Cheap Elemental Gimmick Gear (E.G.G.) (Video Games) (Sega Dreamcast) Price

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Customer Reviews of Elemental Gimmick Gear (E.G.G.)

Great Premise, Horrible Execution
Your character, called "the sleeper," awakens from a slumber several centuries old to find the world being overrun by tentacles and sentient plant life, all sprouting from an enormous temple named "Fogna." Equipped with a ten foot tall suit of robotic armor named "Elemental Gimmick Gear," he sets off to fight the evil and overcome his own amnesia. It's a bargain basement story at best, and aside from the introduction and a brief revelation halfway through the game, the writing really grinds to a halt right there. You're given no continuing motivation to play.

There are a total of three cinematic cut scenes in Elemental Gimmick Gear. One is played at the onset of a new game, and serves to introduce the storyline (or, perhaps, lack thereof). The second is a montage of scenes from that cinema, and plays when you power the game up and fail to press the start button within a couple seconds. The third is your generic "reward" video, and is played every time you defeat a boss and receive a new power. Eight hours into this game, I'd watched that same cinema half a dozen times. No minor nuances were altered, to differentiate between my reception of the ice beam as opposed to, say, the fire beam. It's all the same, horribly compressed, video scene. I'm sure there would have been an equally uninspiring CGI at the game's conclusion, had I been granted the willpower to make it that far.

Perhaps the only factor in which EGG doesn't completely lag is the impressive originality within the overworld's graphics. There's a beautiful, stylistic, thick-lined detail in the backdrops of the game's overhead battle scenes that, with a little finesse, could have been really well done. In today's world of 3-D rendered surroundings and polygons, polygons, polygons, it's nice to see some legitimate linework making its way into a game. Unfortunately, programmers managed to turn even that slim positive element into a non-factor, as despite their beauty it's incredibly difficult to navigate your way around the detailed sketches.

When you enter a boss battle, the game abruptly shifts from the traditional overhead adventure format (a'la Zelda: A Link to the Past) to a strange, polygonal 3-D battle. In addition to the jerky shift between vantagepoints, the visual style shifts just as abruptly, giving way to a poorly textured 3-D battle zone. Bosses are poorly designed and far from intimidating, to the point where they're almost comical. Your surroundings look vaguely similar to the overhead screen they're meant to be molded after, but lack the fine detail and linework that made those scenes even remotely memorable. The characters are simplistic to a fault, and would've been just as much at home with the first wave of Playstation titles as they are here, late in the Dreamcast's life. Add to that an unforgivable load time prior to each boss battle, and you've got an unhappy camper 97% of the time.

Gameplay in EGG is a chore, full of inconsistencies, quirks and bugs. I honestly don't think this game was playtested before its release. Moving around the screen varies from difficult to impossible, and collision detection is way off. Enemies are either too powerful or too weak, with nothing landing in between. I've watched, several times, as my ten foot robot fell to the almighty power of a trout. Yeah, I'm thinking the same thing� you put a fish and a robot in the same room and tell them to fight to the death, my money's most certainly not on the fish.

Your robot also has a love for sailing off ledges and cliffs, an action which actively returns you to the last doorway you walked through and takes 20% of your life as a toll. It's beyond easy to accidentally sail into the abyss, as the machine assumes you've stepped over a ledge every time you're within a couple feet of doing so. Pair that with the horrendous controls, which, instead of following your instructions and heading north, often lead you alternately northwest and northeast in a bizarre drunken swagger, this is a big drawback.

Even the soundtrack is horribly lacking In EGG. Though obviously influenced heavily by the score to Final Fantasy VIII (complete with the soft plucking of violin strings), the game relies all too often on looping and then looping once again. Each individual song is comprised of MAYBE a minute and a half of original music, which then loops back upon itself infinitely. Considering you'll spend about an hour in an average dungeon, this means you'll hear the same obnoxious tune looped upwards of fifty times before you finally complete your work and return to the overworld.

Thinking about Elemental Gimmick Gear makes me wonder what happened. Hudson Soft was chasing the Holy Grail with EGG, the thought of introducing a new type of game to the masses, something which would forever serve as the mold from which entire franchises were crafted. Instead, they released a product which can only be described as overly flawed, incomplete, uninspiring and often painful. I wouldn't wish Elemental Gimmick Gear on my worst enemy.

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this game rules
if you like 2d games you must get this game.

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This game is stupid!
Not only has this game have a stupid name, but the story line is stupid too. I just can't get into a game where you play I guy wondering around in an EGG shaped armor suit. The graphics weren't all that impressive. Needless to say I played the game for a few hours hoping it would get better, which it didn't, and now it just sitting collecting dust.