TechnoMage: Return of Eternity is an Action RPG by German developer Sunflowers Interactive that was released on PC in 2000, and later ported to the PlayStation in 2001.
The game takes place in the world of Gothos, a fantasy world that overcame a war against evil many centuries ago, at the cost of the OldOnes, an ancient race of humans, becoming divided between two races, a group of magic users called the Dreamers, and a group who believe in the power of technology known as the Steamers. The two races chose to minimalise interaction with each other, due to a belief that the mixing of magic with technology is dangerous.
The game has you take control of Melvin, the son of a Steamer-Dreamer couple, a union that is traditionally prohibited. Melvin grew up in Dreamertown with his mother, taking lessons in herbalism from Rissen, his druid uncle. Due to a disaster, Melvin soon finds himself embarking on a journey across Gothos, and ends up fighting with the forces of evil across the world, meeting Talis, a girl born of a similar union to his own parents, and learning the truth of the past along the way.
The gameplay is done from a top-down perspective, not unlike The Legend of Zelda series, with 3D environments mixed with 2D sprites. Weapons and spells are the primary way to combat with enemies, along with tools for utility purposes and defensive equipment to help withstand enemy attacks. Across the eight worlds of Gothos, gameplay features combat with various enemies, meeting various NPCs and helping them out, and solving puzzles scattered throughout.
TechnoMage contains examples of:
- Amphibian at Large: The Fairy Forest is poisoned by what is eventually revealed to be a gigantic frog or toad, which is battled on an island in a particularly infested swamp. Killing it heals the forest immediately.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Throughout Gothos, silver runes can be seen in the locales. If Melvin falls from a great height or into a Bottomless Pit, he'll respawn at the rune he most recently touched.
- Arrows on Fire: Played straight and inverted. Early into the Tower, Melvin finds a set of fire and water arrows, which can inflict extra damage, unless hitting a foe that resists it.
- Benevolent Precursors: The OldOnes used to be a proud civilization in the distant past, before their inadvertently self-imposed collapse. Unlike most examples of fallen Precursors, however, they actively used their power to protect the world, by forming a shield around Gothos to ward off the evils from the underworld. Judging by the various remnants of their existence Melvin discovers during his adventure, their only sin can be considered hubris.
- Black Blood: Most of the blood seen when an attack lands is green, even for humans and other creatures that should have red blood.
- Cartoon Bomb: The bomb tool is the classic black ball with fuse, though the popular writing on the side is replaced with a picture of a skull.
- Charged Attack: Once the Mysticism stat reaches 21, holding the attack key allows this to be done with melee weapons, with mana being expended to power the charge until releasing the key to launch the attack itself. The dagger and sword fire a projectile, while other melee weapons are slammed down to cause a shockwave.
- Child of Two Worlds: Both Melvin and Talis are both children of Steamer and Dreamer couples, two races that are forbidden to marry due to the Fantastic Racism between them.
- Damsel in Distress: Talis falls victim to this twice. At the start of the Tower, a bridge collapses under her, leaving her trapped in a ravine until Melvin frees Ar-Khan and heads to her rescue. Early into the Volcano, Dagomar shows up to kidnap her, planning to use her to activate the shield generator. Melvin is able to rescue her just outside The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
- Dracolich: At the top of the Tower, Melvin fights a skeletal dragon that breaths Cold Flames, as evidenced by a frozen dragon of flesh and blood at the back of the battleground. The extensive background information the player can read in the in-game library of this level identify the victim as the good-natured Ar-Khan and the adversary as the traitorous Yor-Khan.
- Elemental Powers: Most of the spells learned throughout the game are elemental in nature.
- Playing with Fire: The first spell is Fireball, which grants Melvin the ability to launch fireballs from his hand.
- An Ice Person: The second spell, Ice Claw, allows him to freeze his enemies solid.
- Blow You Away: Viper's Vortex, the third spell, gives Mel the ability to summon a tornado.
- Shock and Awe: The spell Lightning is used by Mel to shoot lightning from his hand.
- Dishing Out Dirt: The final spell is Earthquake, and Mel uses it to cause earthquakes.
- Elves Versus Dwarves: Though arguably short of outright racism, the passive conflict between the pointy-eared, light-skinned, slender-bodied magic-users (Dreamers) and the swarthy, squat, corpulent engineers (Steamers) has noticeable shades of this. Ironically, these two humble cultures used to be a single civilization in the first place, before the aversion to magic-technology fusions resulting from their fall led to a distinguished co-evolution into the two polarised peoples we see in the present day.
- Fall Damage: Played with, while falling great heights is an obstacle in the game, it doesn't actually cause damage and simply sends you back to the last silver rune.
- Faux Action Girl: Talis ends up being one of these. The manual mentions her being a master of the sling and other weapons, and also having more developed mental faculties than Melvin does. She also does mention her sling in her introductory scene. Despite this, in the game itself, she's never seen using the sling or any other weapons, figuring out anything, or casting a spell, all of which Mel constantly does. While one could argue she did have some off screen action in the Canyon, she spends the majority of the final three worlds as a Damsel in Distress, and after being rescued, stays out of the action regardless.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The boss of the Canyon level is a bizarre, spherical, floating machine with four blue eye-like lenses that blink, along with four arms (three raptor-like claws connected via electrical tethers and one industrial flamethrower on a mechanical appendage). Nothing ever hints at the nature or origins of this thing (just like the Hover Board which even allows Melvin to fight it in the mines) nor is it ever mentioned afterwards. With that being said, its location and looks strongly imply it to be a more active remnant of OldOne machinery.
- Giant Spider: At the end of the Hive, Melvin encounters such a specimen, which he needs to kill in order to proceed to the next level.
- Half-Breed Discrimination: In Dreamertown, some characters will make comments on Melvin's mixed race status, and a book in the library says that Steamer-Dreamer children are believed to become agents of evil. After a messenger from Steamertown discusses the damage the earthquake inflicted there, the Dreamers are quick to turn Mel into their scapegoat, which leads to him leaving town. Talis' parents chose to live in the remote Canyon so that their daughter wouldn't suffer from this sort of treatment.
- He Knows About Timed Hits: Quite a lot of Dreamertown has this sort of tutorial dialogue. Mel's first line in the game has him telling you that you can advance dialogue with the "action button", and turn the camera with the "appropriate buttons". The chairman of the council tells Mel that the councillers can assist him with "the operation of the game", and Danny's quest ends with him saying he's rewarding Mel with experience points. Early spells and tools will also be introduced by the character granting them saying to use the "spell button" and "tool button" respectively.
- Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: There are four types of locks and keys in the game, steel, copper, silver, and gold, with each lock type responding only to a key of the same metal. The game itself is structured so there’s only one relevant lock/key combination of any given type at one time, but Sequence Breaking shows that they are treated as interchangeable for that type. (As one example, the speedrun route collects the gold key in Steamertown, but bypasses the gold lock there in order to use the key in the Fairy Forest, thereby skipping the quest to get that world’s gold key)
- Interface Spoiler: The visions of the shield generator show it's powered by four Crystals of Eternity, and Melvin assumes he has them all once he collects the fourth one. The inventory however shows an empty slot in the area the Crytals are displayed, spoiling the existence of a fifth Crystal.
- Life Drain: The final skill unlocked by Mysticism, when the stat is at 28, is to have Melvin regain health when hitting an enemy, the menu itself outright saying that he’s draining their life energy.
- Lizard Folk: The Shach are somewhere between this and Snake People, being generally reptilian humanoids characterized by a hissing drawl at random points in their speech. Contrary to most portrayals of either fantasy species the Shach seem to embody, they are completely pacifistic and invariably engage in professional trade. Their culture seems to be semi-nomadic, as Melvin encounters several Shach going about their commerce business throughout Gothos, but they center around a subterranean town located on a volcano island, aptly called "Shachtown". Their facial features are mostly concealed by bags tied around their heads, which either serve cosmetic purposes in a world of distrustful humans or as respiratory aids away from their home climate.
- MacGuffin Delivery Service: Dagomar intends to use the Crystals of Eternity to Take Over the World, and allows Melvin to collect them with the plan of stealng them afterwards. Part of the reason he kidnaps Talis is to lure Mel to the Ruins and take the Crystals before he can use them to power the shield generator.
- Magic Is Rare, Health Is Cheap: Zigzagged, mana potions are rarer than health potions, and Melvin does have much less mana points than hit points, but once the mysticism stat reaches 7 (something that can be achieved in four level ups minimum, seven maximum), Melvin will gain the power of Regenerating Mana, which makes it a lot easier to rely on spells, especially since the rate of regeneration will increase with each point in the stat.
- Magic Knight: Melvin develops into this over the course of the game, coming to wield a variety of weapons and having access to an assortment of magic spells.
- Magic Versus Science: The initial premise of the game revolves around the outspoken yet ultimately harmless enmity between the magical Dreamers and the scientific Steamers. This rivalry turns out to be the subconscious segregation resulting from a not-so-harmless implosion of a Precursor civilization, brought about by their tampering with a mixture of magic and technology which eventually spiraled out of control.
- Magitek: The OldOnes used a combination of magic and technology together, most noticably being the usage of enchanted magma to power a machine that generates a magical shield to protect Gothos from the forces of the underworld.
- Ominous Save Prompt: Upon entering the arena of a boss, the game pops up the message "Something's wrong. Would you like to save now?". Considering that saving is not allowed in the actual fights, the offer is very much warranted.
- Our Dragons Are Different: The game takes the route of intelligent and speaking quadrupeds with extra wings. Their morality is as divided as that of the human beings in the setting, as portrayed by the benign Ar-Khan and the evil Yor-Khan. A third dragon called Yar-Khan is mentioned in the in-game lore, but since he was killed by the aforementioned evil dragon before the events of the game, he is never seen.
- There is also the gargantuan yet seemingly non-sapient Lindworm that is fought as the boss of the Volcano.
- Plot Coupon: The Crystals of Eternity are collected throughout the game, giving Melvin visions about their purpose, which is to power a shield generator created by the OldOnes, except for the final crystal, which was used to imprison Dagomar in a stasis field. The final battle has Mel put the crystals back in their place to reactivate the shield generator and imprison Dagomar again.
- Rodents of Unusual Size: The very first enemies of the game are aggressive rats which plague Dreamertown. Melvin eliminates the horde by tracking the source to the basement of his Uncle Rissen, where he fights and defeats a man-sized, black-furred, red-eyed Monster Progenitor called the "Mother Rat".
- Sdrawkcab Alias: As Melvin starts to learn more about the past, including the war that Dagomar fought in, it's revealed there was a traitor named Ramogad, who is soon revealed to be Dagomar himself.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: Dagomar tries to bluff about having already subverted the shield generator to convince Melvin to give up, as well as mentioning his kidnapping of Talis. Mel responds by calling said bluff, and revealing that he had already rescued Talis while Dagomar was waiting in the Ruins, before declaring himself as the TechnoMage who will complete the Return of Eternity, and offering Dagomar one last chance at mercy.
- Suffer the Slings: Talis mentions that she fights with a sling in her introduction, though she's never seen wielding it on screen.
- Steampunk: The Steamers are a race that are effectively all about this, with Steamertown having steam pipes running through the town, powering up their machines.
- Sword Beam: The dagger and sword can launch one of these when the Charged Attack is unlocked.
- Sword Lines: Melee weapons leave a white trail when swung.
- The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Ruins are the final area visited, and are said in the manual to be an area steeped in legend, with it being said whoever finds them will gain immeasurable power.
- Title Drop: Throughout the latter half of the game, the TechnoMage title is used to refer to Melvin quite a few times, and books explain the process known as the Return of Eternity. Right before the final battle, both parts are dropped in quick succession, as Melvin declares himself to be the TechnoMage and states his intention to complete the Return of Eternity.
- Treacherous Advisor: Dagomar is first introduced as a mentor for Melvin, revealing what Melvin's heritage means and providing helpful items. He eventually turns out to be the traitor from the past and the Big Bad of the game.
- We Can Rule Together: Dagomar tries to offer this to Melvin. Melvin shoots it down instantly, not seeing any reason to trust him.
