You disembark on an island in the Pacific, carrying around a talking guitar? Welcome to hell.
Back on Topic.
Ok, “Hell” might be a little exaggerated, however, it gives you an idea what awaits you on this island, you, the innocent gamer. The game Ephemeral Fantasia was an RPG being developed by Konami back when the PS2 was all new and fancy, and it even managed to start some sort of hype, with game reviewers exclaiming this could very much be one of the best RPG’s ever made. That’s were they were wrong, but credit to Konami for fooling the gaming world for so long.
In Ephemeral Fantasia you are Mouse, a musician/thief who plans to rob this island’s royal family of their belongings while playing at the wedding of the royal couple. However things turn out not quite as planned as Mouse falls in love with the princess and the prince is actually a wizard controlling time, trapping people in the same five days, without them even noticing themselves (Majora’s Mask? You bet.). Luckily Mouse for some reason does keep his memories so your goal in the following 40 (if not 60000) hours is to escape this hell of an ugly island (and kill the prince and save the people of the island, you’re a hero after all). In the first five days your personal emo guard Rummy shows you around the island, including cheap entertainment in the fashion of “Eeeek, don’t look! I’m undressing! HONK HONK!”. Then you get to battle prince Xelpherpolis who is 3000 times stronger than you are, so in the next five days you’ll be farming Mouse while “enjoying” the same cheap scenes all over again. Most of the time you are free to explore the island, however it’s a real challenge to escape the town you are most of the time since it doesn’t seem to have an exit at all. The town itself is pure hell (getting back to the inn where you’re staying is not easy with the inconvenient map and street pattern), and places outside the town aren’t all that exciting either.
Now for the battling system. You’ll be fighting most of the monsters on your own, especially at the start of the game which doesn’t add to the fun. Monsters themselves look like… well, they don’t necessarily look like anything I’ve ever seen, mainly due to the disastrous graphics. You’ll learn a lot of neat moves to kill your opponents with, however fights are boring, boring and boring most of the time (but at least it doesn’t make you wanna kill yourself, so it’s still one of the best things about the game). This also has to do with maybe the main issue of the game (except for actual gameplay): graphics. The graphics are of Final Fantasy VII quality, and even though that sounds really nice, most of us have not forgotten about that particular aspect of that legendary 1997 RPG. Graphics suck, and I could give you a list of 500 Playstation 1 titles with better graphics than this piece of crap. How about the art? Because for example Twilight Princess doesn’t have the best graphics but compromised this with great art and effects, right? None of this is to be found in Ephemeral Fantasia; as I mentioned before this is a hell of an ugly island.
Characters. Whereas the aforementioned Final Fantasy VII wasn’t all that artistic and beautiful either, the real success of the game might’ve been the characters who all had a presence (Barret), an evolving personality (Cloud), or were just plain awesome (Seph). It should be clear already that Rummy (“the guard” with “the breasts”) does not have a personality. Neither does Mouse or Pattimo the talking guitar, and though Xelpherpolis looks a lot like Sephy, he’s not even close to him speaking in terms of awesomeness.
Before I forget: minigames. Even if a game like New Super Mario Bros. was one of the worst things ever made, I still would’ve bought it for the minigames. Now here’s something quite enjoyable about Ephemeral Fantasia. The game is stuffed with minigames (like a drinking contest), but always returning is the guitar minigame, for which Konami even considered making a special guitar controller. I doubt it could’ve ever been just as fun as Guitar Hero, so I’m glad they didn’t make one, it would’ve been a waste. The minigame with just the controller however, is still quite fun and challenging from time to time, and also plays quite a major role in the game’s storyline, like the Ocarina of Time in the game of the same name. However using the same guitar as a sword and best pal is gets kinda lame after awhile. For other minigames however, you’ll need to play the game for hours to unlock them. And you don’t want to play the game for hours. No really, you don’t.
The main problem however with EF is how it is non-linear. That once again sounds nice, but it really isn’t. You are on the island, trying to stop an evil wizard/prince. So then what do you do first? You better tell me, because I don’t have a clue. It is absolutely not clear what you have to do, and though we’re living in this day and age where one can look up some walkthrough right away, it should be possible for a game to be completed without using one. If you don’t want to use a walkthrough, you’ll spend your five days doing nothing at all, desperately looking for clues, but guess what: there are no clues. So then you live through another five days (mainly consisting of loading screens), and another, and another, till even the greatest core-gamer decides to walk out and check out what’s happening in the real world, because the real world is actually way more interesting. EF therefore fails as a game.
Short things short: this game deserves to be **** at just as much as ET for Atari 2600 (though that game was probably worse). It is a shame to the PS2 as a console and RPG as a genre. This game is not average, it’s bad.
Lovemaking end.