I feel like I’ve gone back in time to 2005.
I did some serious digging on Eternal Magic just to make sure I wasn’t being punked. This game had to have been a modern re-release or a port or a reboot of a game that launched over a decade ago, right? There’s no way that this game was conceived for release in 2020, right? It’s a mobile port, right?
Wrong.
Eternal Magic has everything you might want out of a modern Chinese MMORPG. Stolen assets? Check. Shameless pay to win? Definitely. A borderline nonsensical, half-translated story? You betcha. Auto-pathing? Assuredly. Graphics that look like prototype era World of Warcraft? You’ve come to the right place.
If you really want to deck out your virtual waifu, you can fork over somewhere in the realm of $40 for a single outfit. The outfits also make your character more powerful because who cares about integrity when you’re already blatantly stealing from other companies?
The premium currency in Eternal Magic rounds out to a base price of $2.49 per 100 Elir or 2.49 cents per Elir. This means you’re looking at minimum $29.88 for the cheapest mount on the cash shop. I decided to lay out the various tiers of pricing for mounts and what they translate to in real dollars.
- 1200 elir = $29.88
- 2400 elir = $59.76
- 3600 elir = $89.64
- 4500 elir = $112.05
- 6880 elir = $171.31
- 9999 elir = $248.97
How egregiously disgusting. $250 for a sparkly reindeer on a trash-tier Chinese MMO. If Duoyi needs to charge this kind of price to keep their Dollar Store MMO running, maybe it’s best for everyone that they go bankrupt sooner rather than later.
One thing you might notice in a lot of my screenshots are people spamming the chat promoting their “album.” Yes, in addition to the shameless cash shop, Eternal Magic promotes its users uploading selfies to shamelessly spam chat and court likes that give out charisma points.
Not wanting to be left out, I uploaded my own photos. Not of me of course, but for my charisma photo I uploaded a possum with “may I have a smooch” and for my avatar I changed it to the vomiting dog meme. I expect neither of these photos to make it through their stringent checking. This is 90% of chat, people spamming their stupid albums.
Otherwise there’s not a whole lot I can say about Eternal Magic other than pointing out that after ten hours I am nearly at the level cap and at least two of those hours were spent screwing around. The average person could probably hit level cap in a long afternoon of playing. The servers run fine considering you could probably keep them stable on a Raspberry Pie (the food, not the device).
There is also marriage but no gay marriage which is funny in a game that encourages players to basically ho out their real life images to spam chat for virtual likes and “charisma.” It could be because gay marriage is illegal in China. Either that or the folks at Duoyi are massive homophobes. Who can tell?
There are a lot of systems in Eternal Magic and all of them are half-assed incompetent ripoffs of other better games be it the pet system, the housing system, gear enhancement, pet battles ripped from WoW, skill system ripped from Diablo 3, and more. If you downloaded World of Warcraft and only played the level 20 free trial areas you would still have a more fulfilling and complete experience than going through Eternal Magic.
I full expect Eternal Magic’s population to be dead by the end of the year if not sooner. The developers are going whale hunting with an awful spear and they’re going to starve because of all of the healthy fish they ignored along the way.
MMO Fallout 
