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So I got all the the True Eternal (Struggle) Epilogues, and they weren't that satisfying.

I chose Struggle at the start and expected perhaps a "Betray the Empeor/Make myself king" or a "Bwahahaha immortality and UNLIMITED POWERRRR" path and didn't really get it.

Eternal Guy does bad stuff on every route, but I suppose life is cruel and the "best" outcomes don't always happen, but the whims of fate aside, Eternal Guy never works to better himself or leaves a lasting legacy.

BTW for new players, the walkthrough is here at the end by BerkaZerka: http://chooseyourstory.com/forums/the-parlor-room/message/10357

• Eternal Destroyer - Wake up from magical cyrostasis. Without Jennifer's advice, the plague fucks up your neo-Empire, which collapses, and you die of old age.
• Eternal Hero - Wake up from magical cyrostasis. Plague goes fine, and you're fondly remembered because of Jennifer's flattering not!Mein Kampf book about you. Still die tho.
• Eternal Paragon - Empire continues. Sacrifice your magic at the end of your life to produce the Eternal race, die peacefully on your own terms, your 2nd love, Decena. But Empire collapses again without your protagonist powers.
• Eternal Emperor - Empire continues. Manage to piss off your Eternal siblings but become brain in a jar, die at 1000+, bored of life, and without Decena.
• Eternal Harbinger - Manage to kill off ALL your Eternal buddies, and decimate your own Empire for some ritual. Then betray your origins to become an immortal slave. 2 more sub-endings of these are: "Be banished to super-Hell", and the other is "Become brainwashed in afterlife, but be reunited with Alison".

Why not perfect the necromancy/immortality ritual? Or start an expedition to find Mortos, the necromacer island? Eternal Guy sees the Emperor betray him at the magic island, and his motivation is to Struggle, not just be content as a run-of-the-mill mortal ruler.

Man I miss the Ominous Secret Projects and "Bwahahahahaa UNLIMITED POWWWEERRRRR" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg14jNbBb-8 or backstabbing stuff typical emperors types do in fantasy.

Plus all the Dead End side paths where the Eternal dies from a random gunshot. Walk into the evil dwarf's lab and die from a headshot. I thought he wore armor for a reason.

And he's supposed to be this great combatant but it's only implied, never shown. Eternal Guy supposedly solos orc tribes, but when you choose to "push through" orc lands, he dies. Go inspect a ship and Eternal Guy is shot dead. wtf

Also never improves himself to be a better combatant than the elf Mistress either, in any of the Struggle routes, which is strange. Or train an Elite Guard/Elite Minions to help or something. Perhaps because I read Berserk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eYP1KWBmvo first, the character of the Struggler I had in mind was a bit different than this one.

None of the endings felt epic enough to be "Eternal", as the endings claim, it's more of bittersweet victories, rather than Ultimate Victory.

I'm left wanting a bit more I guess.

After all of that you still want even more?

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

I only skimmed a bit, does this noob have cojones or is it just another idiot?

I suppose these things aren't mutually exclusive however.

F

All answers will be revealed sooner or later. Maybe, maybe not.

Honestly while he’s fairly wrong about everything (obviously not how he feels since that’s his personal right to feel such a way) I respect this post a whole lot more than the various driveby “anonymous guests” that bitch in the comment section.

Or say that Blue Pony faggot who hid under the guise of a “guest” when he bitched about the swearing in the story.

Well I liked the story, but for real tho, the Eternal doesn't show a whole lot of initiative for what I've seen in the Struggle route.

In the first half, before the undead assassin, perhaps he's really indoctrinated, and never met any ambitious characters to influence his views, so he never saw the use of replacing the Emperor, which is fine. No "rebellion" route then.

After the undead assassin, it's tricky. Since Semra the elf helped him fight off the assassin, it probably wasn't her that sent the undead. By elimination, the only suspect is the only other mage we've seen: the Emperor. But I suppose the Eternal could be dense and never suspect his beloved Emperor.

However, after the island portal/Emperor's death scene, the Eternal learns that immortality is achievable if he goes to the island, well he knows the Emperor tried it but bungled the baby/ritual section. Or if he doesn't, he learns that even Emperors die along with their empires.

In either case, further research might be fruitful. I assumed that if the protag becomes Emperor, he would issue some orders to the Empire like "go find me immortality" or try to reform the Empire to make it a bit more lasting perhaps.

But even though the word "eternal" is always alluded to in the epilogues, the Eternal never does try to make a lasting impression.

He runs the Empire like it previously was, and only solves short-term goals like a war with a neighbor. The Eternal never does start "eternal"-seeming long-term goals to fit that "Eternal" line in the epilogues, which feels really strange.

IRL, we know many rulers were concerned about building lasting legacies. They tried many things like building eternal empires (always collapses eventually), built statues/buildings and carved their deeds in stone (torn down for bricks or vandalized), or sought immortality (drank alchemist's mercury potions etc), or lied a lot to deify their reputation after they die.

Which makes most of the endings I saw not very satisfying since the Eternal doesn't quite do any of those.

In my personal best 2 Struggle endings: In the first one, the Eternal gets a great reputation, but only after Jennifer wrote him a nice book - on her own initiative. In the other, he did the fertile Eternal project, also from his scientist minion's own initiative. Plus only at the end of his life. And the Empire soon collapses into infighting without the old guard Eternal's guidance.

So none of the endings felt particularly "Eternal"... unless the theme's supposed to be ironic the whole time. Erm, it probably was I guess.

In Eternal, you only defeat Semra after becoming a near-demigod brainwashed immortal minion ("beg" invalidates your earlier "struggle" choice, the Eternal becomes suspiciously infatuated with killing; entire route feels like a bad end imo), or Semra dies of old age or a stray nuke after being ignored, or Semra dies from a random firebomb from the hijacked flying city.

It didn't feel as satisfying to overcome obstacles here, than in Price of Freedom: Innocence Lost. I guess I preferred the smaller-scope decisions in Price of Freedom. The player personally besting Zeke and the big guy in the endgame, even at their own specialties, felt quite satisfying. I liked that style of "shorter text scenes" and "immediate choices" made it feel like the player's doing the actions, instead having the Eternal do it in a longer text scene, which makes it read more like a cutscene. Different styles I suppose.

Overall, the "struggle" feels off. Seems like Eternal's led by his nose for most of it, by the Emperor's schemes or Semra's.

Oh, and the random "death by bullet" dead ends in Eternal's non-branching routes. If even the Eternal can get one hit killed by a scientist or a smuggler with a gun, or a lucky crossbow bolt, then a platoon of gunmen or crossbowmen following the Eternal would make him that much more lethal. Or some troll minions from the dwarf's lab lol.

Well, that's my opinions anyway.

Thanks for the story EndMaster. :)

Well let’s get some of the minor stuff out of the way first.

Well yeah he’s indoctrinated and doesn’t suspect Casimir at that point. He still sees Casimir as a father and it’s just unthinkable that he’d do anything like that.

As for him dying easily in some paths, well as its been pointed out, sure he’s tough, but he’s not immortal. He actually doesn’t even wear heavy armor most of the time and that’s not stopping a bullet anyway. Throughout history, plenty of tough people die from random or unexpected things. Shit happens.

Beating Semra: Well sometimes you don’t get to overcome your arch enemy directly or even at all (Her being the closest to one, other than death itself I suppose). There’s nothing stating that this has to be a given.

He isn’t as skilled or even as powerful as her until later on, so he’s never going to beat her earlier. Even when he does get powerful enough, she’s still enough of a match for him that he isn’t going to easily be able to kill her and she’s not going to stick around to let him try if he’s got the upper hand. It isn’t until he’s given up literally everything that he’s powerful enough to beat her.

Basically he's fortunate that Semra had a twisted obsession with him to not just kill him whenever.

Moving on to the main thing with the weird initiative complaint.

Not sure what you’re looking for, but he’s got a shitload of initiative since he’s pretty much doing nothing but showing it throughout the entire struggle path and always makes a permanent mark on the world in the epilogues. That’s sort of the point of them.

Going with the branch where he actually stays loyal, discovers Mortos, and becomes the new emperor, he’s:

Actively expanding the Empire and conquering everything.

He reactivates the Eternal program which also answers your question about “Why doesn’t he have an elite troops?” He also had the Eyes run by his other Eternal cohort, so again he had two elite groups.

He has new war machines like Zeppelins built which means he’s trying to get the Empire to advance its previous stagnant tech level status.

He actually tries to find Casimir’s notes for his rituals and such, but never finds much. He’s a lot more hands on running the Empire than Casimir and also doesn’t have the extended unnatural necromantic life preservation so he really doesn’t have the luxury that Cas had with just studying shit all the time. He also doesn’t even have the magic “helpers” that Cas had, they’re pretty much “idiots” when compared to him so it’s not like he can really rely on much help there in the magic department especially since magic is semi-dying out at that point anyway.

He can’t even do the ritual that Casimir wanted to do unless he goes back to Mortos anyway and the ONLY path where he learns how to get back there is when he fucks Semra again and mind rapes her for the location. And when he does that, he goes for direct immortality by invading the island with an army since Casimir failed pretty hard just going there without any help at all.

Those alone, combined with other stuff, I’m pretty sure that’s all showing initiative.

As for the 3 epilogues in that branch, how the hell is he not leaving a permanent legacy?

In one branch he literally fathers an entire new race that eventually conquers the planet and gets around the whole sterility issue. That’s pretty lasting.

In the other branch he became a “machine emperor” that lived over a 1000 years and downloaded all his knowledge into another database for the remnants of his citizens to learn from and all that other stuff. You can argue that some of it is going to be corrupted over time, but that’s happened to all major religions and people still remember Jesus/Buddha/Muhammed/etc. So he’s leaving a legacy there as well.

Actually this bit can be applied to just about all the epilogues. He’s going to die. He’s not immortal and he can’t have children. The ONLY thing he can do is leave a permanent mark on the world so nobody ever forgets him which he does whether that’s through being a fairly infamous dictator like say one of those many Roman rulers we remember the names of to this day (Alexander the Great died and didn't have any kids and we still remember him right?), or in the case of the Shadow endings he becomes a prophet/god like figure and the religion becomes dominant enough that people know the name.

The ONLY one where he doesn’t actually leave a lasting legacy is ironically the Harbinger path mainly because he kills the entire planet. Who’s going to remember him? (Well nobody other than Azrael)

However, he’s literally eternal in that one since he’s achieved immortality. So he doesn’t need a legacy in that one.

Funny enough one of the other members here felt that the unofficial Eternal Bliss ending with Alison SHOULD have been marked as an epilogue. I nearly did during creation, but the reason for not doing so is because he doesn’t leave a legacy (due to killing the world) and he doesn’t achieve immortality, so he doesn’t become “Eternal.”

Well in any case going to chalk this up to a writing style preference since you mentioned preferring Briar’s story (it’s a good story) where she has smaller scope choices and the other reasons you mentioned. It happens, people like different things.

You might like Berka’s zombie story (if you haven’t read it already) since his similar in that regard.