPG game of the year. While filled with parts both decent, interesting, and dramatic, you'll find yourself turned of by the boring mundane hours when you don't have a quest, or are attmepting to fill one.
Ephemeral Fantasia is composed of many traditional RPG constituents, but also has ideas that are effective in theory, yet unfortunately annoying and ineffective in practice. As one example, out of place,is the battle system; more specifically, the enemies. Has the battle system gotten boring, when you played another RPG untill your characters were high levels with powerful weapons vs. weak pathetic monsters with horrific appearences which belie their true stats? The cure used in Ephemeral Fantasia is the concept of 'Party Level', which goes up as your party goes up, independently. The enemies levels are thus based on the party level, so as to provide a challenge throughout the entire game. As I said, a good idea in theory, but anyone with any foresight at all can see that the battles would nonetheless be both redundant AND long, rather than just repetitive.
In terms of the story line, read the book or the game backing. Trust me on this one, you need to know as little of the story as possible from outside sources in order to squeeze what little enjoyment out of the game you can get. Thus, ensure you read NO spoilers!

Overall Rating
 4 of 5

Price Paid:  $5.00 from Rented at Hastings

Summary:
I was totally confused at first. RPGs are great, and always weird at the beginning, so I figured it would get over it. But after like 30 minutes, I gave up. The next day dad came in and said that he had started his own game, and it was awesome! So he explained it to me. The whole Time Loop thing is cool, if confusing, but it's a great concept. Don't give up on it, play it for a while while not trying to throw the PS2 out the window, and it'll get good.

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Price Paid:  $20.00 from Babbage's

Summary:
Firstly, let me say that the overwhelmingly negative press this game has been getting is entirely unjustified. While it does have it's problems, it is, overall, a solid, intelligent, and very deep RPG that will reward the patient gamer with close to 100 hours of very good gameplay, and maybe even more.

Ephemeral Fantasia is without a doubt the trippiest RPG I've ever played. It is full to the point of overflowing with innovation, deception, subtlety, and strangeness. It also includes, at least until you figure out what's going on, a healthy dose of frustration as well.

Ephemeral Fantasia (known as EF hereafter) opens with the following quote from the opening Scene of Act 3 of Hamlet, by Wm. Shakespeare.

And can you, by no drift of circumstance,
Get from him why he puts on this confusion;
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?

This quote is no idle chunk of text plugged in by the translators/developers of EF. It is one of the very few clues as to what is actually going on in this game. Nowhere on the game packaging, nor anywhere in the manual, is there a hint of what EF truly is about, so read on for enlightenment.

In EF you play Mouse (actually, you can name him whatever you'd like at the start of play), a thief that is also well known as a musician who has been invited to the lovely island of Pandule by it's king to perform for his wedding. After you arrive, you find out that the king is actually an evil sorcerer, who has mastered a very powerful Time looping spell. And you, unfortunately, are now caught in the loop. However, unlike the rest of Pandule's residents, the Time Loop spell does not wipe and restart your memory at the end of every loop, and therein lies the object of the game. You must somehow break this Time Loop and rescue the island's inhabitants from their temporal prison.

Mouse is not alone. His instrument is also his companion, as it is a lute-like stringed instrument named Pattino that is sentient and is three hundred years old. Pattino is also a formidable weapon, imbued with magic as well as housing a powerful sword. And during the course of the game, Mouse will aquire other members of his party, for a total of three at a time.

The Time Loop is a five day cycle, with each day corresponding, roughly, to an hour of gameplay. During non-battle gameplay, a twelve hour clock is displayed in the upper right hand corner of your screen. It indicates the day of the loop as well as the hour of the day. Four times a day, the lighting changes (suddenly, not gradually) and this is an indicator whether it is, say, 3am or 3pm.

EF has several hundred NPCs that you can interact with, as well as several hundred different locations for you to explore.

EF has a few unusual gameplay elements that should be explained. The first one has to do with the random battles. EF uses the random battle model that has become a standard with Japanese RPGs, but with a unique twist. They are a strange combination of turn based and real time battles. At the beginning of the game, this seems redundant, but later on, you will appreciate being able to administer a recovery item to a team mate that has unexpectedly been poisoned, taken heavy damage, or suffers from a status ailment. In other RPGs, I've found it frustrating to see a team members HP get gradually zeroed while all I could do was watch.

Another element is how EF handles cutscenes. Obviously, with a Time Loop as a base, having to watch the same cutscenes over and over again would be a real pain. EF uses the triangle button to Fast Forward the cutscenes, not just skip them. This is because, as the story unfolds, elements in the cutscenes change to reflect changes in the Time Loop, and you really need to be aware of these changes.

EF is the single most open and most non-linear RPG I've ever played. It not only has multiple endings and is non-linear in the order that you must get things done to advance in the game, it is also non-linear in time. This is the single most confusing gameplay element in EF, because not only do you sometimes have to do combine A, B, and C in no particular order, you usually cannot combine them in the same Time Loop. And this means you have to take physical notes of when things occur. As with a paper and pen. Because there are many events and people that you have to interact with, things you must try to disrupt, and key characters whom you must try to convince concerning the reality of the Time Loop, there is simply too much to remember.

In fact, this is one of those rare RPGs in which some sort of game guide is almost mandatory. EF is so open, with so little direction, and is so vast, that you can spend many, many Time Loops just trying to figure out what is going on. So before you break the controller and trash the disk, download a walkthrough or FAQ first.

EF is not perfect. The non-linearity comes with a steep price, and that is load times. You will get a Now Loading screen ten, fifteen or even more times a minute in some locales. Another point of contention is the lack of a map. EF has a map, but man, you have to work for it. The Map is doled out in approximately 25 pieces, and you find the pieces just like you find any other treasure item. But, in EF, one room in a house can have six or eight searchable places, so this can get tedious. This combined with the fact that the world of EF is huge makes simply aquiring enough of the map to get around a real challenge. Again, this game screams for a guide.

EF has a few mature elements, like some racy dialogue, a boozing sorceress, a pervy artist, a thonged martial arts mistress with large, noticeably bouncing breasts, and more.

EF uses text screen overlays for dialogue, not digitized speech. You can save anytime you are outside or in the Palace, and the game sees both Memory Cards if you have two installed.

Overall Rating
 2 of 5

Price Paid:  $25.00 from EB

Summary:
....... I mean really, what can you say about a game in which you do the same things over and over and over and over.... This had to be one of the worst rpg's i have played in a long time. Come on, i mean what the heck am i suppose to do about a game in which you can hardly understand.