Nov. 14, 2008
Eternal Poison, a strategy RPG with a strong emphasis on story and characters, offers fans of the genre a variety of ways in which to put sound battle stratagem to good use. Throughout the grand narrative experience, players will encounter a variety of conditions and scenarios that will demand some keen tactics in order to achieve victory. For some of the ideal ways to approach combat in Eternal Poison, look below:
General Strategy
• Try to attack opponents from behind or the side - This game heavily rewards the player for positioning themselves well while attacking, even when using magic. As such, Eternal Poison’s mechanics make it difficult to flank someone by requiring a unit to expend two steps to get around an opponent’s side. This is a costly penalty when most characters have movement ranges that hover around five steps. Alternatively, you can use this concept to your advantage by creating a shield of strong units in the front of formations while keeping the weaker, but quite important, healing units out of harm’s way.
• Single out enemies in battle - It becomes much easier to damage and overkill a Majin if there aren’t five of its buddies healing it or attacking your party. Most of the enemies in this game have a limited range of awareness, so it is very plausible to draw out the Majin one-by-one by advancing your party carefully instead of just charging forward.
• Determine the enemy’s weakness - A smart player will pay attention to an enemy’s physical and/or elemental weaknesses (which can be figured out by looking at a unit’s status screen). If an enemy is even slightly resistant to a certain kind of attack, that type of attack is close to worthless.
• Inflict opponents with status effects - The Bleed status ailment takes away a certain percentage of the affected unit’s life each time the bleeding unit performs any action, including moving, attacking, or beingattacked. If the unit has high HP and strong resistances to many attacks, sometimes the Bleed damage is more significant than the actual attacks that are being used. And since Bleed can bring an enemy’s HP down to 1 but not kill it, putting a Majin into Bleed status before overkilling is ideal.
Overkill Strategy
• Bring the Majin’s HP down as close to 1 as possible before dealing the killing blow - In order to overkill a Majin in Eternal Poison, the player needs to damage the Majin by a certain amount beyond their normal HP with the killing blow. If a Majin has 50 HP left and a 120 HP overkill threshold, the player will need to do more than 170 damage to overkill, or less than 50 damage to make sure the Majin doesn’t die before being overkilled. If the player does do somewhere between 50 and 170 damage to that Majin, it’ll just disappear from the map, and it may drop an item at best.
• Determine, and keep in mind how much damage your most powerful attack will do - When attacking a Majin for the first time, initially use whatever you think would work best as a killing blow on a unit, and note that damage in your head. With a few exceptions, most Majin are strong enough to endure even the most powerful attack from your units. There are usually the same types of enemies on each map, so you can assume that you will do that same amount of damage to that type of Majin after this “experimental attack.”
• Nominate your most powerful character to be the “Overkiller” - The ideal party setup in Eternal Poison usually revolves around having a few over-powered characters in your party for overkilling (the main characters in each respective path of the game suit this role well), and then having a few support characters there to heal your “overkiller” units and capture the bound Majin quickly.
• Use combo attacks - Combo attacks are almost a necessity when you want to overkill a strong opponent, especially when your mage units don’t have spells which target the enemies’ weaknesses. Remember that combo attacks follow the rules of weaknesses and positioning just like other attacks. Thankfully, you can use the combo ability with ranged units, so it is even possible to get two back attacks in one combo by having a melee and ranged unit work together.
While these tips are useful, please note that there are many other strategies a player can and should use to succeed in the world of Eternal Poison. Eternal Poison is now available in stores across North America!
Eternal Poison is one of three titles featured in the “Atlus Spoils” promotion, along with Luminous Arc 2 for Nintendo DS™ and Persona 4 for PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system. Each game includes a soundtrack CD free-with-purchase, and each game offers a deluxe full-color art book exclusively with pre-orders. Don’t forget to ask for your pre-order bonus if you reserved a copy at a participating retailer!
For more information on Eternal Poison, please visit the official website
Eternal Poison, a strategy RPG for PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system, is currently available in stores across North America with an MSRP of $39.99.
