Retro Review Part 1: Secret of Evermore

I've owned Secret of Evermore since it first came out--a good twelve years ago. It's one of the only SNES games I've bought that someone actually reccomended to me. Back then, I would rent whatever game looked the coolest, and I doubt the cover art would have appealed to my ignorant tastes. Hell, I didn't rent Earthbound for a long time because I thought the box art was shitty. The only reason I ever ended up renting it was because I wanted to know why the box was so damn big.

Anyway, I recently have been playing through it again, and I'm almost done.

Story - The basic storyline is kinda cheesy, but at least it tries to be unique. You're a normal kid from the mid 90s (great already, huh?) who chases his dog into a big mansion where it's rumored that a terrible accident happened during an experiment. The owner of the mansion and his three guests went missing, and weren't heard from since. The boy encounters a strange machine inside, and the dog chews on some wires, sending both of them into a realm created entirely by the scientist (the mansion's owner) and his guests. All four of them still exist in this realm (though time seems not to have affected them), and they each live in their own respective made up worlds which span from prehistoric times to a futuristic space station.

This game has constantly been compared to Secret of Mana and criticized for not being as good. Fuck that, the Secret of Mana character development sucked. At least the kid in this game is a movie buff, and quotes fake movies all the time. And he has a 90s 'tude, typical of the decade.

Gameplay - SoE is an action RPG. Thus, you walk around hitting stuff, and numbers pop out telling you how hard you hit. It's a good system, however, borrowing from Secret of Mana. You can level up your weapons (independent from your character's levels) and subsequently charge them up to hit enemies even harder. Your dog also runs around attacking enemies as well, and you can switch to control the dog if you want (this is actually necessary later to solve puzzles).

You also learn "alchemy formulas" along the way, which you need to collect ingredients for before you use them. Alchemy in the game works similar to real life: it makes no sense. Mix oil and wax to create a flaming homing projectile? Sure! The system gets an A+ in my book. You can also level these formulas up too. While roaming the feild, your dog sniffs out stray ingredients for you, which is COOL.

The boss fights are usually strange. Each boss seems to have a haphazardly planned set of stats (some bosses go down fast, others take forever), and it almost seems there were a few different design teams that split the work load for designing the bosses. But it does work, somehow. I guess the diversity keeps me interested (i.e. they didn't just slap a different palette on an old boss, although this happens once or twice).

The dialogue itself shows attempts at humor and keeping the player interested. I have to give them that. But there are a few puns that make me want to kill myself, and there's a ton of un touched-up dialogue that's really just shitty (bad punctuation, etc.). I don't even think that it was translated from Japanese...

Graphics - They're pretty good. Like I said earlier, the design of some characters and enemies won't really mesh well with others, but it works. For the most part, you can tell they took the time to design things that didn't look "square" (like in Final Fantasy for example, everything seems almost grid-based). Minutiae abound if you know where to look.


Music and Sound - I'd have to say the weakest part of the game. Though the music is almost ambient in some points, the ambient noises just aren't convincing enough (sound very sampled). The only music I really enjoyed was during the Medieval section of the game. Being out in the pink trees with the turquoise hedgehogs and bizarre music made the area memorable. The sound effects can be glitchy too, and annoying. But the splat noise when you kill a bug is MEGA-SATISFYING. WOAH>

Overall - This is the epitome of the 90s, so that might make or break the deal for you. Regardless, I think it's a game that you need to play when you can appreciate it. I didn't like it back when I was a kid all that much. I like it a lot more now. I'd give it...

8 OUT OF 10 SCHOOLBUSES DOING WHEELIES
Click the Youtube video below to see how intense just one school bus doing a wheelie is.





Doughead Software. ...yup.