I had a dabble in E.V.O. again for the first time in many many years and I’m enjoying it. Still in the first era but it’s just as I remembed except for one thing, wow that music is really out there.
Now I’m going back to being an armour-plated fish thingy.
I won’t be firing up E.V.O. but it’s cool to see how well most of these comments are lining up with my takeaway from a play through back in the late 90’s or early 00’s: “Wow, that was a neat game! I never want to play this again.”
No 3D just sprites on photographic PNG backgrounds
Edit : uhhh I forgot the context that I said there is a switch to 3D that is the mixed media but you get the point.
I prefer a 3D character on 2d backgrounds to a 3D background with 2d characters most of the time with exceptions
I’m trying very hard to imagine a Rez in the style of Resident Evil or Final Fantasy VII.
Every Extend
This one briefly hits a sweet spot for its concept, tone, and extremely cute sprite work. But yes, it’s a frequently unpleasant mess of a game in spite of this, and its score is typical of Sugiyama: a few cute ditties blended with periods of interminable screeching. It fits in theme and presentation alongside Quintet’s Enix-published offerings for the console, and there is staff overlap between the dev (Almanic/Givro) and Quintet, so check that out. The studio folded after work on both Wonder Project J titles as well as Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari, all three of which are due for broader evaluation outside of Japan (Quintet’s output is too.)
Oh yeah, absolutely check out Terranigma, which has a tangentially similar theme and premise. It may be less high-concept, but a vastly more competent end product. One of the all-time greats.
EVO may have been the game that taught me what “grinding” even is.
I’m gonna download this soon and see there’s a fan translation that says it corrects the bad official translation. Has anyone played this? Is this just someone being a stickler about localization or is the original translation kinda bad(not uncommon for the time)?
primarily, the names of many prehistoric animals, including familiar
dinosaur names, are mangled beyond recognition. (“Brosasaurus” and “Tritops”
are among the more familiar ones; “Omosaurus” and “Pronesaurus” are just
baffling.) Beyond that, the official translation isn’t terrible, beyond a couple
of errors in converting large numbers and the final boss randomly claiming to
be a caveman. Apart from that, the text is just awkward in places and doesn’t
express emotion very well.
that at least doesn’t seem like it is an online weirdo being weird about literal translations.
You might want different things from the experience but I’d say the translation has been a highlight for me so far.
The wonky translation definitely adds to the charm.
This is my first time joining one of these game clubs things. Glad to finally do it!
Never played E.V.O. before but I’ve been interested for a while; I definitely get what people are saying about it being inspired and yet pretty janky on the execution. I played for a couple hours last night and mostly enjoyed the basic loops of killing, eating, growing, and then setting off to fight a boss. As long as it’s pretty short, I think I can get through and even enjoy it, though this will definitely be a save states run for me. Kind of crazy how many SNES games were really driving at these bigger theological/teleological themes and not really quite getting there but stumbling toward them in interesting and beautiful ways anyway.
release date: 2020
I’d say if it came out as recently as 2020 it’s worht a try! It’s certainly a game that has something to gain from a better translation.
Rumors circulate
among the cucumbers.
though this reminds me this is one of my favorite lines of all time, so…
if you want to join the “cult”, play the original. you could always transfer the save to the patched version if you get confused. if I play evo again, I would also be torn as to whether I want the nostalgic, screen-shot-inducing bad translation, or this patch.
Old, bad translations often have an evocative quality. Like actors making puzzling or awkward declarations in an absurdist stage play, which almost definitely was not the original intent. Games aren’t localized that way anymore for good reason, but I like the idea of exploring the idea with intentionality in original games. Cryptic, broken language like poetry that defies or complicates a game’s complexities. What Brecht called the “Verfremdungseffekt,” after I gave him the idea.
Yeeeees! YEEEEES!
Can’t spell evocative without E-V-O-cative!
Well, I beat the game!
Some of my favourite quotes are:
I feel like I somehow know less about evolution now than when I started playing.
Reading through the thread here, seems like I missed a bunch of stuff. I didn’t find anymore evolutions after becoming a mammal, I finished the game with a sort of rhino-lion-deer thing.
In a word, mixed. The game feels like it gets progressively worse the longer you play, like all the best ideas were front loaded. The underwater area is the prettiest, sounds the best and the evolution mechanic feels new and exciting.
As I progressed, the games charm wore off and the rough edges became ever more grating. I caught myself whistling that little tune that plays on repeat for most of the game’s areas.
When my little guy was appropriately powered up and I had a handle on things, it didn’t feel so bad to play and I didn’t mind the odd bit of grinding here and there… but so many of the encounters were extremely frustrating. When I did get through a boss or whatever, it rarely felt earned… more just lucky. There were a few occasions where I got really mad because I lost a bunch of exp unexpectedly due to some insane hitstun, or repeated attempts against a ridiculous boss. A few times I tweaked my build for the encounter and it was quite satisfying, but you can burn through your points super quickly that way so it didn’t feel worthwhile to experiment.
There is clearly a lot of depth (or maybe breadth??) to this game that completely passed me by. A lot of the mechanics aren’t really explained (maybe I should have read the manual). Like, I have no idea what the crystals do. I found a couple red crystals, and they turned me into something else and then back again a minute or so later with a message like “Crystal power doesn’t work yet”. Do I have to have a specific build before picking one up to get a new evolution or something? They never respawned so I guess I just missed out on whatever that was supposed to be.
I can say with some confidence, if I had this game as a kid I would have played the wheels off it and have some really fond memories. It seems like the kind of game where you can find something completely new and unexpected every time you play. I can imagine spending hours with my friends experimenting with different evolutions and hunting down secrets. Based on my playthrough alone I would have had no idea there were branching evolutionary paths.
As an adult, though, one playthrough is enough for me I think. I’m glad I persevered, there was some really novel stuff going on here but I’ve had my fill of the moment-to-moment gameplay.
Does this remind anyone else of an Amiga game? A lot of western developed games from this era had a really similar vibe. Prehistoric theming aside, the sprite work looked kinda like a disney cartoon… the unpolished movement, random spikes in difficulty and lack of iframes on hit. As well as the generally high visual production value, like great artwork and parallax. It’s kinda surprising to me that this comes from a 90s Japanese developer.
I rolled credits on this game. Overall, I’d echo what other people said: great concept, stanky execution (even for someone who can tolerate stiff controls and weird hit detection here and there). Loved the themes, the evolution system, the weird dialogue, and the story, but even worse than the simple gameplay and stupid bosses (which, yeah, I shamelessly save-states’d and Game Genie’d through), the biggest dropped ball was the music. Some cool tracks in the beginning and the end show tons of promise, yet they choose to just use the worst track in the game (and, no jokem one of the worst SNES tracks I have heard) for like 80% of the levels in the middle of the game. It’s almost unbelievable they didn’t think better of it. If the soundtrack had been good throughout, this would maybe be an all-timer, but I just have to take off big points for that debacle of a track they constantly shoved at me.
Still really glad I played it and definitely appreciated its brevity. I think I’ll mostly remember it fondly honestly.
