It's undeniable that many games from Japan that make it to our shores--particularly in the role-playing genre--have strong influences from anime. Great role-playing game series like Disgaea, Persona, and Tales feature visual and storytelling elements heavily influenced by the art form. Developer Imageepoch aspired to go one step higher with Time and Eternity, billing the game as "playable anime." Unfortunately, the end product is not only a showcase for nearly every negative stereotype ascribed to anime, but a bad RPG to boot.
Time and Eternity tells the story of Zack and Princess Toki, a couple of lovebirds who live in a secluded fantasy island kingdom. On the day Toki and Zack are set to tie the knot, a group of assassins disrupt the proceedings, and Zack is killed protecting Toki. The incident brings out some of Toki's innermost secrets: not only does she share a body with the soul of another woman, Towa, but her family possesses magical time-manipulating powers. Toki and Towa decide to travel back in time to piece together the how and why and stop the disaster before it happens--though they are unaware that Zack's soul has come along with them, trapped in the body of Toki's pet miniature dragon, Drake.
Even as the plot setup and central cast are being introduced, Time and Eternity seems determined to make you dislike it. Zack, the male hero--and the character whose perspective you follow--seems more interested in off-color thoughts and remarks and being "manly" than he is in Toki and Towa's genuine affection and well-being. Toki and Towa are affectionate toward Zack in a way that feels very uncomfortable at times, given Zack's questionable behavior. Toki's friends are one-note anime archetypes (ditzy wedding planner, shrill rich girl who flaunts her status, and boy-crazy teenager) who offer no real character development and simply exist to set up bad jokes. Non-player characters you meet over the course of the story are similarly irritating, typically featuring a single humorous (read: obnoxious) trait that defines their entire personality. It's hard to be invested in anyone's plight when almost every player in the story is unlikable. Though that's not to imply that the story is good; Time and Eternity features some of the most insipid plot twists you could possibly conceive for the time-travel concept.
But the character development isn't the only thing that falls flat. Time and Eternity's biggest hook is its unique visual style. Rather than being polygon-rendered models or sprites, every action of every character in the game is drawn in high-definition, traditional animation sequences. This approach sounds interesting on paper, but the problems with its execution begin to materialize almost right away. For starters, you immediately notice that most of the animated characters bear only a passing resemblance to the game's illustrations and concept art.
Just a few minutes later, you start to become keenly aware of constant animation sequence recycling. Reused and repeating animation is certainly nothing new in games, but the jerky, awkward motions of the characters and inconsistent frame rates make the rampant reuse both more noticeable and more unappealing. (As an example, you can play an impromptu metagame just counting how many times Toki and Towa do their weird leg-crossing/uncrossing animation during the teatime sequences.)
The cheap feel of the animation becomes even more pronounced when you see just how much palette-swapping goes on throughout the game. Toki and Towa share the bulk of their animations, but are simply colored differently, leading to motions that don't match the personality of the character in play. In addition, there are only a handful of enemy designs, but plenty of palette swaps for each one. But perhaps the worst visual effect comes from the juxtaposition of 2D animated models against the game's 3D backgrounds, leading to awkward camera angles, weird scene transitions, and disjointed character movements. (The backgrounds, lacking in detail as they may be, at least offer some pleasant use of color, which is probably the nicest thing you can say about the visuals.)
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