While its business in the Western market was sold to Webzen, the Asian operations for Gala-Net, better known for its gPotato portal, remains intact. The next title to churn out from its Gala Lab studio is Eternal Blade, which entered Closed Beta recently in Japan under a 3rd party publisher. The Korean server has yet to see any updates.
Eternal Blade is just a really normal, if not stale game from my initial point of view. Of course, this is just from a couple of hours of gameplay (server only opens for a few hours), things might look up when venturing further. The character selection is 1 of the simplest I have seen in recent times, with classes gender-locked.
There are 2 camera views available in Eternal Blade. The first will be the locked, isometric one, similar to games such as Diablo. Right clicking will use the default spell, while left click is for moving and normal attack. There is no WASD movement at all, since those are reserved for spells.
The second camera view is the free view, where right click changes to turning the camera around. Not a really good mode, since I will want to see the mobs around me as much as possible, hence I favor the first mode. Combat is simple targeting, with spells manually aimed in the direction characters are facing.
There is this function call the Saint Beast, which is not actually a real pet feature (as far as I can tell), but rather based on cards. These cards can boost certain spells when equipped, and can level up as well when the boosted spell is used more often. It seems that 3 can be equipped anytime, which is pretty awesome.
The world of Eternal Blade is separated into different zones, which is a rather basic layout as seen from the teleport screen below. Very, very classic themepark kind of mechanic.
Dungeons are extremely linear, at least for the beginning few, each with 3 different difficulty modes. It seems like the developers themselves are not much of gamers themselves, as I was expecting some scores, grades, chests to choose my rewards from or perhaps an actual chest where loots spills out. Or at least better drop animations from the bosses…
Class change happens at level 10, and as usual, the basic quests of clearing dungeon and getting stuff NPCs are too lazy to get themselves. Armor skins do not change when new ones are equipped, and it changes only after class change and perhaps getting cash costumes.
Eternal Blade is certainly far from being impressive, and it reminded me of a recently failed game in the Western market, Lunivia, which went down with its publisher, Outspark. While I am certainly not impressed thus far, I always heed the words “1 man’s meat is another man’s poison.” This might be a gem for those preferring a simple game trapped in time.
