At some point I’ll get through all of these pho­tos from China. This is a statue in Tianan­men Square, ded­i­cated to the People’s Army, if mem­ory serves. While there’s a num­ber of folks who will insist that there’s no point tak­ing pho­tographs in the harsh mid-day sun this was taken in when there’s per­fectly good light com­ing, maybe, in the golden hours, that’s pretty rub­bish advice if you’re not going to get an oppor­tu­nity to go back wher­ever you are in a hurry. It’ll be a while until I’m back in China, and if I have to go under my own dol­lar, per­haps I never will. This was taken with the sun directly behind the statue in an attempt to do some­thing inter­est­ing with the hand dealt to me, with lim­ited suc­cess as you can judge from the above.

Read­ers of a cer­tain age and pre­dis­po­si­tion may remem­ber the infancy of videogam­ing in the home, with unsus­pect­ing “seri­ous com­put­ers” such as the ZX Spec­trum and Com­modore VIC-20 being abused into dis­play­ing some prim­i­tive ances­tors of the mod­ern gam­ing mul­ti­me­dia extrav­a­gan­zas we take for granted on our Xboxes and Playsta­tions. While Atari might have been a lit­tle more strict about intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights, given that they owned a good chunk of the good arcade games at the time, other for­mats were the rip-off equiv­a­lent of the Wild West.

Cue a mas­sive num­ber of barely, if at all, dis­guised ver­sions of Pac-man and Space Invaders and the like, often of wildly vary­ing qual­ity. A sim­pler, more inno­cent time, where peo­ple shared and shared alike, or at least when game com­pa­nies didn’t have legal teams larger than their devel­op­ment teams.

I’m appar­ently not the only one nos­tal­gic about this era, or reck­less enough to base a company’s release sched­ule entirely around quite bla­tant idea theft. Gameloft have been mak­ing games for mobile phones for as long as they’ve been capa­ble of run­ning the rudi­men­tary Java-based games that seemed fab­u­lous at the time, and as bar­barous as Speccy games in ret­ro­spect. The release of the iPhone, how­ever, seems to have turned them into full time rip-off merchants.

You’d have to be incred­i­bly char­i­ta­ble or com­pletely dis­hon­est not to feel that there’s a mas­sive degree of sim­i­lar­ity between N.O.V.A and HALO, or the Mod­ern Com­bat and COD: Mod­ern War­fare games, or Star­front and Star­craft, or as we’re inter­ested in here, between Eter­nal Legacy and Final Fan­tasy. In par­tic­u­lar, Eter­nal Legacy draws on the graph­i­cal styles of Final Fan­tasy VIII and the plot of Final Fan­tasy VII, so I sup­pose if you’re being aston­ish­ingly gen­er­ous that counts as innovation.

I’d get a lit­tle more shirty about Gameloft’s out­right clon­ery were it not for the gen­er­ally high qual­ity of all of these cover ver­sions. While N.O.V.A and Mod­ern Com­bat are shad­ows of their inspi­ra­tions on the mas­sively more pow­er­ful con­soles, they’re still very com­pe­tent, fluid games and arguably as close as anyone’s come to mak­ing great FPS’s on the Apple iThingys. Eter­nal Legacy in some respects one ups the oth­ers men­tioned, by being a bet­ter game than the Final Fan­tasies it apes.

Of course, this is com­ing from some­one with a very low tol­er­ance for Final Fan­tasy games, so fac­tor that in your cal­cu­la­tions of what­ever that’s worth. Astrian, a spiky haired fel­low car­ry­ing a ridicu­lously over­sized sword in no was resem­bling FF8’s Squall and his buddy, in no way rem­i­nis­cent of Zell, are rebels attempt­ing to steal an oppres­sive government’s shiny crys­tal trin­kets, Varsh Stones, the source of power in this world, which is the first hint that you’re play­ing a game heav­ily indebted plot­wise to FF7. In fact, I’m going to stop point­ing out char­ac­ter sim­i­lar­i­ties to FF8 and plot sim­i­lar­i­ties to FF8, as oth­er­wise we’ll be here all day. Please just assume that any char­ac­ter you play is a barely dis­guised ver­sion of some­one from FF8 and most of the plot’s a homage, shall we say, to FF7.

Mechan­i­cally, the game also shares ele­ments with the FF series, although by exten­sion it shares ele­ments with pretty much every RPG with turn based com­bat. There’s the usual com­bi­na­tions of phys­i­cal attacks, ele­ment based attack magic, stat alter­ing buff/debuffs and assorted heal­ing items and spells, which dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters will use to dif­fer­ing lev­els of effect depend­ing on their abil­i­ties. There’s also a rough ana­logue of Limit Breaks, and a stat/effect boost­ing sys­tem thank­fully far less tedious than FF8’s Junc­tion­ing, as Varsh Frag­ments found through­out the game can be attached to the weapons and armour you use, grant­ing either access to spells that could not nor­mally be utilised by the char­ac­ter, extra defence or attack, and so forth.

So far, so famil­iar, and the over­world sec­tions aren’t going to blow your mind with their orig­i­nal­ity either. It’s the usual RPG deal of wan­der­ing around a town talk­ing to peo­ple, either get­ting a quest or receiv­ing infor­ma­tion that involves head­ing some­where else and fight­ing your way their through a vari­ety of whacky ene­mies and beast that seem to have no par­tic­u­lar sto­ry­line rea­son to be get­ting up in your grill. At least, thank­fully, there’s no ran­dom encoun­ters, as the ene­mies are clearly seen wan­der­ing around and thus can occa­sion­ally be avoided com­pletely, and you can per­haps sneak up on them. Why this isn’t the way all RPGs deal with this is beyond me. I can almost accept it as a lim­i­ta­tion on ear­lier machines, but there’s no excuse for it in the mod­ern age.

So, there’s a brownie point for it, but there’s a num­ber of less suc­cess­ful deci­sions made in the game. The com­bat and cus­tomi­sa­tion sys­tems are far sim­pler than in the games it apes, which to my mind is entirely appro­pri­ate and laud­able for a game designed to be played on the move. As the iDe­vice for­mat is more con­duc­tive to play­ing for short bursts as a time filler rather than full-on gam­ing ses­sions, short­en­ing the nor­mally inter­minable 40 hour RPG grind to a more com­pact 8 or 9 hours fits quite well.

Fits well for me, at least. Given that JRPGs these days seem to make their hay based entirely on how ludi­crously com­plex and padded they are, what’s fine for me may not be so good for the intended core audi­ence. The plot’s suf­fered a lit­tle under the baton of time com­pres­sion, tak­ing a few sharp right turns that could leave you flat­footed if you were hop­ing to actu­ally care about the sto­ry­line or char­ac­ters. It also presents a novel twist on the ‘early doors unwinnable bat­tle with even­tual boss’ trope, as you face off against the game’s main antag­o­nist, kill him with ease, and are imme­di­ately taken to a cutscene show­ing you on prone, defeated and at said antagonist’s mercy. Some­how. Buh?

There’s a few mechan­i­cal annoy­ances that should really have been fixed remain­ing in the ver­sion avail­able as I write. When you equip a new weapon, the Varsh frag­ments do not auto­mat­i­cally trans­fer over to the new weapon from the old, which means another fid­dly trip to the menu sys­tem. That I can deal with, but the menu sys­tem in com­bat is a com­plete pain in the ass when try­ing to nav­i­gate the lengthy item menu. Or at least, it’s lengthy by the end of the game which is about the only time you’ll ever need to use heal­ing items.

You see, the main prob­lem I have with Eter­nal Legacy is that it presents no chal­lenge what­so­ever to any­one with the slight­est expe­ri­ence of these sorts of games. I had won­dered if there was some sort of bug in the game, as my char­ac­ters were very quickly lev­el­ling up to silly degrees. Turns out that’s a func­tion of the shorter game length, but between the stats boost gained and the free heal­ing gained from lev­el­ling up there’s prac­ti­cally no dan­ger of dying, at least until the game pulls one of it’s some­what fre­quent dick moves, split­ting the party and leav­ing you with­out any­one that has a heal­ing spell. At which point we’re often rely­ing on heal­ing items, and the cum­ber­some menu for select­ing them that can take so long to get at that you might be in dan­ger of dying more through menu inef­fi­ciency than through lack of tac­ti­cal nous.

It’s not game-cripplingly unus­able, and to be fair I strug­gle to see how else the menus can be organ­ised. How­ever, even this prob­lem stems from the core prob­lem — a lack of chal­lenge. The menu becomes unwieldy because the game is mas­sively gen­er­ous with dis­patched ene­mies drop­ping heal­ing potions. Apart from this mean­ing you’ve no excuse no to go into each bat­tle in top shape, it also leaves you with a ridicu­lous num­ber of items in your inven­tory, mak­ing find­ing par­tic­u­lar things more dif­fi­cult. By the time the game ended, I had some­thing like four hun­dred spare heal­ing thingys. I could sell most of them to a trader, but in the absence of a “sell all” but­ton that meant tap­ping ‘sell’ some­thing like four hun­dred times, and, well, screw that noise. It’s not as if I needed the money for any­thing, as the few items that the mer­chants sell were eas­ily afford­able from the money dropped dur­ing the nor­mal course of the game.

Dis­ap­point­ingly, for a rel­a­tively short RPG there’s still a bit of arbi­trary game­play padding as you return to pre­vi­ous loca­tions for pretty poorly laid out rea­sons. Thank­fully, it’s pretty rare, and there’s no need to spend hours in one loca­tions grind­ing out either level gains or draw spells, mechan­ics from FF8 that still give me night­mares to this day.

Okay, per­haps it’s a lit­tle slap­dash in places, and I’m not sure if it’s going to com­pletely sat­isfy the JRPG / Final Fan­tasy lov­ing crowd that it’s aimed at. But it’s a rea­son­able mobile fac­sim­ile of famil­iar con­cepts, and it cer­tainly kept me com­ing back to it for those eight to nine-ish hours with only rel­a­tively minor com­plaints. Look at it this way — if you had told the younger ver­sion of myself play­ing that there Pac­man rip-off on the Speccy all those years ago that they could play some­thing of this qual­ity and scope on a mobile phone, he’d have been blown away, at least once you had fur­ther explained the con­cept of a mobile phone to him. I am very old, remember.

And all this for a price less, in absolute terms, less than the bud­get game releases of the day, even before you take infla­tion into account? Lunacy. How­ever, we’re not judg­ing Eter­nal Legacy in com­par­i­son with Chuckie Egg, we’re judg­ing it amongst its App Store com­padres. There are a few more pol­ished RPGs that I’ve seen, but most are either opt­ing for a SNES-y, car­toony, Zelda-y look, or have more in com­mon with the West­ern, Oblivion-style RPGs. Noth­ing wrong with either approach, but it’s left a gap in the mar­ket for some­thing a lit­tle more mod­ern and JRPG-influenced to exist, and Eter­nal Legacy is a very cred­i­ble game to fill that gap.

It’s cur­rently £2.99 in the App Store, a triv­ial amount of cash for such a game on any con­sole, but thanks to the unusual met­rics of the sys­tem it’s in a more expen­sive tier than most games. It’s cer­tainly worth that much, but per­haps you may want to wait (as I did) for one of Gameloft’s fre­quent sales to knock that down a lit­tle before tak­ing the plunge. At fifty nine pence, it’s damn near as good value for money for a game as I’ve ever had. There’s also a free demo ver­sion, should the prospect of part­ing with less than the price of a mediocre cup of cof­fee con­cern you greatly.