RPG Maker strikes again!
Eternal Concord is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction.
As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options (although you get some due to the use of what looks like the JRGSS port of RPG Maker... yeah... it's Java... Jesus wept, this is a java based mobile app slapped together with RPG Maker and dumped on Steam as if it's a real PC game... Noah, get the boat), making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used as a substitute for "professional" game development, as the "developer" of this fan-fiction has tried to do here. Real development requires talent, not childrens construction kits... and what do you know, when people are unable to do the difficult job of making their own game and resort to a construction kit, turns out they're not very good at the other parts of game design either, which is one of so many reasons why these asset flips like Eternal Concord are so godawfully bad.
Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.
This one has a painfully generic, yet somehow still incredibly cringey high school anime club dropout fan-fiction about the end of the world, the "developers" imaginary anime girlfriends, etc etc... it's a complete cringefest. So basically right smack bang in the middle of what anyone should expect from these wildly ignored RPG Maker asset flips.
The worst part about this one is it was ported to iOS and Android, so yeah, this is a mobile app... the developer is trying to sell a mobile app, not even genuinely made, it's an RPG Maker construction kit asset flip, for cash money. What a joke.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this RPG Maker asset flip? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?
Eternal Concord is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
