Eternal Poison is unlike many other games I've played in that it doesn't even try to be more than what it is. Atlus wanted an anime game with Gothic elements that'd hopefully be cheap to localize and would appeal to both the Hot Topic and Gamestop crowds, so that's exactly what it is. On the bright side, based on my (limited) experience with it, it didn't turn out quite as badly as I thought it would.
The game opens with a Prologue scenario where you control main character Thage ("Tage", a girl in traditional Goth garb who is apparently fourteen?) and her companion, a horned wolf named Rakim as they beat the everloving shit out of a few Majin - the demons that you can turn into money, if you recall. The combat system is very simple. Characters get turns in varying order based on their Speed stat, and each turn a character can move and take one action, be that casting a spell, attacking, or capturing a Majin (more on that later, as it's pretty much the only thing that sets Eternal Poison apart from your typical SRPG)
Thage is a spellcaster, Raki is a melee fighter, and the enemies in the Prologue scenario are all weak to at least one form of their attacks (Thage has Fire and Dark, Raki has Slash and Pierce), so it's not hard to wipe the floor with their asses. The interesting thing is that it's not enough to just kill an enemy. Each Majin has an Overkill rate - if you manage to kill the Majin by getting rid of all their HP PLUS this Overkill amount, the Majin doesn't die; instead, it's Bound, stuck in place by a giant cross spear thing. From then on, any non-Majin character that stands next to it can Capture it, basically sealing it in a giant book for later use in town.
That's basically all there is to it. You beat on Majin with attacks they're not weak to until you get them down to 10HP or thereabouts, then use an attack aimed at their weakness to Bind and Capture them. There's a few other things. Combo attacks, for instance, are available and do the combined damage of each character involved in the combo. This would normally be a waste of time to set up, but the sum damage could be the difference between a bind and just a kill.
Once the Prologue is over, you can move on to the main game. After some background exposition - there's a kingdom, the princess has been kidnapped by Majin, a gate to the Majin's home of Besek has appeared, the King says that anyone who goes in and finds the princess gets anything they want - you're given the option of choosing between three potential parties. I chose the one led by Thage since I was used to her from the Prologue; the others are led by the Princess' fiancee and a priestess.
Thage, as it turns out, is after the Eternal Poison, which is a magical treasure that does...uh...something. They haven't said what it does yet, but we DO know that it's somewhere in Besek, so Thage and Raki are in there looking for it. Thage magically enslaves some kid for some reason with magic, the kid spends the next three missions whining about it and also dying to Majin because he's terrible. One of the things I noticed about this game is that every character but Thage and Raki has absolutely atrocious magic defense, and every Majin except the basic Egyptian jackal things can attack with magic. In other words, everyone but Thage and Raki gets their shit fucked up on a regular basis. There's game balance for you.
Next time I'll write about town and what you do with those captured demons, also why this game is hard as a motherfuck.
