Profile
Story: Nine fighters throughout history have met untimely and unjust deaths. They now compete against each other for a chance to face the "Eternal Champion" and reclaim their souls. The victor will return to Earth with the chance to avenge his or her own death and restore balance to the universe.
General: Eternal Champions was the first 2D fighting game from Sega, and was pretty much "riding the coattails" of hit arcade fighting games like of Street Fighter II (1991), Fatal Fury (1991) and Mortal Kombat (1992). The game introduced a cast of oddball characters and stage-specific, gory finishing moves called "overkills."
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First of all, Eternal Champions was a "home" fighting game on the 16 bit Sega Genesis, so it obviously didn't have the graphical prowess to overtake (or even come close to) the top fighting games that were becoming crazily popular at the arcades in 1993. To make matters worse, the gameplay was super clunky, especially to anyone who had ever played the fighting games mentioned in the last paragraph. The animation in Eternal Champions was also below below average, and extremely choppy. Most characters' priority moves are no more than 2 frames ... Yeah, the animation was just plain bad... Possibly the worst animation in any mainstream 2D fighting game. The only animation that came out "alright" was the disturbingly gory finishing moves; seems like they spent more time on those than the actual game itself.
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Projectiles and other special moves are performed by either pressing multiple buttons together, or holding back or down to charge. The gameplay features a special attack meter, which would decrease over time as you performed a special move such as a projectile. Different special attacks decreased the meter by different amounts. Due to this meter, special attacks can't be abused, because you have to wait for your "inner-strength meter" to refill every time you perform two or three special moves in succession. It was a decent idea for a gameplay element, but I think most fighting game players didn't like the fact that they couldn't perform special moves at will. Actually, in my opinion, there wasn't really anything "fun" about the gameplay at all.
Manufacturer: Sega
Platforms: Sega
Genesis / Megadrive
Release: 1993
Characters: Shadow
Yamoto, R.A.X. Coswell, Johnathan Blade, Jetta Maxx, Slash, Trident, Xavier
Pendragon, Midknight, Larcen Tyler, Eternal Champion
Related Games:
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2 / 10 |
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3 / 10 |
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1.5 / 10 |
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Closing Comment: As a young Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat fan in 1991, I knew Eternal Champions was just another attempt at a rip-off. Even with the hype of this game that popped up here or there, I found absolutely nothing about Eternal Champions that I liked. I remember deeply despising the horrible choppy animation and terrible pixilated graphics (I could have drawn better characters on my computer, with a mouse, at 9 years old). I also concluded that this game would make me worse at Street Fighter 2, because the gameplay was so terrible. Seriously, this game makes World Heroes look good.
I also hated
the character designs... I really really did. I remember watching some
kids playing this game when it came out at some random game store back
in the day (Babbage's I think), and they were all so "into it" and thought
it was so cool. It pissed me off to see people actually enjoying this game,
because I knew in my heart that this game truly sucked. I do realize Eternal
Champions developed a small fan base, and I do wonder where all
five of those people have gone, 
but personally, I really do hope they never try to re-make this game.
In closing,
Eternal
Champions is indeed guilty of trying to mooch off of the success of
Street Fighter 2, and also Mortal Kombat's "shock value" by throwing in
some blood and gore. It was as if the designers thought "who cares how
the game plays, kids will love the blood and guts right?" Well, they
didn't capture my interest back then, and time has obviously not been kind
to this title; it's still one of the ugliest fighting games
ever
made. It's true I neglected putting Eternal Champions on TFG
for a very long time, and it was simply due to the fact that this
game's graphics, characters, and pretty much everything about it just makes
me want to puke... 
a lot.
But due to
"popular demand," Eternal Champions is finally on TFG... Enjoy. 
~F.Yagami,
Webmaster
of TFG
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