Rise Eterna 2 is a sequel strategy RPG developed by Forever Entertainment. Taking place only a few years after the first game’s conclusion, a young Athracian soldier named Jacht is caught in the crossfire between two different families seeking to take the throne.
While both these parties wage war against themselves, a third party makes its presence with the intent of seeking revenge on everyone involved. Join us in this niche gamer review as we lead Jacht and his merry band of mercenaries into this brilliant conflict of spitefulness, revenge, and outright vindictive nature.
Rise Eterna 2
Developer: Forever Entertainment, Makee Games, Ricci Cedric Design
Publisher: Forever Entertainment
Platforms: Windows PC (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
Release Date: October 9, 2025
Price: $19.99
Rise Eterna 2, though at first glance appears to be a rather generic-looking strategy RPG, tends to do things very unorthodox in its execution. For starters, there is no form of leveling up your cast of heroes. Jacht and his trusted canine companion, Armond, for instance, do not gain any form of experience points after battle.
How does one get stronger and progress? This question can be answered through the means of many different systems. Blending them will give the player a level of agency in how a hero is built.
One particular feature, the quintessential skill tree found in most RPG’s is a prime example. At first, it seems like there is quite a bit to chew on with the fairly sized diagram each character gets to invest points in.
The further you get into the game and recruit more of the cast, you will quickly notice that while each tree is certainly organized differently, a lot of talents get recycled between the characters. It feels extremely half-baked or rushed. A perfect example of this is how some of the repeat talents appear in characters that would never realistically fit their combat role.
One character, being primarily a healer, can get certain abilities that a more tankier character would get, but never really feels the true benefit since the healer is generally very squishy regardless. The choice to do so is welcome, but it would have been nicer if the talent trees were more unique and less redundant.
Progression does, however, become more fleshed out the further into the story. Various heroes that join you can sometimes offer services to help the band of mercenaries on their mission, such as alchemy and jewelcrafting. Since there are no currency or shops in Rise Eterna 2, Crafting is essentially the answer to its absence.
Consumables have quite a bit of use, such as using status inflicting bombs and throwables, they really feel necessary in many encounters; however, the materials required to make even one take a lot of your time farming the materials. It’s better to just use the ones you will find as you fight in chests and harvesting points scattered around battlefields.
Crafting feels at its best when it comes to making permanent stat boost potions. In addition, jewelcrafting is the game’s bread and butter when it comes to building your characters. There are a lot of different gems to apply, and each character can equip up to eight gems.
Some gems will have significant values early on but have detrimental stats that will reduce your other stats in return, such as increasing strength by five and reducing your health or agility by a few points.
The strategy RPG combat itself is both satisfying and somewhat repetitive, and dragged out in most cases. Early on in the story, battles will feel simpler with fewer enemies, which feels appropriate for what the game seems to be trying to achieve.
However when you get several missions in, you will find yourself spending minutes dragging each of your selected heroes across endless amounts of movement tiles just to get to the next segment of the map.
Gameplay combines the grading system applied after a fight, since you get rated on how long it took you to complete a mission. This is even more of a nuisance because in many cases, treasure chests and gathering points are often completely out of the way of the objective, as if the design is intentionally trying to get you to waste your time and speed scoring. Luckily, the score given to you after each battle doesn’t seem to have any relevance whatsoever.
Combat boils down to properly placing friends next to each other so they might trigger additional team-based attacks. This system is very similar to the affinity system well known from the 3DS Fire Emblem entries.
The more you pair the same heroes near each other over and over, they will gain affinity levels, allowing for some cutscenes at base to happen, as well as more of a greater chance to perform tandem attacks.
There aren’t any weapon techniques or magic to cast; however, some characters do have innate skills, like your priest heroine being able to mend party members. Armond, the armored dog, runs far and has the unique ability to detect traps. The thief who joins unlocks chests and doors at no cost by using keys.
Regretfully, there are no optional battles to speak of; it is strangely allowed to repeat previous missions. This is a fantastic method if the player wishes to grind materials and talent points. It’s possible to grind talent points for character skill trees. Since there is no traditional method of leveling, completing a battle always grants each participating hero in the battle one entire talent point to spend.
I find this newly popularized method of grinding kind of bad and exploitable, giving me memories of another SRPG I played called Arcadian Atlas, which did exactly the same. With this system, you can just repeat the very first missions over and over for fast Talent points, maxing their trees out for insane and imbalanced progression.
The music in Rise Eterna 2 is interesting, to say the least. Cutscenes seem to repeat the same song in pretty much almost every scene. It actually began to make me laugh as the same song would be used for every kind of mood the current scene would be sharing. Sad, funny, tragic, dangerous, you name it.
When you perform an attack, it enters a Fire Emblem-esque side view of all combat participants in range, playing very gothic chorus-sounding music which feels awesome as each attack happens. I wish I could hear that a bit more, but you only get to hear maybe three seconds of it at best, since the attack segments happen so quickly.
Rise Eterna 2 is definitely a game that the fans of the first one should play. Its polish still feels on the same level, and the odd gameplay progression is obtuse yet strangely satisfying at the same time. Maybe they should just keep it as an experience leveling system, at least to some degree, so it doesn’t result in cheating the game by repeating the first mission for free talent points.
The story continues not too far after the first entry’s conclusion, so sometimes replaying the first before going in is suggested. Overall, it was a satisfying adventure, but with Final Fantasy Tactics taking the spotlight with its less-than-stellar modern release, Rise Eternia 2 certainly won’t be getting the spotlight it may secretly deserve.
Rise Eterna 2 was reviewed on PC using a code provided by Forever Entertainment. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Blood West is now available for Windows PC (via Steam), Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.
