Eternal Ring Commentary Script

Eternal Ring Video Commentary

Hello, I’m beastly and this is Eternal Ring Any%. Within the last few years, skywolf came up with a new route involving the use of Dark Flash and Power of seek. In the past, we used the wind magic vortex and this change has led to a lot of the route being different than how it was before. Now that I have a solid run using this route, I want to provide an explanation of the route and strats that led to this time being possible.

This game has multiple unskippable cutscenes, but I personally think they are pretty funny, so I will avoid talking over them. If you don’t want to watch the cutscenes, I’ll have some timestamps in the video description that you can click to skip to the end of them.


Right off the bat, I turn off the walk animation and make the ring menu on the top right of the screen stay visible at all times during regular gameplay. This is really just preference

This is the first magic ring, and it takes about 10 seconds to go out of our way and grab. There is a faster ring to get later, but grabbing this ring allows us to equip all of our magic rings in one menu, so it ends up being a tiny bit faster.

I’ll go into more detail on the ring crafting system and mechanics as we go, but before we leave the waterfall cavern we need to get 2 earth gem drops out of these 3 sahagins.

We’ll be using these 2 earth gems and the magic ring we picked up earlier to create the earth heal magic ring, which converts MP into health points. We are still going to pick up these two golden grass though, as we won’t be crafting that ring until passing through an area with nearly guaranteed damage via poison.

Our current objective is to gain access to the water shrine and obtain the water key. We have to check in with the research team sent by the kingdom of Hengaria for them to let us in.

As thanks for reinforcing them, Our sword is taken and we are told we have to request another. We don’t really have time for that, so we head over to the water shrine unarmed.

Now that we have a moment, I’ll explain some of the differences between regional versions as well as different platforms that people run the game on. The Japanese version of the game doesn’t start you out with the ability to sprint. You have to beat the first boss, the big sahagin, to get a ring of move in order to run. This makes the beginning of the game much slower vs the other versions. The PAL version reduces the speed of the game’s logic by 1/6th to make it run at the 50 FPS required for the pal video standard. This makes the US version the fastest, and what everyone runs on.

As far as platforms go, most runners use the PSN version available on PS4 and 5. There is also the original release on PS2 that can be played on emulator as well as backwards compatible PS3s. The PS2 version on BCPS3 is actually the fastest way to run the game by 5-10 seconds, but due to their cost and tendency to break, nobody has really bothered using it.

Normally in the water shrine, you have to navigate through and lower the water level before being able to get the water key, but we can skip this requirement with a set of stairs and a sahagin.
We want to get the sahagin over to the stairs as fast as possible by baiting an attack that has a chance of the sahagin chasing you with a jump afterward. Getting the follow-up jump is random, and not getting it first or second try loses quite a bit of time.
We get the sahagin up onto the 3rd step, and then climb up the stairs and land on the sahagin to get pushed through the wall.

Lucky for us, getting OoB in this game doesn’t make you fall into the void, and mostly locks your height to where you initially got OoB. Now we no longer need to navigate through the rooms as the shrine was designed and can loot everything quite quickly.
Interestingly, if you stand over a chest that is below you, you fall down to where the chest is, giving us a way to navigate dungeons vertically while oob where we would otherwise be unable to.

That fireball ring is going to be our source of damage for the upcoming boss fight, and these magic rocks will be used fill our MP so we can cast it. and this magic ring here is the last regular magic ring we will be needing for the run. Magic rocks are used to refill MP, and since the game starts you off with 0, one needs to be used so you can start casting magic. Looting this water gem makes it so we don’t need an additional earth gem from the sahagins.


Since we now have all the magic rings we are going to need for the run, we can put them all on in the same menu we already have to do in order to fill our MP up before the boss.

Aside from using magic rocks, you can also get MP from defeating enemies, both with magic or melee. This means that as long as you are using your spells wisely, you can often get most of your mana back by simply defeating enemies.

At the beginning of the giant sahagin fight, we spam the fireball move as it makes the sahagin dodge every time, allowing us to get close and loop his attack move that is really easy to dodge. We skip the special attribute ring the big sahagin drops called the ring of insight that increases EXP gained by around 15%, as that extra EXP would only amount to around 1 extra level by the end of the game and we want to keep moving.

Now that we have the water key, we want to get out of the water shrine as fast as possible, and find lyla like the water dragon said. The water key is used to open this door, and we have to hope that the crabs by the door are in a position that lets us slip past. Unfortunately, they weren’t so I had to wait for them to disappear to enter the room. The crabs have a chance of dropping a golden grass, which is nice for health safety, or an earth gem, which could save the run if you only got 1 from the initial 3 sahagins in the opening cave.

Going for a 2nd oob with this sahagin as you leave the water shrine is a bit of a gamble, it only saves 10 seconds or so with perfect luck vs walking out normally and it is pretty common to lose more than that to sahagin luck. It might be a good idea to delay doing this OoB if you are learning until you already have a good time in order to reduce resets. By being OoB, we can head directly to the loading zone we initially came into the water shrine with.

A quick note about opening doors, you want to stand in a centered position with your view level as you activate the door, if your view or position is off, the game will move you into position slower than you could do it yourself on the way over.

Unlike other first person fromsoftware games of the era, there is no stamina meter for melee attacks,  meaning there is almost no downside to spammining it

At the start of the werewolf fight, there’s a coinflip if the boss goes left or right. Ideally, they go to the right and get stuck in-between the sconce and the wall allowing for an easy kill. A lot of the time though, they end up staying away from walls and you want to get close to loop their attack and dodge animations so you can still get good damage in.

Now that we’ve cleared the werewolf out of the path, and we have the water key, we can proceed through the water key door toward the worship area. Being that i placed the water key on the quick use button the last time we opened one, I don’t have to open the menu to open this door.

In previous routes, we made the earth heal magic ring at this crafting station. This could still be done in this route, but would be slower. It could still be worth considering though if you wanted to get some experience with the dark flash route without having to worry as much about dying in disposal valley.

You can go off of this ledge and land on some of the ruins below to avoid fall damage, but I generally don’t worry about it. Down these stairs to the left is an alternate magic ring we used to get, but if we looted this one we would have to add some menuing time in order to put it on, which ends up making it slower or about the same time to grab. There is also a chance you get stuck inside the collision of the ramp, so yeah better to avoid it. There is an additional golden grass available to the left of this ramp that can be worth getting if you want to be able to take some more damage without dying before making the earth heal ring.

The dark flash route requires us to get 5 total gems from the moths in this and the following zones. If you kill a moth while standing under it, the corpse gets stuck on top of you and you can loot the gem quickly without needing to wait for it to disappear.

Now I am looting the last 2 golden grass i will be getting for the run and equipping them to my quick use button so I don’t have to open up the menu every time I want to hearl.

I swear this lizard always finds some way to be in the way. Around the corner here is the entrance to the disposal valley. The disposal valley has some randomness to it in a few different ways. As you walk through the area, there is a chance that you get poisoned by the toxic air. It’s quite rare to go the whole area without getting poisoned. All those golden grasses we’ve been collecting is so that we can survive the poison without needing to take the time to craft the earth heal ring until we have more gems in order to save a crafting trip.

There are quite a few magic stones available as we go through the area, and we will be grabbing a few of them along the way. Having them will ensure we don’t run out of mana for casting spells for the rest of the run.

As we grabbed three out of the 6 needed moth gems in the worship area, we have to make sure we grab 3 more in the disposal valley. Some of the moths along the way don’t drop a guaranteed gem, but there are backup moths available so most of the time you get what you need

This left moth is the first of the two moths I typically go after for the final needed gem. If this moth didn’t drop the gem, i would go for one from an upcoming moth in a cave that I kill anyways for a level.

The movement after getting this cloudy gem is a little tight, we need to get into the cave and around the corner to dodge the cuhtoeblepas attack. Not an instant kill, but it does 40 damage.

At this point you might be wondering “Didn’t this guy say you get poisoned in this area”, and yeah you’d be right. Somehow this PB is one of like the 2 times total I’ve made it through the area without being poisoned. Sadly I already spent the time grabbing the golden grass to offset the HP cost of getting poisoned, so it didn’t save any time and I have to eat the grass anyway to clear out the inventory slot to make my menuing uniform between runs.

We are going to stop by the ring crafter in this area as well as grab a gem along the way, but there isn’t much else to do but enjoy the music.


We’re coming up on the first ring crafting sequence here and there is a lot to go over. I’m going to try my best to explain things, but if you would rather have a written explanation, I’ll link the relevant section of the brady strategy guide that was made for this game in the video description.
Now that we are at the first crafting sequence in the route I will explain the mechanics of creating rings

In this game, you craft two different kinds of rings, both of which improve your elemental stats, one kind of which provides access to new spells. The kind of ring that provide those new spells are Magic Rings. Magic rings require a base ring, or previously crafted/looted magic ring, and elemental gems looted from enemies or chests to craft, and provide you with a spell along with stats in that element while worn. The second kind of ring you can craft are attribute rings. These do not use a magic ring, and are created simply with gems and only apply elemental stat increases, no magic spell.


There are 4 standard elements in the game, Wind, Fire, Earth, and Water. Each one of these elements is considered either an “attack” or “assist” element. Wind and fire are attack elements, while earth and water are utility elements.

The ring crafting menu is split between two halves. The elements of the gems on the left side determine the final element of the ring. If there is more than one element on the left side, the element of the ring created will be randomly selected out of those elements

The “type” of gem placed on the right side determines if it will be an attack or support magic ring. In a similar way to the element of the ring, the type of ring will be randomly selected from the two types if there are both attack and support type gems placed on the right.

The gems themselves have a value associated with them, with each value giving the gem a different name. Each ring type has it’s own number of tiers and value needed to make a ring of a higher tier, with the total value of the magic gems being put into making the ring determining the tier. These on screen values are for creating rings of different tiers, but know that at the high end of these values there is a chance that you could produce a higher tier ring.


But know that There is no benefit in using gems with a value  of 9 to make a level 2 ring for example, you would just be wasting 1 gem value in the process.

Now to summarize what we actually made in that crafting trip,

We made a tier 1 earth assist ring, which provides us with earth heal, a tier 1 assist wind ring that gives us turbulence, a tier 3 attack wind ring that gives us tornado, and a 1 value attribute ring called ring of breeze that raises our wind magic stat by 10.

Now that we have access to a good attack spell with tornado it becomes worth killing enemies near us to grow our level. Since you get mana back when killing enemies, we almost don’t have to worry about refilling our mana, but when we do we have those magic rocks to top off with.

Now in the mine you typically have to ride around floating platforms in order to navigate through the level to get to the next area, but by using the rats near this elevator, we can get out of bounds and walk straight to the loading zone. The rats run away from the player based on where you are facing, so we face toward the ledge until the rat is going to drop, then look a bit to the left to get the rat near the corner. With the rat near the corner, we can land on top of the rat and quickly get out of bounds. Doing the OoB in this manner saves around 1 minute and 40 seconds over doing the area normally, and is a bit faster than other methods of using these rats to get oob.

In the iron mill area, we are going to be picking up the 2nd elemental key, The fire key, as well as using a different method than what we have used so far to get out of bounds. We also need to collect a gem to start building toward crafting the dark flash magic ring. The enemy here has the gemwe need, often times he won’t die in one tornado cast, so we are going to hit him again as we come around. We have to move very carefully in the next room, as it has the rats we are going to use to get pushed oob. We spin twice as we pass through the room to prevent them from all stacking up inside eachother.

In order to spawn in the fire key, we have to ride these couple elevators up to a lever on the top level. The key spawns on the lower floor, so we quickly fall down while finishing up the enemy we threw that tornado at earlier. Now that we have the fire ring, we can go back up and use those rats to get pushed oob. While grabbing the gem, I face slightly left of perpendicular to the door to create a bit of space in the corner of the room as we enter. As we slide into the corner I turn toward it and push into it with the force of all the rats behind us, and pop out on the other side.


This oob saves around a minute and a half, and cuts out a boss fight with the captain from the research team.

On our way out we grab a special kind kind of attribute ring from this chest called clarity and equip it right away. Clarity reduces the MP cost of casting magic and saves us from needing more magic stones in the route.

In the old route, we used to have to kill the fire demons in this area for gems, but in this dark flash route, we do not. The doors in the river of lava area require a projectile magic to hit the gem in their center in order to open. In the past, we used wind cutter for this, but now turbulence is used.

It’s actually pretty easy to lose time hitting these doors, as any miss makes you stand still and wait for your mana bar to recharge to get another attempt at opening the doors.

Past this door is the one enemy we want to kill and loot for a gem drop. The phoenix takes 2 tornado casts to kill with our current setup. When the gem drops, that 2nd tornado cast will still be spinning on top of the gem so we need to heal ourselves as we grab it to survive.

This is the king of a nation that was once called aldine. They were a major military power on the mainland that invaded the island of no return to face the solcians and gain the eternal ring. They mostly won the war, but before claiming the ring they were cursed and all started to turn into monsters, which prevented them from returning from the island of no return. Without their king Aldine eventually dissolved.

I is possible to move so quickly here that you get hit by the dragon fire and die, so I slow down for a quick moment before proceeding though this hallway.

Now, to explain what is going to happen during the upcoming bossfight with the cockatrice, I have to explain what turbulence actually does. Enemies that are hit with turbulence have the damage threshold for stunning them lowered. When we hit a door with turbulence, the door becomes inactive after opening and freezes the turbulence timer that was applied to it. This timer carries over to the next area and gets applied to the cockatrice, making it so we can stun it with tornado with a lower amount of wind stat.

When tornado stuns, it lets us hit the cockatrice multiple times with a single spell raising the damage per cast up drastically. When the cockatrice opens it’s eye, it becomes invulnerable to magic damage. To get the eye to close again, we go in and hit them a few times with melee attacks to get the eye to close, and then finish them off. The cockatrice drops a dark gem, one of the dark gems we need to create dark flash

In the ruins we grab the hunting sword and equipt it right away. In this route, the extra wind stats we get from the ring of breeze and the hunting sword let us kill some upcoming gargoyles in 1 tornado, but after I got this run we thought of possibly skipping the ring of breeze and the hunting sword and 2 shotting the gargs.

In such a route change, you would skip the crafting time of the ring, which takes 24 seconds, you wouldn’t need to kill and loot one of the moths in the disposal valley, and you would save the time from the sword. Compared to stabbing the gargs and using 1 tornado like we do now, it would probably save around 10 seconds total, but make for a harder library.

In order to get through the library zone, we have to complete a few steps in sequence. To start, we have to eliminate 3 gargoyles on each side to activate elevators that take us to the 2nd floor. On both sides of the 2nd floor there is a lever, and once both of these levers are pulled we can take a new elevator down to a lower floor and exit the zone.

There are two paths to the levers on each side of the 2nd floor. You can see the path I take on this first half in this image. Along the path here we can also grab another special effect attribute ring. This is the sacrifice ring, which revives on death you once, restoring your HP and MP and then breaking. It’s a bit on insurance, but can also be used as an MP refill if needed in a boss fight.


Now that we have hit the first of 2 levers, we have to walk back to the elevator and take it back down to start fighting the gargoyles in the 2nd half of the library.

A quick note, if you are playing on emulator you want to start the 2nd set of gargoyles from the right side. If you start on the left as I am here, you get an extra bit of time loss, as cain will stand still on the elevator here for a few extra seconds.

I turn pretty hard to the left and go through this other door as it ends up being a bit faster. Here is a picture of that map again with the route through the 2nd half shown in red.

You can get cursed by these enemies if you get hit by them as you manuver through the rooms, but if you do get cursed it will dissipate by the time you have to fight anything making it not a big deal.

As you can probably tell by now, the library tends to drag on a bit. it it would be really nice if there was some way found to skip needing to hit both of these levers, as it’s probably the least engaging part of the run, but a way out of bounds in this area has yet to be found.

With both levers activated, we ride the final elevator to the bottom floor of the library

In this final chest is one of the most overpowered rings in the game. It’s another special attribute ring called “The ring of seek” We throw it on right away as well as put on that sacrifice ring we got earlier. The ring of seek makes your magic attacks home on on enemies, which has a very synergistic effect when paired with Dark flash as you will see later in the run.

Not wanting to be outdone by lylia leaving before we can leave, we leave so we can follow her so we can leave first next time we see her.

There is a cutscene coming up here that people have been looking for a way to skip for quite some time, but nobody has been able to find anything yet.

For those keeping track at home, this means that Cain is the son of the first magician, who became the fire dragon. Lylia is the daughter of the fire dragon, meaning that Lylia and Cain are brother and sister.

It’s time now for the final ring crafting sequence of the run. Our only goal on this trip is to turn the no longer needed turbulence ring into dark flash. We put both dark gems on the left side in order to make a dark ring, and then attack type gems on the right side with enough value to make a tier 3 dark attack ring, which is dark flash.

Dark flash works like a cluster bomb essentially, releasing a bunch of little magic balls outward as an explosion. When combined with power of seek, all these little magic balls home in on enemies, dramatically increasing the single target damage of the spell.

We have to climb the wind tower to face the wind dragon boss that resides at the top and claim the wind key. On the way up we take advantage of how powerful dark flash and power of seek are together to farm a bunch of level ups along the way. Since we also get MP back from the enemies we defeat, it’s basically a self feeding endevor.

After getting all of these levels I like to heal to fill up the HP pool that has expanded along the way. You want to make sure dark flash is selected as your ring before standing on the elevator to the wind dragon, as the cooldown will lose you time if you aren’t on it.

The wind dragon in the dark flash route is basically a coinflip. If the dragon uses tornado it is easy to dodge and get a 1 shot with dark flash and finish close to where the key will appear. The worse result is what happened here, with the dragon pushing me away with gusts of wind from their wings. You can still 1 shot the dragon with this move, but it is harder to time and you finish the fight farther away from the wind key losing a little time.

The wind key door behind this griffon is our target. As we move through and go into the teleporter we have to be ready to stick to the right side as we come out of the loading screen. We have to stick to the right side and inch forward around this corner to skip a conversation with a NPC who wants to talk to cain.

We are going to do another out of bounds in this area and these harpies can interfere, so we throw out a dark flash to clear a few away. We bait this griffon into a nearby tunnel and set it up so it will push us through the geometry.  I’ll have a tutorial linked in the video description if you want to learn this out of bounds, but the high level info is that you can get oob too high and be unable to go under the level, or too low and be unable to loot the key out of the upcoming chest. There are a few different setups for this, and people tend to pick the one that works most often for them.

With the earth key now in hand, we can open this earth key door and gain access to a teleporter that takes us back to the laboratory. We have to place each key into the respective pedestal for each element. If you use the wrong key or item, you get teleported away as a punishment losing quite a bit of time, so extra care is taken

There is a sweet spot near the edge of the pedestal’s interact range where cain will insert the key right away without shifting around, but if you are a little too far you end up using the key on nothing and have to walk forward and try again.

The eternal dimension is a three level dungeon with some interesting challenges and fights along the way. However, each one of the levels of the dungeon loops under itself as can be seen on the map here. Because of this, we can just fall from near the start to near the end of each level bypassing almost everything.

Now that we found lylia it’s time to face captain daryl. This fight can be completed in 3 dark flash casts, and I am able to do it every now and then, but most of the time I finish the fight in 4 casts. After you defeat daryl the camera will pan towards him, so you want to already be looking that way. After this, you have to turn toward the door behind you to open it, so you want to make sure that you are at least close enough to the door that you can open it when you are done with the turn.

The solus fight usually takes 3 or four dark flashes to win, but it’s a bit easier to get a 3 shot on solus than on daryl in my opinion. The general idea is to cast dark flash at a good distance from solus so all the orbs hit him, and move the circular bits away from solus so they don’t home in on them. The PS4/5 version has an issue with solus where his AI will break sometimes after doing one of his blue energy ball ranged attacks.

And there you have it Eternal Ring any% in 58:21. I’m going to let the ending cutscenes play, but I’ll have some more things to say during the credits

I would like to thank everyone who worked over the last decade to make this time possible. First of all, I’d like to thank Kreggan, who’s runs originally got me interested in running this game and who did a lot of the early work on figuring out how to play this game fast. Thanks to TheWanderingMind, gungy, Lobos, vergil, and petedorr who all worked to optimize the vortex route and found most of the skips seen in this run. Thanks to Skywolf for coming up with the dark flash and turbulence route and bringing the time down even more after all these years. And finally thanks, to Secondplace and miniomegaking for also keeping the game alive by running it in more recent times.

Next on the docket for a post commentary video from me is either going to be shadow tower or shadow tower abyss. If you have one you’d be more interested in seeing, please let me know in the comments. And if you want to see more from me in the future, please subscribe and like the video.