Secret of Evermore

"A game I've been meaning to review for a very long time."

Over the years, I've played, quit, restarted and beaten this game several times. I'm so ambivalent about the design choices it's hard to say how I really feel about the game. Some are great and others are just dreadful. This review isn't going to tell you anything you don't already know or can't find out from reading any of the other reviews on this site, it's really just my way of venting about the issues that turned a potentially awesome game into a completely underwhelming experience. Really I'm just trying to get some closure from the game that's been on my mind for over a decade.

A bit of backstory. Secret of Evermore (SoE) was Square's attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Secret of Mana. (SoM) They created Square of America and to my knowledge this is the only game they ever produced before disbanding.

To say that I am a big fan of Secret of Mana is a bit of an understatement. I've probably completed Secret of Mana more times than any other game I've ever owned. Certainly more times than I can remember. I was extremely excited about SoE when I heard it was coming out, but much to my dismay the game was not really what I expected, which is to say another Secret of Mana. It wasn't a terrible game by any means but it suffered from some very amateur design mistakes considering the game it was based on. Where did it go wrong on so many levels?

Story: The story follows a young boy who chases after his dog into an abandoned mansion shortly after watching some B-movie in the old theater. Inside is a strange machine whose wires your dog decides to chew on. The result is the boy and his dog are transported through "time" to the prehistoric era. What really happens is that you've been sent to the prehistoric segment of Evermore, a world created by a scientist and his friends who mysteriously disappeared many years prior. Your ultimate goal is to discover how everyone got trapped in Evermore in the first place and destroy the evil to return everyone back home.

I'm not going to disparage the story, because the presentation was somewhat unique at the time. Being transported to another world is hardly a new concept but the interesting part was that it was really a man-made world separated into four segments, each representing the environment of the creators' imaginations. There's the prehistoric jungle, an ancient Greco-Roman society, a medieval kingdom and a futuristic space station. The locales are interesting enough, and I can't say I've seen too many Roman civilizations in RPGs.

I'll be honest, I absolutely hated the game when I first played it because I wanted another Secret of Mana, and in that respect it was a complete let-down. After selling the game and coming back to it years later with a more open mind (several times) I learned to appreciate the game's modifications to the SoM engine. However I soon came to find it had its own list of glaring problems.

I'm just going to get the basics out of the way so I can talk in greater detail about the real issues.

Controls: Everything seems to work just fine, running works about how you'd expect. In fact you can run in 8 directions until your meter reaches 0 percent. A welcome change from being able to run in only a single direction in SoM. Fighting is fun and responsive and your character gets knocked out of his weapon charge less frequently than they would have in SoM. Big plus.

Graphics: Nice and colorful but not bright and full of pastels the way Secret of Mana was. No complaints here. I liked the graphics and the varied environments just fine.

Story: It's amusing enough for its time and a refreshing break from the countless "find crystal, kill boss" stories that populate the various JRPGs.

Music: There are some great and fitting tunes here. Some of the atmospheric songs worked well (jungle, swamp, desert, boneyard, tar pits). Just a great soundtrack overall, especially given the limitations Jeremy Soule was working with (he had buggy equipment that made it impossible to write music that was as fast as songs Nobuo Uematsu did in the Final Fantasy games, hence the slower more atmospheric tracks).

Sound effects: Nothing to write home about. They get the job done. I never care too much about SFX in a game.

I'm not going to say the cliche of "Gameplay: This is really where the game falls apart", I'm sure you can find dozens if not hundreds of reviews on here that use that exact sentence. Honestly the game plays competently enough and fixes a few of the niggling AI bugs from SoM like characters getting stuck behind objects they really shouldn't.

You'd think that if the game is good and it controls well that most of the issues I have are minor. Well they are, but there are so many of them that add up to seriously detract from the gameplay.

The first and perhaps most troubling issue is the exclusion of one of the most prominent features of SoM, multiplayer. The main draw of Secret of Mana, and what made it so immensely replayable, was the ability to go through just about the entire game cooperatively. In SoM there were three characters with two characters playable simultaneously by default (three with a multi-tap but I never had one so I'm just going on what I've heard). While there are only two characters, that's not really the issue. They're both selectable, yet you're never able to have a second player join in and play the game with you. Why was this feature scrapped? Everything about the game indicates that it should have been a co-op game but it was either never implemented or removed at the last minute.

There was recently a hack that patched in 2P support but it seems a tiny bit too late for people to benefit from it. Really neither this game nor this review are culturally relevant anymore but it's been bothering me so long that I need to just say it. I found this amusing; fairly recently one of the developers of Secret of Evermore was interviewed by VC-Reviews.com and mentioned that he hoped that if it was released on the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console that they patch in two-player support. It's unlikely as VC games almost never get any noticeable patches/bug-fixes but amusing nonetheless.

Another very odd design choice was the way that weapons were handled. It was a great idea to have only three weapon classes. There were eight in SoM but leveling them up was a chore. Especially considering there were occasions where you really needed that weapon you've been neglecting. In Evermore I found myself switching between swords/axes/spears quite frequently and comfortably. What I didn't understand was the planned obsolescence. Secret of Mana side-stepped that by having the weapon orbs that you found throughout the world. There were eight weapons and they only got stronger as you upgraded them. Here there are 12 standard weapons, 4 swords/4 axes/4 spears, one of each in all four time periods. Weapons you get in one time period are almost universally weaker than those in the new one. The spears, which are the strongest weapons in each time period, are as strong as the sword in the new time period (weakest). So why take the time to upgrade and level the weapons to do charge attacks? Unfortunately the game was designed with charged weapons in mind, because bosses are tedious and sometimes unbeatable if you haven't taken the time to level your weapons, making this an exercise in grinding you already know you'll be repeating as soon as you get the next weapon. Not to mention if you prefer swords, you pretty much have to take the hit in damage potential. The biggest slap in the face is that in the beginning of the game you're given a bazooka which lets you waste enemies with ease but once you arrive in the prehistoric period you're left with just the gun and no ammo. So you get a taste of this awesome weapon before being stuck leveling crappy weapons for about 2/3 of the game. To add insult to injury, there's a programming bug that gives some of the bullet types unlimited ammo, making it doubly apparent how pointless it is to use your other weapons once you can buy ammo again. Unless you're a masochist, you're never going to beat the last boss using only the bone.

Then there's the alchemy system. I actually enjoyed it to a certain extent. It was a fresh departure from the way spells were learned and mastered in SoM, and I actually preferred alchemy (items) to having magic points and being SOL when your healing walnuts in Secret of Mana ran out. It was fun to accumulate ingredients to cast spells. Your dog was capable of sniffing the ground to find ingredients, but there were times when he'd get stuck behind a wall or often he would be sniffing indefinitely so you'd never actually find the thing you were looking for. Better than your idiot AI buddies in SoM getting stuck behind walls when they were fighting though. Unfortunately all but the weakest spells are prohibitively expensive to level up and the grind is just as long as it was in Secret of Mana. At least in Secret of Mana, leveling up an element affected several spells. Here you have to level each one individually. Better spells often had expensive components or limited uses (items that were found, but could not be bought), which made them effectively useless. Thankfully the cure spell is relatively cheap and easy to level, because it's really the only one you truly need to beat this game. That and energizer, but if you beat the game, you already know about that. On a minor note the many hidden alchemy teachers that taught you random obscure spells were fun too, if only just to find where they were hiding. However most of these hidden alchemy teachers gave you such worthless spells it wasn't worth seeking out, like the Bee spell. I'd say the negatives about cancel the positives, making alchemy a squandered opportunity to be a fun alternative to magic point spell casting.

The difficulty level is also irritating because there are a few times you'll find the game to be unforgiving in really odd places. Did you forget to level up your weapons before the arena in the Greco-Roman era or come to the rat-boss unprepared? Too bad. In fact the very first "boss" in the prehistoric era might kill you if it catches you by surprise. Ironically the overall easiest area in the game is actually the final area. Or rather it was designed in such a way that avoiding the really difficult sections was easy. Once I reached the space station I think I only gained one or two levels before taking on the last boss and with the energizer spell you get right before this fight and the proper defense buffs it was a pitifully easy fight.

Now I'm going to go ahead and praise the game for a few things that it did well. First things first, the dialogue is clear and amusing. Your main character is just a little too into cheesy B-movies, but in a charming way. Even though this game was modeled after a JRPG it had strong Western storytelling influences. The story, while fairly conventional, is told well through the dialogue and particularly the creators of each time period. Another relief is that since it was originally written in English, the dialogue doesn't sound nearly as awkward as many of the haphazard translations Square threw around in those days. I don't care how much you love the "spoony bard" line, FFIV had an awful translation.

The marketplace, particularly the first one in the Greek era, was magnificent. It was fun, completely optional, rewarding and cleverly designed. There were one-time trades that you could make, provided you didn't insult the vendor, rare and valuable items that improved statistics as well as other things. There was a crackpot that stood in place and yelled things about the world coming to an end, whom you could talk to repeatedly for comic effect. The din of the crowd in the background was fitting to represent a busy marketplace (as opposed to strange music).

Now the environments were a bit of a mixed bag. While I loved the locales and they looked beautiful, they all felt a bit claustrophobic. It's more to do with the way backgrounds were drawn and how paths were designed like small mazes. Even cities were annoying to navigate. Secret of Mana's graphics were more simplistic so even the caves felt somewhat "open" and with rare exceptions towns had enough folks in them (and upbeat music) to give them a lively feel. However here towns suffer from numerous narrow winding passages which are often blocked off for no discernible reason. The castle towns in the medieval period were just a chore to run through because of the snake-like long corridors and alleys. In addition what few towns there were in the game were very sparsely populated. Aside from the desert, most outdoors areas were just as full of these narrow passages and often few enemies. One of the two identical castle towns is even completely abandoned at any given time. While on the one hand the environment had the effect of putting the emphasis on the individual character, much like in Panzer Dragoon Saga, more often than not it just made the game feel like a desolate wasteland.

The music is fantastic at setting the mood for the game. Jeremy Soule is a great composer and many of his songs are hauntingly sad. They fit the backgrounds because despite their diverse colors, the relatively empty environments are quite lonely and really the entire world has a much more melancholy atmosphere than SoM ever did. The Ivor Tower/Ebon Keep songs as well as a handful of others strike me as incredibly depressing. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but thematically it makes sense. Evermore is a world gone wrong where people are trapped within their own creations, as beautiful as they are. And ultimately when the game concludes and Evermore collapses in on itself, you can't help but feel a bit of sorrow and regret. You think of the "What ifs" and all of the imagination and potential that will be lost.

Ironically it's almost a metaphor for the game experience as a whole. The messages it wanted to show were clear, but all of the niggling gameplay issues drag down the immersive qualities of your characters impact on these fictional worlds. With some effort I could really see someone getting engrossed in the world of Evermore and the story the characters are trying to say, but the claustrophobic yet empty world and lack of multiplayer creates an almost alarming 4th-wall breaking feeling of detachment and isolation.

You're sitting in your room alone playing as a boy and his dog in an empty world that sits forgotten in an old mansion, and just like the people who created the separate areas of Evermore who sit surrounded by glorified period actors, you feel the the lack of human interaction with someone that can empathize.

I still play this game from time to time, because real-time RPGs are a lot of fun to play and sadly there aren't nearly as many of them as there ought to be, or at least ones as fun as the Secret of Mana/Evermore games. Still, no matter how many times I come back to this game, I look on with disappointment at how depressing this game is, thinking of what the world of Evermore could have and should have been.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/07/08, Updated 10/28/08

Game Release: Secret of Evermore (US, October 1995)