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- He/Him
- www.gemubaka.com/
Arcade enthusiast and game collector. Retro streamer and games archive writer at Gemubaka.
For business only: gemubaka at gmail
I was thinking about Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side on SEGA CD today, as one does from time to time.
One of the things that sticks out to me when the game is looked at as a product is its thick, thick instruction book. This ranks in at 70 pages, and we're talking 70 pages of a longbox instruction book.
This book barely fits under the plastic tabs on the case to hold it in place. It features the commonplace items of explaining how to play the game and describing the characters, but it goes into levels of having multiple pages of lore and how to most effectively arrange your audio equipment to get the best sound from the game (?).
This is a game that is too good to be stuck on the SEGA CD format. If the series is touched on in any way by SEGA, it's always the Genesis/Mega Drive version. This is a game that screams "1990s," for better and for worse, but it has such a rich feature set that it impresses me to this date. I definitely still enjoy playing it every now and again.
It's a shame that SEGA allegedly saw the franchise as a threat to its Virtua Fighter sales and popularity. A variation of the console box for the SEGA Saturn featured a mock screen of Eternal Champions: The Final Chapter, which never came to light. If the series was going to go away, it would have been nice if it had the chance to do so on its own terms instead of fading away with a whimper.