'You can't make fun of magic in Asia!'
One upping the toilet Russians in Goldeneye 007, The Ring: Terror's Realm actually contributes a cutscene to a monster on the toilet. In fact toilets are the favorite places to hide for the monsters in order to sneak up on you. Beware of the toilet.
In the late 90's to early 2000's copying Resident Evil was a popular endeavor often met with limited success. The Dreamcast had a number of survival horror games that fall under the category of survival horror but accomplish little more than camp. These include Carrier, Illbleed, and Blue Stinger to name a few. The Ring: Terror's Realm may be the hardest of these to swallow. There is definitely camp for camp fans, including a fair number of laugh out load moments due to poor storytelling and translation foibles. However, the player will have to wade through a game containing a number of design flaws to get to these points.
The Ring has one of the worst first impressions in gaming. The instant the start button is pressed you are greeted with the sound of boot stepping in fresh cow manure. Then, after a rather entertaining but quite poorly voiced introductory sequence, the downright most irritating and repetitive music I've heard since the advent of cd-rom attacks you like a gong hit with a sledge hammer. Or worse, like your baby brother repeating everything you say for hours. I endured this song for a good while in order to hear the other themes of the game, which are at least tolerable, and one or two that might be called fair. Chances are you will mute the game before you get to this point.
The Ring's story is very loosely based on The Ring movie (the Japanese version). Rather than a cursed film, the story revolves around a computer program in which anyone that plays it gets infected and will die in 7 days. The story takes a number of campy twists and turns and falls in the so bad it's good category. I recommend that you visit 'The Spoony Experience' website for a wonderfully funny review of the story.
The gameplay borrows a great deal from the early resident evil games. Like most early survival horror games the game has tank controls, fixed camera positions, areas that cannot be accessed until a key is found or a certain event occurs, ect. Most enemies include a lizard man that crawls on all fours, the man-sized meerkats I mentioned earlier, and apes. These enemies come in several different colors indicating how tough they are. One of the biggest problems with these enemies as they are incredibly stupid. The AI does little besides run directly at you and lunge when it gets close. They do have a line of site so you can get by them if they are not looking your direction. The enemies have particular trouble navigating obstacles. They will run directly into an obstacle between you and them and move back and forth trying to work their way around it. Obviously, this can often be used to your advantage.
There are parts of the game you take unavoidable hits because you walk up a stairs and show up right on top of a monster, or you will have a short cutscene where a monster will run up and slap you on the back of the head (seriously). All in all this may be the only game I ever play where my favorite enemy was the flying crows, simply because they had an AI that worked. Of note, there are number of moments where you are searching a room and a monster will walk in the door and flick off the lights before it runs at you. I find this kind of horror quite humorous.
There are actually a fair number of weapons in the game and surprisingly are fairly well balanced. They seem to draw a believable reaction from the enemies when they are shot as well. A very odd design choice is how a couple of the weapons are obtained very late in the game, then taken away from you for the last two bosses. In fact, you have to find three different parts to make a rocket launcher in order to advance the story, then almost immediately you lose all of your guns but your handgun. I never used the rocket launcher (or rocket lawn-chair for Medal Slug fans) once.
Where this game really fails is that it completely misses the point on what makes traditional survival horror games fun. There are no real puzzles but use 'x' key on 'y' door and find object 'q.' The biggest problem with how this game handles this. It places items you have to find in places you've already been. It is counter intuitive to have gone through a room 4 times but have to visit it a 5th time to find a critical item (which will be sitting in plain site like it just appeared out of nowhere). Random enemies will respawn in rooms you previously visited as well, making it irritating looking for items in rooms that you've already visited.
The Ring: Terror's Realm is by no means a good game but it can provide some entertainment to B-level survival horror fans. The best bet is saving your time and just watching some of the youtube reviews of the game.