Game Complete - Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

A Lovecraftian tale of different characters separated in place and time

but connected through a common destiny to save humanity.

This was a game I had been wanting to play for a long time since it first came out. Unfortunately, I haven't owned a Nintendo home console since the Super Nintendo until the Switch (portable consoles not withstanding, I own all the iterations), and none of my friends who did had picked up this game. When my girlfriend moved in, so too did her Wii, so I suddenly had access to two generations of Nintendo since the Wii had native Gamecube functionality built in!

Prior to this, I've only spent any considerable time with the Wii playing Xenoblade Chronicles a couple years ago (absolute gem, definitely scratched a JRPG itch I had been having for quite some time that Final Fantasy had failed to do for over a decade and a half), but since the move into our new place, I decided to go back to the Wii and visit another old title.

Despite the dated graphics, the game holds up pretty well, and I was still able to enjoy it quite thoroughly. One of the game's greatest points is that it takes place in numerous environments from around the world - a Middle Eastern tomb, a Cambodian temple, a medieval European church, and the contemporary mansion in America. Despite the fact that the environments were reused multiple times, each one grows and adds new areas in each subsequent visit, as time goes on. While they locations were familiar, it didn't feel like they had grown stale.

The gameplay is pretty smooth but leans towards the easier side in terms of difficulty. There are some puzzles to solve in each chapter, which generally consist of fetching an item and using it in the correct space or using the correct spell to progress. A lot of the puzzles reflect on the recent powers the character acquires. Combat is easy to learn and master, you can target different parts of the body - head, arms, torsos - and you can focus destroying one to reduce its abilities (no head - can't cause sanity damage or follow you, no arms - can't attack). There's only a handful of enemies - 6 types, along with their individual variants for each of the Ancients - not including the 3 bosses. The enemies are easy to bait and fell, especially when you use the correct enchantment on your weapon, so I never really felt any sense of danger. 

The story is decent. I really enjoyed that there were so many different characters to play as and with their own storyline and reasons for being involved. It kept me interested, in spite of the characters all playing the same except for a reshuffling of different statistics. I've always been a fan of horror and Lovecraft. I think this game did a good job for 2002 in terms of capturing that sort of weirdness, especially with how many different things could happen when your sanity had dropped. Apparently the game has different events and scenes depending on which artifact you chose at the beginning (I chose the red one, Chatturgat), and a 'true ending' if you complete the playthroughs of each of the three artifacts (Something I'm curious enough to look up on Youtube, but not enough to play through the game three more times). 

I definitely enjoyed my week and a half of it (I only played after work in darkness, I really feel that games need to have the atmosphere set to truly enjoy it) and I'm glad that I was able to finally experience it after all these years.