Eternal Champions Boss: Eternal Champion gameplay.

Gameplay of the boss Eternal Champion in Sega's Eternal Champions. This game was a request by the user PauloGaiden Eternal Champion's moves: Invincibility: X+Y+Z Energy Projectiles: A+B+C What is it with Sega and naming bosses after the game itself? In Golden Axe: The Duel the final boss was G. Axe, and here the final boss is the Eternal Champion himself. Eternal Champions is one of the biggest anomalies in gaming history. It's the only console fighting game I can think that was extremely well-received, and actually surprisingly marketable, with a ton of merchandise available for it, and it actually being Sega's flagship title there for a while. As with AOF2, this is a beloved game, and for good reasons, but not as such a good game. It is one of the most brutally difficult and unfair fighting games there is, certainly being on par with AOF2, particularly as the two games share the same power bar system for special moves. And yet, it's so charming and of such a high-quality in the design department (particularly visuals and sound), to the point where it still remains a game many are fascinated with, and enjoy. It's a brutal game, but there's no denying that it's a damn interesting one, and definitely lovable in its own strange way. One point that might be the breaking point for players however is the Eternal Champion himself. This guy comes in five forms, with five full lifebars, and must be defeated in 2 subsequent rounds. Although you get your lifebar partially refilled after you defeat one of his forms, this still means you are at a FIVE-TO-ONE DISADVANTAGE. It's brutal. If you look up playthroughs of this game or its sequel, you'll see that sometimes a third or even half of the game is just spent fighting the Eternal Champion. Despite coming in five flavours, the Eternal Champion himself only has one character slot. This means that his other four forms are changed on the fly by a different, subsequent value, a series of flags which I suspect change his movesets to other unique ones on the fly. This is incredibly unique, and we'll never see anything like this again, it's downright fascinating. However, due to only being able to use his first form, this means he's pretty underwhelming when played as, having a weak projectile attack and a significantly more useful (and broken) invulnerability special moves. It's still pretty easy to mop the floor with the AI, simply due to being able to turn invincible at a moment's notice, but were it not for the diverse visuals from stage to stage and the variety of the soundtrack it would become a tedious experience quite quickly. Alas, there also exists one other problem. EC himself will usually cause the game to freeze up at some point. Sometimes at the end of one match, sometimes at the beginning of another, but he'll nearly always cause the game to lock up by some point. This was the best footage I was able to get, and let's hope I have better luck utilising the Dark Champion in the second game. The game received a sequel on the Mega CD Called "Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side", which I'll cover soon. It was also supposed to receive a third game on the Sega Saturn, but Sega cancelled that to instead focus on the Virtua Fighter franchise, due to the rise in popularity of 3D gaming. VF is essentially the polar opposite of EC, with VF having fantastic gameplay but next to no story or universe to talk about. EC on the other hand is brutally difficult, unbalanced and more than just a touch broken as gameplay goes, and yet is infinitely more interesting in terms of design and story elements. Ah, what could have been. I had to hack EC to play as him, as he's not usually playable. Sega games are nearly always some of the easiest to hack (character values ascend in order the characters on placed on the character select screen, so the first character is 00, second is 01, third is 02, etc, which makes hacking bosses incredibly easy.) I'll do a tutorial on how to hack him, of course, if anyone's interested.