Ideas for Eternity

Sega and Tri-Ace's collaborative RPG, End of Eternity (Resonance of Fate outside of Japan), is on the horizon now, though it's thankfully releasing far away from Final Fantasy XIII in Japan. A lot of RPG fans who found themselves burnt by Infinite Undiscovery and Star Ocean: The Last Hope are finding themselves intrigued by the concepts being realized in the game -- though time will tell if all of us are setting ourselves up for disappointment -- but there were a few details revealed that will appeal to fans of the genre as a whole; features that seriously should have been addressed years ago.

Not too long ago, a blog post went up on the game's Japanese webpage detailing how user-friendly the game would be for everyone. Way, way too many HD games suffer from the text being calibrated for HD sets the buyers of some games may not have, the result being some of the smallest, most unreadable fonts SDTV owners will ever see. Some RPGs also tend to suffer from this, which is pretty bad for a genre so reliant on text -- especially you Blue Dragon. EoE thankfully has developers actually being sensible enough to make sure all of the text is perfectly readable on an SD set. That's pretty great, now if only everyone working on HD games could think this way.

There's also another problem that haunts console RPG fans that EoE fixes: The inclusion of a Quick Save option. There's nothing like an RPG that has incredibly long stretches between specific, if not every, save point, the best example of which would be...well, most Tri-Ace games. Good to see they're finally addressing this problem! Seriously, every RPG in the history of everything should have this feature; it's something that doesn't need to be tied exclusively to portables, even if it is most beneficial there.

Though I'm sure some people will raise a fuss about it, I think having the ability to retry battles immediately is a pretty nice feature, as it will save everyone the time from making their way from a save point all the way back to the battle they lost in. It's bound to draw some criticism for being too much of a user friendly idea, but whatever. It's something very similar to what the Wild Arms games did.

Oh! And it'll also be one disc on both PS3 and 360. But it's unknown if they're going to go ahead with their earlier plan of not dubbing everything to keep the Japanese version on both discs, mainly the 360 DVD in this case. As a person who happens to like dubs -- though mainly when they're quality -- that's something I can't get behind. I doesn't make good sense in the grand scheme of things either, since most English-speaking players are likely to play the game in English. I hope they've reconsidered that.

With so much going into this, and for how good the game looks in its latest trailer, it's almost difficult to anticipate it because of Tri-Ace's track record so far this generation. But EoE looks like it could be the exception, coming with ideas too ambitious for Square Enix to touch it. And even if it's bad, I hope the genre and general video game flaws it intends to fix are recognized by a lot of other developers. It hits Japan on January 28th; far enough for FFXIII not to threaten it, but along with too many other games -- one of which is a port of a Tri-Ace title -- also dodging the lightning bullet.