Elemental Gimmick Gear

How much did you like Albert Oddysey on Saturn? How about Grandia, or the Lunar remake? What do all of these titles have in common with each other, and very likely E.G.G.? They were all originally intended for another system, but delayed or canceled for whatever reason, only to rise again to varying successes. Sometimes the system it was intended for was simply too limited to achieve the vision, and sometimes the system becomes non-viable while the game is in development, so development is shifted to recoup losses.

I'm inclined to say Elemental Gimmick Gear is from the latter. E.G.G. is an RPG which combines various types of graphics to create a unique look. While these types of games looked fine on the Saturn (simply because you knew the machine couldn't handle fully rendering all the polys for the whole picture), this should be something we see with 3 million polys per second. Handdrawn backgrounds with plasticky rendered main characters on the overworld with 3D battle scenes, E.G.G. is the jack of all trades, as well as the master of none.

You play as an egg-shaped character, which explains the stupid-ass acronym of the name. I'm not sure whether this will be a good or bad thing for this game in the long term, but it certainly keeps it from blending in with the billion other RPG's on the way in Japan. At the very least, this game should eat up some time as any average or better role-player tends to. However, since it is an RPG it will be very text intensive, so unless you are fairly familiar with the Japanese language, I can't recommend the import, and I have serious doubt this game will see a release in the US. Elemental Gimmick Gear releases on May 27th 1999 in the land of the rising sun.