A look back at: Secret of Evermore

One of the most interesting games I've played, a Western RPG that plays very similarly to its similar games in Secret of Mana, which I still haven't played along with games in that series. Yep, another Action RPG, but actually quite slow-paced too.

Secret of Evermore is a game I remember most for it's amazingly atmospheric soundtrack, one of the greatest soundtracks ever, with memorable songs in just about every location. It also happens to have a case of "accidental plot" where the boy's dog runs off and he chases him to a lab, where things happen and he ends up in a totally new land. Actually, let's talk about these new lands. They are all interesting locales involving ancient areas, well except for Omnitopia which is naturally a futuristic setting. Enemies obviously match the setting, and apparently the dog does too, becoming a different breed of dog each time, up to the robotic jet dog in Omnitopia. Battling enemies in this game is actually somewhat interesting, gotta charge your attacks to really do damage, and the alchemy system here uses up several kinds of items to create good magic spells on enemies. Provided the player continues to search these items, they end up being useful for many things, not just fighting. And there's even this huge-ass market where a lot of things can be bought or sold.

Well the characters do manage to be interesting apart from a boy who likes crap movies and his shapeshifting dog. It seems the residents of the boy's town are not only sucked into the portal too, but also three other residents are sucked in, and apparently have evil clones of themselves too. These evil clones aren't really fought, but are still enemies. I'm also rather glad that the main scientist, Sidney Ruffleberg, is actually a good guy who was trying to make something chess-related, but naturally it backfired and he clearly seems like the guy to atone for what he had done. What bugs me is that the robot he screwed up apparently was his own butler. That's just so far-fetched and unbelievable, but it needed to be deactivated to finish this plot up. And then there's the matter of getting the other residents out of this weird world so that the stability stays the same. Yet there seems to be this sequel hook at the very end which really begs me to wonder if this game would ever actually get a sequel.

Overall though, Secret of Evermore is above average in every aspect, not really the most amazing thing ever of course, except in music where it definitely is amazing.