Overview So, some of you may be wondering why I made this thread. Well the main reason is while it's often criticized for its odd controls and weird move combinations as well as absurdly high difficulty, and being an attempt to outclass Street Fighter 2, it's a pretty interesting series. The storyline has quite a bit of depth to it which a lot of other fighters lack. The cancelled third title would have wrapped up the series and completed the otherwise unfinished storyline. For those unfamiliar with the series, here's a video of the Opening FMV sequence that breifly goes over what the Eternal Champion's mission is and how each champion died: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGxSYyshw8 For those that want a more detailed overview of the storyline watch this text based storyline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMYNy6IjEWQ Planned Gameplay and Mechanics of EC3 Since I'm in contact with Michael Latham, the executive producer and creator of the series, I have access to some information others don't. Unlike the previous 2 games, EC3 (planned to be titled Eternal Champions: The Final Chapter) was to feature a much more complex set of mechanics and gameplay. Notably, progressing through the game would affect the ending. Depending upon the outcome of different fights during a run as a character, it would affect the ending they got and this ending would affect other related characters as well. I'm sure anyone that's played Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side on Champion mode remembers the cliff hanger ending. The Dark Eternal Champion summons his own champions called "Infernals" to fight the Eternal Champion's chosen "Eternals". Each Infernal was indirectly responsible for the death of their corresponding Eternal. This means that they technically have to have "ordered the hit" so to speak rather than committing it themselves. For example, Larcen's Infernal is his boss, Mr. Tagilini and Shadow's would be the Black Orchid Company CEO, not the assassin that killed her. Now Eternal Champions: CftDS dealt with problems with getting the champions home caused by both the Eternal Champion's drained energy from transporting all of them there, and an imbalance of good and evil in the timestream. The introduction of the Dark Champion's Infernals further complicates this. You see the problem is, no Eternal and Infernal can exist alive in any timeline at the same time because one or the other has to die. Even though the Eternals and Infernals were meant to fight eachother, one of the interesting game mechanics affected by the outcome of fights planned was that a character could switch sides. This in turn would affect a related character on the same side. For example, if Larcen became evil, then Shadow would turn to the side of chaos. Each character was supposed to have corresponding endings related to which alignment they ultimately ended up on. The idea was, there was no true definition between good and evil. Everyone has the same potential to become good, evil, or inbetween. In addition, a new even more malicious threat reveals itself, the Chaos Eternal Champion. This champion is the wild card of the three. His existence is hinted at at various points in CFtDS's storylines. Most notably, he is responsible for the God Thanatos losing his powers and becoming mortal and being killed during the Salem Witch trials. He also attacked the god of Time, Chronos as well. Thanatos took up Chronos' post as god of time since his position as death was stolen by Chaos Eternal Champion. The Access Info Storyline I linked to above also mentions Chaos EC's existence. His complex is located on top of Mount Everest in the middle of a hidden lake. Like the other two EC's he can change forms. His design contrasts with the other two champions. While the other two champions have solid clothing and bodies made of energy, the opposite is true for the Chaos EC, whom has clothing made of energy and a body made out of solid material based on whatever element his current form is based upon. His outfit would change depending upon the time period his opponent was from. It was always Southeast Asian combat attire from that respective time perioid however. As for his forms, his first five are based off of the Chinese elements Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, and Wood. The last few forms reflect his chaotic nature with Light, Entrophy, and finally Emptiness. All in the order I mentioned (with his default being Fire) Instead of turning into an orb of energy, he transforms into a black hole that can damage whomever he's fighting. He also uses this for a new type of fatality known as "Removal from timeline" which would remove an infernal or champion from the timeline affecting the outcome of the storyline. The final battle was to team up the Eternal Champion and Dark Eternal Champion against the Chaos Eternal Champion. The Eternal Champion would fight him first and be defeated followed by Dark EC whom would also be defeated. The universe then starts to collapse. The Eternal Champion and Dark Eternal Champion revive one final time and merge together to form Unity Eternal Champion. With this new form they are able to fight Chaos EC on equal terms. If they are defeated, the universe and everything in it is destroyed. If they win then Chaos and with good and evil as one they're able to return all Eternals and Infernals to their timelines with the balance properly restored. After this, the Unity champion returns to its own time and separates back into both EC and Dark EC. However, both leave a part of the other in themselves, further securing the balance of the timestream. And that's about all the information I've collected so far. I do know that Thanatos, Xavier, and Hooter are connected characters however so one of their endings will affect the others as well.
Yeah, just based on the way the ending is intended to play out shows they didn't really learn from the previous two games. The 'Light' Eternal was bad enough in the first game on the Genesis, where he only had 5 forms. Then they took a page out of the crazy book by giving him and the Dark Eternal 9 forms, seemingly completely at odds with the story*, so that when you went through at the highest difficulty, you had to slog through two fights that could take up to 15 minutes each. The only cool part to the Hardest mode was (the one-time only surprise) that once you landed the final hit of the match against L.Eternal, it proceeded into what seemed like the cinekill sequence, only to take you to the Cimmerian Complex to face D.Eternal as L.Eternal. Here, they wanted you to do 3 of these 9-form battles in a row? Ain't nobody got time for that! To add insult to injury, the game expects you to pick up three new characters in the space of a match each. Are they kidding? Second, they intended you to go into not just one, but a pair of Hopeless Boss Fights against the new Chaos Eternal, before you get a 4th, 11-Hour Superpower Eternal form, until you're allowed to actually win. Nobody likes hopeless boss fights. Worse are when you're required to win one and lose the second, before being 'allowed' to win the third (look at Pokkén's story mode for a blatant example of that). It insults the player no matter how it's handled. If he's invincible, it's a controllable cutscene, and if it's just high damage and defense, putting in the effort to get good enough with either 'normal' Eternal to actually pull off the win (and yes, there are those that will do it), have their skill and dedication dismissed as the result's (presumably) stripped in a cutscene afterward. Finally, they still insisted on keeping the low-power joke characters in, and making them mandatory? I don't know if you noticed, but people hated Hooter, Slither, Crispy, Yappy, etc., and their storylines in CftDS were clearly tongue-in-cheek. To actually try to link these despised characters into the story... just no. Since this, well, let's just call it what it is, clusterfuck was what they planned to finish off the series, maybe it's good it got canned. They'd have to have really tightened up the actual fighting system (CftDS had some silly infinites) in order for the crazy story to even come close to not dragging the game down with it. * Now, why do I mention they seemed to contradict their own story? Well, part of it was that after countless contests that did nothing to help, the L.Eternal was weakening. Unbeknownst to him, the D.Eternal formed afterward and expended his energy at twice the rate to snatch 4 champions before the L.Eternal could reach them, and so it's likely that he was also pretty well weakened by the time CftDS happened. So, if the L.Eternal is weaker than in the first game, where does he get the strength to pull 4 more forms out of his ass?
I also feel like the ideas for narrative are heavily flawed: 1) The Chaos EC undermines the narrative theme by it's apparent all-destructive nature, especially considering SMT ganes with many more positively portayed "Chaos" characters. 2) If everything is just reset to how it was before the EC intervened in the first place, then the story is inherently shaggy dog and pointless. All the effort accomplished nothing. Which is funny, considering a fucking time god like the ECs are should have been able to foresee that outcome. If the devvers were that passionate about the narrative (which they must be if this is what was found out before any other details) they should have seen this as being an ending that would piss off anyone who had invested in the narratives of their favorite characters. It would have effectively been the Mass Effect 3 of retrogaming. 3) the infernal plot twist is kind of nonsensical. Actually, more than "kind of". There is no good reason for the rules of the universe to work that way except to justify the third game's plot. 4) A lot of the narrative details sound too robust to be represented in any way other than long strings of text, which was annoying enough in the first game. It would be horrible if I did not get so much as snazzy CG art of the character for victory. All in all, I think it is safe to say that BlazBlue; Calamity Trigger and Mortal Kombat X did this kind of fighting game plot better than this would have turned out - in part because they knew to make a separate "story" mode for the story, rather than trying to cram it in the confines of arcade-like gameplay. It also seems obvious in retrospect why this was canned in favor of Virtua Fighter, which was designed to be quickly picked up and played competitively, like, well, how every fighter other than EC was trending.
Excuse me if this counts as Necro Posting, but I'm really interested on how and what Eternal Champions The Final Chapter could have been as I've been a fan of the series since I was a kid, and while this series as it sounds in the supposed 3rd game would have been insane honestly I would have loved to have it, Glisp I cannot thank you enough for you're post and information, please post or PM me if there is any other info you can gather, such as how would the characters end up differently due to how the characters end up when it comes to the Timeline Altercations, or who the new characters would have been like, are there any others besides The Infernals and Chaos Champion? And since the Eternals end up winning it all what happens to all the characters, in the very end, the best ending does it all depend on how you would have played the game? Again, this is really cool and interesting information that we need not just as Sega Fans, but so that we can archive and keep this info alive and well for everyone to see, I commend you for your results.
The first game was ok, the story was meh but some part of the game was a bit wack and the final boss was unforgivable (till this day, I NEVER beaten it and I don't plan on doing it so but kudos to those that did beat the game). The second game was ridiculous (don't get me started on that one)! I'm glad the third game never got made, they should've called it quit after the first game release. This is just my opinion on it
I know this thread is old but I'm reviving it. Mostly to say that this information is nowhere near complete. Firstly, only Hooter is confirmed to be canon. The other animal characters don't seem to be, or Mike hasn't told me how they play into the story yet at least if they are canon. Hooter is canon because of his connections to Thanatos and Xavier. He started out as Thanatos' familiar and was captured and killed for said reason. In Hooter's ending, he finds new companionship with Xavier. Also for the record hooter's actually quite broken if you know how to use him. He's the easiest character to get cinekills with. Though tbh, he's good at cheesing due to his size. Keep in mind none of the other animal characters' endings or backstories tie into other characters. Hell, many of them aren't even from the same time period as most of the champions either. Senator is another character whose canon is debated as well. There's a few champions where their Infernal is less clear such as Riptide for instance as one could argue that the shovel killed her not Hannibal but at the same time her suitor (forget his name) could be the infernal because he was the reason she left to become a pirate in the first place and thus caused her to anger Hannibal, who in turn killed her then looted her family's home back in France stealing works of art that were important to history and science and then there's Xavier who was killed by a mob. I'm guessing in the case of Xavier it was the person who ratted him out as a witch/warlock but there's no information on who this individual might be. Other than that I don't really have any new information. Also, tbf the concept of EC3 is too old now and other games have done it as some others in this thread have pointed out. It's still nice for actual fans of the games to know what the cancelled third game was planned to be like. You also have to remember that this game was scrapped in the early concept phases, so some things never got to be finalized. Something else that I'd like to know about is how Raven Gindar plays into the game. She's confirmed to be the Light Eternal Champion's "consort" in CftDS. Well it's not just multiple contests, time actually just resets and it's doomed to repeat in an infinite loop. since time resets the Eternals never expended their power before hand and thus they get to do the contest again, rinse and repeat. As for him getting 4 more forms, he gets these powers from nature itself and it's not just coming from him. Granted, he can't use nature to like fix the timeline and stuff I guess because it's just nature not time. As for using up most of his power, he has just enough to send one champion back. the others are forcefully sent back to relive their deaths due to the time paradox that the Eternals face. Also a mechanic in CftDS actually explains how they are able to still fight you at full strength. You see, depending upon how you win a fight, it can affect which champion is stronger than the other. Like let's say you get a bunch of Cinekills or Vendettas. The Eternal Champion is going to be extremely weak and easy to beat, while Dark Eternal Champion is going to be a pain in the ass. Likewise, if you don't do these (I'm not sure if Overkills and Sudden Deaths count as these are implied generally to be accidental) The Eternal Champion will be hard to beat and the Dark Eternal Champion will be easy to beat.
