Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring

About Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring

Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring (1998) is DreamFactory's free-roaming 3D fighter for Square and Namco, with Final Fantasy VII's Cloud and Tifa in its cast and, on the PlayStation, a dungeon-crawling quest mode.

Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring in Depth

Drawing on wrestling games and DreamFactory's own Tobal series, Ehrgeiz allows full 360-degree movement and does not require fighters to face each other, so the camera stays mostly fixed, zooming in and out rather than circling the arena. Stages are three-dimensional, with interactive objects and changes in height, letting fighters leap onto crates or use them as weapons. There are four buttons: guard, high attack, low attack and a special weapon attack unique to each character. The original cast, designed by Tetsuya Nomura, includes the cyborg-armed mercenary Ken "Godhand" Mishima, the taekwondo film star Han Daehan, the kickboxer Prince Doza and the jujutsu student Yoko Kishibojin, fighting in a tournament for the legendary sword Ehrgeiz.

The PlayStation version adds Brand New Quest: The Forsaken Dungeon, a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl like Diablo with randomly generated floors. As the archaeologists Koji Masuda and Clair Andrews, the player descends for artefacts, levelling up through a five-point chart fed by eating protein, vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates and lipids from monster drops, while managing hunger. There are also minigames, including a race and a Reversi-like board game, and even wine trading that works like a stock market.

Making Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring

DreamFactory, which had made Tobal for Square, developed the game, announced as the first project under an agreement letting Square develop for Namco's System 12 arcade board; it was shown at Namco's booth at the AOU Show in February 1998. Takayuki Nakamura, composer of Tobal 2, wrote the music. Game Machine listed it as Japan's sixth most successful arcade game in its 15 April 1998 issue.

The PlayStation version sold over 222,000 copies in Japan by the end of 1998 and 340,937 by December 2004, and Famitsu gave it 32 out of 40. Western reviews averaged 76% on GameRankings: IGN praised its graphics and presentation but found the play simplistic and the combinations hard to perform, GameSpot called the blocking "unintuitive" and the minigames disappointing, and Next Generation said it was "good to see developers straying from the accepted formula with new fighting designs that truly work".