Time and Eternity Retro Review – Wedding Crashers

Time and Eternity makes a very strong first impression. I was really impressed when I first saw the early footage and screenshots. The game looks like some form of playable anime, and that’s going to tickle many JRPG fans in the right places. As beautiful as the game is and however unique the experience, never has the phrase ‘Be careful what you wish for’ been more appropriate.

Introduction

Time and Eternity, known as Toki~to~Towa in Japan, is an animated role-playing game for the PlayStation 3. It uses unique 3D backgrounds and hand-drawn 2D sprites for characters and enemies. The theme of multiple-personalities and time-travel play important roles. Character switching is somewhat utilised in the game’s action-oriented battle system. The game was released in July 2013 as a PlayStation 3 exclusive.

Time and Eternity differs somewhat from many Japanese RPGs by only having one playable character instead of a party. Producer Kei Hirono said that “We wanted to break the mold and step away from the current trend of male hero… to have a female hero playable character who is strong.” As for only having one player character, Kei commented ‘This is both to highlight the uniqueness of the character switching mechanic, as well as to reduce expensive animation work.’

Another key difference from usual JRPGs is that Time and Eternity ignores traditional ‘save the world’ type storylines for the more personally relatable experience of marriage. Kei himself was getting married at the same time the game was in development, and so pushed for it being a key plot point.

Story

On the eve of her wedding, Princess Toki makes her final preparations with her knight fiancé, Zack, along with Toki’s closest friends, the energetic young Enda, the wealthy noble Reijo and their clumsy wedding planner Wedi. Toki mentions that she had snuck out of the palace some time ago to visit the psychic, Makimona, who told her there would be a murder at her wedding, though the girls dismiss it as superstitious nonsense.

The following day, the wedding proceeds as planned, however Zack is killed protecting Toki from a group of assassins who raid the ceremony, but Toki drives the remaining attackers away when she undergoes a strange shift in personality. She then casts a spell which sends her and Zack back in time to six months before the wedding in order to prevent the attack, though the spell has an unusual effect on the previously deceased Zack, causing him to instead possess Toki’s pet dragon, Drake.

After quizzing Makimona about the cause of the attack, Makimona reveals that she is a fraud and her prediction about an attack on the wedding was a blind guess. Confused, Toki and Drake (Zack) return home to consult their friends and Toki reveals the source of her power. She is in fact a ‘Dual Soul’ (Two souls within the same body) and periodically transforms into Towa, the alternate, more aggressive persona from the wedding raid. She also possesses time magic, a secret art known only by those of the royal bloodline.

With the help of her friends, Toki/Towa attempts to stop events leading up to the attack on the wedding, only to find that altering the timeline may cause more problems than it solves, meaning Toki will need to make multiple stops throughout time to find the underlying cause of her misfortune.

Gameplay

Battle is reliant on the use of different skills which Toki and Towa learn as they level-up and progress through the game. Throughout the game, the player switches between controlling Toki and her alter-ego Towa. The switch happens on each level-up or upon using certain items. Toki and Towa have different skills: Toki is skilled at long-range rifle attacks, while Towa is better at close-range knife fighting. The battles take place in real-time but require strategic timing to successfully execute dodges and spells.

On the world map, you have a selection of dungeons, though most of these are palette-swaps of almost identical locations. You’ll quickly become intimately familiar with the floating island, the canyon, the haunted forest, and the sky ruins. The areas are very large, especially the floating isles, however exploration is simplified for the player as the mini-map in the corner of the screen tells you exactly where treasure chests are located, and where the side-quests are.

Inside the dungeons, you play as Towa or Toki. Since they both live inside the same body, you only really have one character. There are no other party members however Drake will fight alongside you as a support character, though he can’t be directly controlled. While you can be engaged by multiple foes at once, battles flow with a one-on-one style.

The two girls have similar stats and spells with slight advantages or disadvantages. Toki starts more as a fire spell user, and Towa as a lightning spell user, but later you can have them learn almost all the same spells, meaning there’s very little strategic importance in which girl is used in battle, particularly later in the game.

The battle system has a stylish, action-packed flow to it, however it’s also very repetitive. There’s a semi-strategic beat-’em-up quality to it that’s quite unique. It’s real-time, but not like most JRPGs; in this one it feels more like you are playing Punch Out, or an old arcade fighting game. The goal is to avoid the enemies’ attacks, then counter-attack with physical attacks or spells.

You can defend with L1, or move the stick to avoid incoming attacks. Then, you can use either the rifle, the knife, or a spell if your SP bar is full. Spells are the most powerful option since they can one-hit-kill most enemies, but you’ll first need to dodge and cast the spell with the right timing to avoid interruption. Timing is key, and the window of opportunity to fire off a spell becomes narrower and narrower as the game progresses.

Graphics/Sound

People will come in for the graphics, and they genuinely do impress, but you will still be leaving disappointed when you see how far those beautiful visuals extend to and how soon that budget fizzles out. The characters look great, the cutscenes are awesome, and the big 2D sprites look beautiful on the sprawling fields. The animations are superb and everything seems to flow very well, even in the heat of battle.

However, just like the dungeons, the enemies are palette swaps as well. There are only really about a dozen different enemies in the whole game. Even different areas have the same enemies, just with different colours and names. They even have pretty much the same attack patterns with slight timing variations. Fighting the same enemies over and over again, especially with such a high encounter rate and mashing the O button continuously does not make for a very fun experience.

The music is decent, although re-used often like the rest of the game, and the voice-acting also does the job just fine. It’s nice to see an English dub included regardless of what must be an especially tight budget. There are some big names here, including Kira Buckland, Christina Vee, Stephanie Sheh, Sarah Williams and Christine Marie Cabanos.

Replayability

As Zack, you must decide which girl you like the most between the two and raise their affection level through battle and conversation choices. That’s really just a secondary aspect of the game though, as you could just play the game without really caring and wait until the end to see who has the highest affection towards you, which awards you with one of two different endings. New Game+ also brings with it a third possible option, should you find the patience to play through the game again.

You’ve also got the game’s many sidequests to play around with. You can take sidequests from townsfolk around the two main villages in the game, but they’ll all ask for the same things over and over. It’s pretty much a hefty collection of recycled fetch quests. Sadly, the rewards for your efforts are surprisingly poor since the extra experience, money and items didn’t provide much of an advantage in the game’s much more challenging second half.

Conclusion

One of game’s strongest points is its characters; Toki, Towa, and Zack can actually be quite an amusing little love triangle. The whole game doesn’t take itself too seriously, and there were a few cute mildly comedic recurring themes. There’s a bit of cheeky fan-service too but this isn’t particularly frequent and it’s really quite tame. If anything, the game could actually stand to be a bit more daring with it. There is one particularly stand-out side-quest which pretty much runs the entire length of the game and tasks Zack with finding increasingly inventive ways to spy on Toki in the shower, with each attempt usually ending in humourous misfortune.

Unfortunately, these charming moments are broken up by incredibly repetitive gameplay. Everything is recycled, from the NPC designs, quests objectives, dungeons, enemies, battle flow; all you do in the game is the same routine over and over again until it finally ends in a rather unsatisfying way. Time and Eternity overstays its welcome in the end, and while it is a unique experience and has great potential with a visual style that really stands out, the variety and gameplay leave a lot to be desired.

I absolutely loved the concept and the visual style; It really looked like a quality anime, but it was just riddled with flaws. The constant recycling of environments, enemies and others elements are more than enough to condemn the game, but we also have to contend with regular gameplay balancing issues too. The difficulty really spikes in the second half of the game, almost like a juxtaposition of an easy first half and a surprisingly difficult second.

While the story does build to a grand and eventful climax where the fragments of the narrative all come together to make a clearer picture, it’s still far from a perfect picture. This is simply because the story is full of significant plot holes. While the Kingdom of Kamza is clearly a relaxed place, with a friendly royal family who are happy to mingle with the locals, the game seems to forget, time and time again, that Toki is a princess.

No matter where Toki finds herself in the past, her parents always seem to be absent, and I find it very hard to believe that a King and Queen would miss the wedding of the princess. Why Toki can’t ask them for help with her timeline conundrum and why she can’t simply go back in time to an hour or so before the ceremony and request a team of bodyguards is anyone’s guess. Even for a fantasy game, it all feels very unbelievable.