The PS2 Fossil Record - Ephemeral Fantasia

The choices for RPGs on the PS2 in the first year were pretty slim. This was especially the case if you wanted traditional turn-based RPGs. While From Software and Level-5 would produce a number of action RPGs in that first year, there really just wasn't much in the way of vanilla JRPGs on the system. Honestly, it's a bit odd considering the genre was at the height of its powers at the time. I almost feel like it was a genre that was well understood and developers wanted to give the new hardware a try with genres the PS1 had limited for technical reasons. Still, if you really wanted one you could purchase a turn-based JRPG on your PS2 in August of 2000 in Japan, or July of 2001 in America. Hopefully you didn't though, because this is not a sterling example of the form.

That's a real shame though because Ephemeral Fantasia is, on paper, honestly pretty interesting. The game is built around a five-day time loop. Protagonist Mouse is a musician hired to play the wedding of the royalty of a small island. He arrives five days before the ceremony at the beginning of the festivities, and when the wedding day comes he finds himself sent back to the moment he arrived, a fact pointed out to him by his talking guitar Pattimo. Mouse and Pattimo's original goal was actually just to rob the place blind, but seeing as they're stuck on the island until they can find a way to end the loop, they set out to find a way to resolve it. This is complicated by the fact that it quickly becomes obvious the only way to end the loop is to kill the groom. 

Conceptually that's quite cool, and the basic structure of how to gain new party members is neat as well. You have to find a way to convince each character that time is looping over and over, awakening them to its existence and allowing you to use them on future loops. The plot itself is reasonably interesting in broad strokes even if its villain is probably the most obvious one I've seen in years (at least it doesn't beat around the bush revealing this). 

On paper, there's a lot of good ideas crowding around in Ephemeral Fantasia. Aesthetically it's very of the time, but the music manages to stand out as a high note. There's also a kind of cute nod to developer Konami's Guitar Freaks series, a franchise that was only exported to the dying arcades of the early ‘00s but which basically plays like three-button Guitar Hero (though it was devised many years earlier). Mouse can actually play songs he'll learn throughout the game using the exact same mechanics as those then-popular arcade games. The default button layout is atrocious but for the time it was novel, especially for western players such as myself.

As you can probably tell based on the verbiage I've been using, Ephemeral Fantasia just falls apart when it actually has to be played. It's not even just the ambitious parts that don't work, (although those are where it gets really trying)—this is a top-down JRPG where the camera sucks. It really almost feels like it was made by a team who hadn't worked with 3D much before and went mad with power. The camera typically sits at a slightly tilted angle rather than pure top-down and that's where the assets are meant to be most readable, but the arrangement of objects in town means that you're routinely just obscured. Your other options are a camera so zoomed-in as to be completely useless and a literal top-down camera. The top-down one fixes the obscuring problem but makes the game generally less readable at a glance, as many distinguishing characteristics of the buildings and people in town are no longer visible. This is ignoring that the game is already hard to navigate. The battle camera isn't any better, by default it’s set to “Dynamic” which swaps between two of the other settings seemingly at random. The settings it’s swapping between focus the camera on either an enemy or a party member, and it's incredibly disorienting and hard to keep a handle on what's actually going on. Setting the camera to focus on enemies makes the game disorienting because you can’t see any of what your party is doing unless it’s directly attacking that specific enemy; setting it on the party is the closest to readable though still mildly disorienting. There is a fourth setting that zooms it way out, but that makes the battles actively dull to look at. Visual dynamism is how you dress up a system that's as simple as this one and this fails that test.

Think about how absurd it is that I had that much to say about the camera in a turn based JRPG, and how none of it was positive. All this wouldn't be a major problem if the rest of the game worked better, but there's no good news there. Ephemeral Fantasia's actual management of its core gimmick is thrown into sharp relief by its most obvious comparison, the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. That game is as divisive as they come because the gimmick of having to repeat segments and always being on a timer is inherently stressful. That said, that game really nails what needs to be done to make such a taxing gimmick palatable to a broad audience. 

Now I want to stress that there is essentially no possible way Ephemeral Fantasia could have been conceived as a knock-off of Majora’s Mask. EF was in development for quite a while as a Dreamcast game, then it finally released for PS2 about 3 months after Majora's Mask in Japan. By the time anyone on the team could have played Majora's Mask it would have been too late to integrate anything from it. 

Unfortunately, the game they released just doesn't work. For starters, five days as a time loop is kind of pushing how much you can expect the player to keep track of. There's just a lot of information about scheduling that this kind of game forces into your head, and the longer the loop is the more the player has to track and correlate. There's nothing like the Bomber's Notebook from Majora’s Mask that tracks whos, wheres, and whens either. The player is left to keep track of things they learn about schedules pretty much on their own. Ephemeral Fantasia also has no way to forcibly end a loop early other than running out the clock or getting a game over, neither of which is a low time commitment process in real world terms. This makes a rather finicky game also tedious and punishing if the player messes up scheduling. Unlike that original Japanese release of Majora’s Mask, saving in mid-time loop is totally doable, but it isn’t a great trade compared to the quality of life features lost.

Even that wouldn't be a problem if the majority of the game didn't require carefully meeting appointments. This really is a huge percentage of the game—just being in the right place and right time to hit event flags. It doesn’t help that those appointments are both strictly timed and dropped in a world that's essentially a giant maze. Pieces of the game's map are hidden everywhere and are legitimately useful both for navigating and later on acting as the only means of warping, but they often require a lot of studious exploration to find. A player approaching without a walkthrough who wants to recruit all the characters (to the game's credit this is by no means required) is likely to endure a number of loops where they get lost or don't know about a necessary meeting or step. Another virtue of Majora's Mask compared to this game is extremely straightforward map design. Majora's Mask is an archetypal hub and spokes design; go in a cardinal direction and you will find a very specific and distinct area that you can cleanly digest. Ephemeral Fantasia's map is more naturalistic in its layout to an extent, but that makes a game that's already demanding the player to keep track of a lot really push past my personal breaking point. The whole thing just doesn't really work. The expectations demanded of the player cause the entire game to eventually collapse under the weight of a number of harsh design choices.

I do want to touch a bit on what I see as an ongoing confusion about how to approach the PS2 that we'll probably see a lot of in this series of essays. In the case of Ephemeral Fantasia, the left analog stick is used for movement and the right one is unbound. This can likely be blamed on this game starting life as a Dreamcast game before being reworked as a PS2 title, but there's still some oddness that feels deeply in-line with a developer who doesn't fully grasp the difference between analog and digital controls. Whether the analog stick is lightly pressed in a direction or pushed full tilt, Mouse walks unless a run button is held. Also, there's no auto-run option, which is slightly irritating given that you always want to be running because the game's on a timer. No use that I could detect was made of the pressure sensitive buttons either, but I would typically consider that a mercy. A lot of these early PS2 games seem utterly befuddled by what to do with the Dual Shock 2, even though it's standard, so I think in the future essays in this series will have sections devoted to what games end up doing with it. 

Another thing I want to keep track of is what these games offered to try to distinguish themselves as a specific "next-gen" upgrade compared to a PS1 game. I think the biggest one here is in that flawed camera, due to the large scale environments and desire to zoom in close on models. There's definitely an intent to show off models and animation more than you'd have seen on the PS1. The environments were also all 3D which wasn't common among PS1 RPGs. Typically, those games had 3D characters running across 2D backgrounds to allow for more detailed environmental renders. While Ephemeral Fantasia was definitely less detailed, all the rendering is real-time which would have been something that would have been at least lightly remarked on given how prevalent pre-rendered backgrounds had been to that point.

This was your option for an early PS2 JRPG. Structurally, I admire its ambition. I legitimately don't think the game's irredeemable, but I feel like you have to look past a lot and have a lot of patience for a mediocre translation hiding a pretty bog standard script. If the very concept isn't incredibly appealing to you, the execution probably cannot save it. I can't wholeheartedly recommend the game to basically anyone. While I might do another post later if I can force myself through the full game, it's such a deeply flawed work I can't guarantee that when there's so much that's more immediately and deeply rewarding to play.