Learning Day: Eternal Champions 2 Instruction Manual (Patreon)

Mortal Kombat was a big deal in the early 1990s. Especially if you were in a position to be grounded for masturbating. Or spending your lunch money on POGS. Mortal Kombat got a lot of attention for its extreme violence and allegedly realistic graphics. But there were plenty of bloody ass games around at the time - Wolfenstein, Splatterhouse, NARC, Robocop, Smash TV, Dig Dug, that Predator 2 game on Sega Genesis - so kids had options if we just wanted to see digital guts and gore. Mortal Kombat was also kind of good, and was a fun throwback to gnarly VHS kung fu movies. In other words, it was a creative vision, executed by a team of weirdos with no expectations. Like a science fair project about anime. It’s the kind of magic that genuinely can’t be created by committee. In the wake of its success, many diseased imitators tried to be the NEXT Mortal Kombat, without understanding anything about what made that game appealing or good. Like announcing, “I’m going to be the next Super Dave!”, then lighting your dick on fire and screaming, “Owwww goddddd my dick my fucking diiiiiiiiiick! Who would choose this?! Who would choose this path?! Sweet godddd my fucking diiiiiiiiick!!”

Eternal Champions was one of those games. Eternal Champions is what you invented with your old He-Mans because Mom wouldn’t buy you Mortal Kombat.

If you took those He-Mans, wrapped them in EXTRA spandex, and filled them with human blood, you’d get an Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side. It’s the Oops! All Fatalities! version of Mortal Kombat.

The design team behind this souped-up Sega CD sequel spent a massive amount of time and energy developing an intricate fatality system, and then remembered they had to make a game, too. So they sort of did! A bad one, that sucks! But more importantly, there are just SO MANY fatalities, dude. Even the FATALITIES have fatalities.

Really earning that Shark rating.

But we’re not here to talk about fatalities, in the digital or economic sense. We’re here to boot up Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side on our vintage Sega CD entertainment modules. This is a delicate system though, so let’s crack open the instruction manual to make sure we get it all set up correctly. Also, games back then usually didn’t have tutorials, so we’re gonna want to bone up on some special moves lest we embarrass ourselves in front of our fellow warriors. The thing you immediately notice about the Eternal Champions instruction manual is it's 70 pages long.

This looks like a take-out menu from a yakuza front. A restaurant where there’s no kitchen and the well-dressed man at the register seems confused that you walked in. The kind of place where, if you order a certain entree, you either get handed a brick of heroin or are tackled by a guy wearing an earpiece. I won’t lie to you: this is a terrific sign. I’m detecting the optimal balance of lunacy and violence for a swell time. Let’s check out the epilepsy warning:

This just sounds like everything that should happen if you’re playing the game correctly. If I don’t set the controller down feeling like I was in a roller coaster accident, your game was a mediocre farce that failed my imagination. Like FIFA or something. There are several more warnings on this page, mostly about setting up your projection screen and speakers correctly for when you’re playing in the Foot Clan’s warehouse lair, or trying to recreate that Super Nintendo commercial with Paul Rudd.

Don’t you DARE use that Mixing Cable, you dumb son of a bitch. Let’s put the rest of this glossy paper to good use:

Normally I would question the wisdom of devoting two full pages and a spilt quill of ink to a chapter title, but not when it’s The Fucking Legend. This is one of those cases where you have to throw the budget out the window, screaming and begging for its life, in order to embrace raditude. And let me tell you, they weren’t kidding about The Legend:

You could be forgiven for thinking those are six different karate men, but they are all in fact the same karate man, just posing with different accessories. In his great mystery, he allows the suspense to build for seven damn pages before he tells us who he is.

So we’ve got some reading to do before we can start preparing to play the game. Ok! No problem. Legends are an important part of battling ninjas across time and reality. And this legend has subchapters, so we’d better get started:

Fucking fuck yes, times a million. I don’t know what this means. I seriously doubt the makers of Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side know what this means. But when you slap it at the top of a legend in Wonton font, you know a jacked maniac in breathable pants is going to kick an ogre's teeth out by the light of six full moons. That’s the kind of game I want to start playing right away, so let’s continue:

Ok, this fully rules. You can’t rule harder in two paragraphs and one sketch of a whirling claw mummy, you just can’t. It’s not like you can toss a second mummy in there and give him lobster hands, I’ve tried.

I may have come off at the start of this sounding dismissive of Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side. Even insulting. And only cowards are afraid to admit when they are wrong. I was wrong. Here’s a mummy with claw hands, side-by-side with three paragraphs about how he kidnapped Morbius the Living Vampire from the year 2100. But not before Freejacking a ninja who tripped off a building at the Last Action Hero premiere. You can’t rule harder than THAT. I’m comfortable drawing the line there. Surely I won’t be made an immediate fool by any paragraphs about a kickboxing cyborg.

This mummy, who has the power to transform into any of earth’s creatures but primarily their claws, is snatching history’s greatest warriors from the moment of their deaths to fight in a tournament at his house, which is a temple created by multicolored lightning at the nexus point of the universe. The winner gets to decide the fate of eternity, and presumably will also inherit claw powers. At this point the legend is divided by a Robert Frost quote, about the time he unlocked Akuma in Super Street Fighter II. I think I’m an Eternal Champions fan now.

The manual takes two more pages to explain that there are four additional characters recruited by the powers of darkness - a Scottish cowboy, a lady pirate, a voodoo priestess who is sure to be very racially sensitive, and the actual historic man Ramses III. I didn’t know that was on the table. This game should’ve had Ben Franklin in it. It’s slightly less cool now. Oh well, time to get to the game! …is what I will say, once we’re done reading this helpful primer on the concept of paradoxes, and how they relate to the Eternal Champions universe:

Uh huh.

Killer.

Now you’re talking. Let’s throw in a quote about time that we don’t understand but has the word “time” in it, then slap down a Mummy Birdfoot with some power hands.

This image just grew onto the back of a denim jacket somewhere. It burned itself onto a drummer’s bicep, immune to the coroner’s shrieking protests. Now that we’re sufficiently debriefed on the state of the cosmos, we can get this disc spinning and start turning some heads inside out with fierce kicks and punching attacks.

Shit. Right. Ok, no big deal! I’ll admit, my enjoyment of the game was enhanced by the seven pages of prologue; somewhat less so by the paradox dissertation, but I’m willing to take the good with the bad. I’ve purchased at least four copies of Skyrim across two decades of platforms - I can overlook dogshit as long as I’m having fun. PREPARE FOR BATTLE!

Uhhhhh. Ok, no problem! I don’t generally like to see diagrams when I open an instruction manual for a video game about kickboxing timelords, but the Sega CD was a notoriously finicky system, so it’s probably best to cross our kara-tees and dot our kara-tayes.

I like where your head is at, Eternal One. Most days, I want to reveal the mysterious secrets of eternity. But sometimes I want to jump right into combat with my fellow warriors. I like having both options available to me. It’s like I’ve already won the tournament, and can manipulate time at will. The folks behind Eternal Champions: CFTDS continue to be very concerned about my QSound setup, promising to absolutely DRENCH me with audio if I follow their commands:

This kind of sonic power could kill you instantly, so they’ve included even more diagrams to help us avoid that:

We are now on page 12 of this instruction manual. But I get it! I need to be able to echolocate every skull-crushing blow in my living room in order to get the full Eternal Champions experience, otherwise I’m not battling for eternity in a lightning crater. And hey! Since we love diagrams so much, here’s a picture of a controller you almost certainly don’t own:

Looking past the point that we don’t NEED an illustration of the controller in here so you could’ve saved some space in this 70-page booklet, the Sega 6-Button Arcade Pad was a premium accessory. You had to have already owned one, or bought it alongside your copy of Eternal Champions. Otherwise, you’re riding with the factory standard 3-button Sega gamepad, the settlement disbursement of controllers:

In case you’re having trouble reading the second controller diagram included in this instruction manual, the standard 3-button gamepad for Sega CD requires you to constantly press START to toggle between punches and kicks. This recreates the experience of playing Eternal Champions while blind and guessing whether or not Player 2 is still in the room. You’d have a better shot at winning a fight by putting the controller down and going to Walmart to kick someone for real. We’ll make do with our 3-button controller, because at least we know our speakers have been meticulously positioned to unlock the sonic heart of the universe and just drench us in QSound. We’re soggy with it. Let’s play!

What the shit, Eternal Champions? This is a tournament for the fate of reality, the menu needs but one option: FIGHT. But fine, ok, let’s see what they’ve got:

Ah ok, here’s where you get to kick people, and also select how frustrating the gameplay will be. Neophyte sounds like the worst Andrew Tate subscription tier, so let’s go with Warrior. I am bedecked with hubris, but I am new to this realm, so I’m not yet comfortable calling myself Champion. Others will disagree, once they see my power. Checking out the rest of the menu, we’ve got a one-on-one mode called Duel, and a tournament mode with five pages of options I am confident no one has ever explored:

Fighting games of this era insisted upon including tournament modes, despite nobody ever playing them. No, seriously, I have never seen anyone play tournament mode. If you think you have, no you haven’t. That’s an implanted memory, and you are a replicant. Or Judge Joseph Dredd. There’s also an Access Info option, to re-read all of the stuff we just read but less conveniently, on our TV screens, like Commander LaForge (see “blind and guessing,” above). Let’s check out the gameplay features, so we know how a match goes:

Ohhhh that’s right, I remember why Eternal Champions sucks now. You have an energy meter that governs how many special moves you can throw. That’s a fine idea in theory, but this is Oops! All Fatalities we’re playing here. I’m not in the mood for deep strategy. I don’t want to count Ryu’s fireballs like Dirty Harry. I want to kick someone’s head off a pirate ship and into a shark’s mouth. The manual goes on to explain some of the high-level play to which we can expect to lose:

And just SO MANY FATALITIES, you guys. Each fatality concept gets an intro of flowery prose, like we’re catalogue shopping for murder on Instagram:

Ok, I think I’ve found the problem here:

Oh rad, I can tag in the game’s boss to blast my opponent with their greatest fears. For Hudson Hawk, it’s swallowing bombs:

The Eternal Champion should consider hosting the tournament in safer locations, it kinda sounds like OSHA needs to get involved.

Yep, we definitely need to install some railings in the eternal temple. With all of THAT out of the way, it’s time to select our fighter. But we gotta look up a special move or two so we can palm-strike the ground running:

Each fighter profile is three pages long, which should creep us up to that 70-page mark in no time! The first fighter profile is just Blade, but whack. Whack Blade. He’s a bounty hunter who was kicked off the force for thrashing too hard:

And here’s their Morbius! Except this one is a war criminal:

Then there’s the acrobat who died in a trapeze assassination before she could save China:

Don’t forget Larcen, the cat burglar with a heart of gold who tragically died while bombing a hospital:

“It’s a history game, Mom!” says Ramses III, the victim of an infamous coup recreated in Eternal Champions as some bozo pushing him into a river:

This artist isn’t very good at faces. Let’s see how they do with jump kicks!

Hell yes. If ever an extended robot leg could scream “the year nineteen ninety-fiiiiiiiiive!”, it’s the gangrenous meat piston of R.A.X. Coswell. But how does R.A.X. compare to the capoeira fish man of Atlantis with perfect balance?

Um… equally, I guess? It’s hard to tell. Every person here is Power Level 4 except for Blade. It makes sense that Blade is stronger than the vampire, but why is the acrobat an arm-wrestling match for the cyborg and the Atlantian (sic) fish warrior? That said, I do believe Hudson Hawk and Ramses III would be an even fight. Let’s select Dawson the Scottish cowboy, as his stats seem fairly balanced for a warrior scumbag:

Like each other fighter in the game, Dawson has two pages of special moves for us to struggle to recall:

I’ve located my favorites already:

These are the secret techniques of a spinning cowboy who leaks tobacco juice while tumbling all over the arena like a guy who swears he can do the worm. He’s the most embarrassing date at the costume party. Appropriately, he fights using a whirlwind style of tornado violence that no one else would dare wield:

I think I’m an Eternal Champions fan again. Let’s go back to the Main Menu.

If it also includes their addresses, you’ve got a deal.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busy transforming his hands into claws, but only his hands, because we have the 3-button gamepad. Check out their new show BADICAL, about the raddest fighting game ever made.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Velo, who doesn't need a manual to pull off a pony tail strike into a spinning axe pick. Just eleven breakfast beers.

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