Time and Eternity, the latest role playing game from developers imageepoch and NIS America, opens with a scene that's surely been every potential groom's nightmare - having your special day crashed by assassins. With the bad guys threatening to bring everything to a rather abrupt halt, your wife-to-be Princess Toki, being the calm and collected sort she is, does the only logical thing and transforms into her time-hopping alter ego Towa and gives them what for. Also you die. And then you wake up six months before the attack happened, trapped in the body of her mute dragon pet Drake, as it turns out the princesses can time travel too. Heading back in time in an attempt to put right what went wrong, your fiancee(s) set off on a journey to figure out the reasons for the attack and prevent the whole ordeal from happening in the first place - but as everyone knows, messing with the past can have consequences you may not have expected...
It's this ridiculous setting that makes Time and Eternity seem somewhat different to your average Japanese role-playing game - for starters, there's no angsty teen with a oversized sword on a quest to save the world from some androgynous bad guy possessed by some nefarious dark power. Instead it's a silly, light-hearted, and often times humorous adventure through time to track down the assassins that wrecked your opportunity to live happily ever after with your wife to be. You see, although you spend most of your time in control of Toki/Towa, the 'main character' is technically the husband, who spends most of the game inside Drake (the dragon)'s head, leaving you privy to some of his inner-most thoughts (which aren't exactly powered by the head on his shoulders) - which leads to some rather hilarious situations.
Your home, where the obligatory post-mission tea-party debriefs take place.
With a head over heels hubby trapped in the body of a cute dinosaur, he's full of the sort of cheesy innuendo-filled one-liners you'd expect, whilst the game itself plays out like a sort of Japanese romantic comedy anime. In fact, your girlfriend doesn't even realise you're trapped in her pet's body for the first part of the game as you're unable to emit anything other than cute dragon-y noises, leading to some awkward moments - you become Toki and Towa's confidant, watch the Assassin's Guild Fan Club head put the moves on your women, and even enjoy a couple of baths with the ladies (although much to his dismay, he passes out with excitement before things get interesting). Once he gets the ability to talk though, you get to see the relationship between him and his princesses develop, as they work together to prevent his eventual bloodshed.
Beyond the main dude, his innocent happy-go-luck fiancee and her more serious tomboy alter ego, there's nary a normal person in sight. There's assassin fan-boys who own a bakery, a friend with a very particular (and peculiar) preference in men, a fortune teller with a distinct lack of magical powers, a love-struck child who believes the calming power of peanuts can save him and many more. It's crazy and silly, and the game knows it.
In terms of how it actually plays out, Time and Eternity is a role-playing game through and through, which means your time will be split between talking to anyone and everyone lending them a hand with their problems, getting into more than a few battles with bad guys along the way. As is a staple for the genre, the more you battle the more experience points you accrue, and once you earn enough points your character gains a level, becoming more powerful and learning new moves in the process - but in the case of Time and Eternity, levelling up also means you'll switch between Toki and Towa automatically each time your level increases, which brings with it a few interesting changes - although we'll come back to that later. You'll also come across better equipment during your travels that'll help boost your characters even more - guns and knives laced with thunder, magical rings to up your defence and more, which can be bought from the town store, found on your travels or given as a reward for completing a quest.
Seemingly, the plot to ruin the royal wedding was pretty far reaching, with your adventure taking you all over the kingdom, albeit to some pretty similar locales - a wide open field, a claustrophobic cavern, or a leafy forest, with the same scenery being used over several different islands. Each dot on the overarching world map corresponds to a new area, packed with side-quests, items, treasure chests and objectives, all of which in turn are shown on the handy area map - and while it helps make sure you're never stuck with where to head next, it does take away the need to explore every nook and cranny for secrets too. The side-quests themselves also tend to be very samey, with only really two main types - fetch stuff and kill stuff - even if the dialogue to set them up is as oddball as the game itself, with a man eating his magazine, indecisive parents Thissun and Thaturn and a portly president that's possibly been eaten by monsters.
The 'Memory Sites' on the map, denoted by a heart, unlock little extra conversations/situations with both Toki and Towa, which can help you and the girl(s) grow closer. In fact, your reward for picking the correct option during one of these scenes is sometimes an 'interesting' picture - they're all fairly innocent really, designed to leave stuff to the imagination of some of the game's less mature audience. Speaking as a female playing the game, the sneaky peaks at underwear, cunningly placed beams of light and helplessly-tangled-in-vines (tentacles?) scenes are sort of sigh-inducing, but kind of fit with the ardent male character you're 'playing' as - and his reactions to said scenes are usually funny and light-hearted enough that it doesn't really matter.
Oh, Japan.
Perhaps the only really awkward part of the whole game is the camera - from the outset it's fixed at a set distance behind Toki/Towa, giving you a relatively limited view of what's going on and making exploring kind of awkward and disorientating, and while you can also rotate the camera with the right stick, the girl(s) still stay slap bang in the middle of your screen blocking whatever's directly in front of you. With so many chests, quests and memory scenes to find during your adventure, such a restricted view seems like a bit of an odd decision - with a bit of experimenting we did find that you could make things better by zooming out as far as the R2 button will let you (which isn't all that far), which at least lets you see more than a few feet in front so as not to collide with every single bush and rock on the map, but it's not exactly perfect.
Like most role-playing games, Time and Eternity has battles, and lots of them. Occurring randomly as you wander round the world, the game transitions to a view which isn't all that dissimilar to your average fighting game like Street Fighter or Dead or Alive, where Toki/Towa go one on one against a series of enemies one after the other, either firing long-ranged attacks or leaping in close for some hand-to-hand combat. In theory, Toki is better from a distance with her rifle, whilst Towa excels up close with her knife, but in practice there's not a huge difference between the two women, with both being almost equally as capable the other in each situation. Where the pair do differ though is in the special moves and magic spells they're able to learn - Toki can hurl fire balls at her enemies, whilst Towa has lightning at her disposal. These magical attacks may take a moment to charge but do immense amounts of damage, often killing enemies in one hit and stronger bosses in a couple of shots, although they can be disrupted by your opponent if they attack you whilst it's charging. Some enemies have certain types, defining their strengths and weaknesses, and letting you exploit them for massive damage. While you can obliterate an ice golem with a fire ball, hitting a phoenix with a fire spell does no damage whatsoever, so it's something that's well worth keeping an eye on.
Take that 'Master' Ricardo!
Toki and Towa aren't alone in their battles though - after all, they're due to marry a knight, and what kind of man would he be if he didn't lend a hand? Not wanting to let the fact he's trapped in a dragon's body stop him, Drake can help you beat up the bad guys and has an immensely useful healing spell he uses whenever he thinks you're running a bit low. You can't control him directly and it's up to the game to decide what he does and when, but by and large he'll heal you before you conk out - and even if he does skimp on his duties, you can simply hold down the R2 button, pausing the action, and scoff down a macaroon and carry on, no longer on death's door.
With a refreshingly different story, crazy characters and fairly low difficulty, Time and Eternity was a game we really enjoyed, but it may be a bit of a Marmite one. Repetitive fetch quests, random battles and it's childish, innuendo-fuelled humour may turn off some, but if you can look past it's flaws and enjoy it for the bizarre game it is, there's plenty of fun to be had here.
Format Reviewed: Playstation 3
