A swing and a miss from a game that's more of a tech demo and an almost direct continuation of King's Field in terms of mechanics. Eternal Ring is really nice, especially because of 60fps gameplay (KF3 runs at 15, amazing), but not even remotely in the same realm as FF?

Not at all, aha. Just a catchy bit of marketing from Agetec and shots fired at the biggest name in console RPGing at the time. And yeah! Very much in the same field as, uh, King's Field.