Becoming a Chosen One
Asobimo released their newest title Eternal Kingdom Battle Peak this fall. The lauded Yoshitaka Amano of Final Fantasy and Vampire Hunt was involved with the character design of this MMORPG.
The story presented within Eternal Kingdom is that human and near-human races such as elves have been at an impasse with a nation known as the Horde Federation. The Horde has its own humanoid races, but they are more anthropomorphic—think orcs and werewolves. Humans have been encroaching on the Horde’s lands for years leading to the current conflict between the Horde Federation and the human Holy Nation. The Horde are the original inhabitants and even though a truce was signed almost two decades before the start of the game, war is ready to break out at any moment.
Magic and Swords
The classes in Eternal Kingdom are standard when it comes to the world of MMORPGs. There’s the Warrior class which specializes in fighting with either a sword or an axe along with a shield. Mages make use of the elements to battle their enemies and specialize in ranged attacks. Paladins can be considered a mixture of Mages and Warriors since they specialize in melee combat and sorcery. Priests are the healers of Eternal Kingdom and they’re able to revive others thanks to a blessing from the moon. The last playable class is the Gunner, snipers who also set bombs and traps in order to trip up the enemy.
Character Customization
It’s always a pleasant surprise when a game has fully loaded customization channels for players to use to their heart’s content. Everything from eye color to height can be tweaked to your liking. If you enjoy spending hours when it comes to character customization and you’re always disappointed by the lack of options in other games, Eternal Kingdom is for you. I honestly wasn’t expecting this and greatly enjoyed it. There was a bit of lag when it came to switching between screens and color options, with some minor color corruption on the character. Luckily, the glitch went away permanently after I switched to a different customization screen and then went back to select a different color.
What Eternal Kingdom doesn’t have is any way to actually customize body shape. All of the options are slim and slender when it comes to female classes. Male characters, on the other hand, tend to be muscular and slender. So, there isn’t too much variety when it comes to shape.
Hurry Up and Wait
One disappointment is the long download time and constantly crashing servers while in-game. It’s exactly conducive to a fun gaming experience. You don’t expect a mobile game to take over an hour to download, let alone several. This would make sense only if the file was immense in size. However, in this case it isn’t. Eternal Kingdom requires a total of 4 GB to operate on an iOS device. This is nowhere near close to the package size of games like Genshin Impact. And with Eternal Kingdom’s old school MMO design, the wait time doesn’t make sense.
A lengthy download time can go from a slight annoyance to a complete turn off for players, especially if it’s a mobile game. One of the selling points of mobile games is accessibility. Having to deal with long wait times just to install it doesn’t fit in with that. Again, the file itself isn’t massive and Eternal Kingdom is adjusted for mobile gaming.
Old School
Eternal Kingdom is definitely a game for fans of games like Lineage and the whole old school MMO experience. However, the translation and because of that, the story, fall short. Another annoyance is the long download time and the server crashes. Having said that, there’s no annoying pop-ups and the ability to fully customize your character is a plus. Eternal Kingdom is a game you may enjoy picking up for a few hours to pass the time.
