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Secret of Evermore

Developer / Publisher: Square
01 October 1995
Secret of Evermore - cover art
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81 Ratings / 1 Reviews
#1,801 All-time
#39 for 1995
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1995 Square  
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XNA 0 94689 15101 6 SNS-AEOE-USA
1996 Square Nintendo  
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ES 0 45496 33035 4 SNSP-AEOS-ESP
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The only Square game designed in north america, Secret of Evermore proved to be more than just a western Mana epigone. Regional differences are visible in its writing & main characters, while gameplay/system ones such as alchemy - which simply adds crafting materials to leveled spells (mainly for RPG utilities but also for mild Zelda-like progression), offer partial but more intriguing twists on the source. Its combat follows a similar approach; top-down brawling modeled after Secret of Mana (ring menu, stamina, charge attacks, battler-swapping, etc.) but without the ability to vortex and push foes around (as knockdowns last for a fraction of what they used to), focused instead on evasive movement, brief stuns and follow-up attacks from a companion. In a sense, it's closer in concept to the original Seiken Densetsu than to its follow-ups, although updated with the speed of SD2 and the flow of SD3. If its production pales when compared to mainline Manas, Evermore managed to surpass them in other areas, from enemies (trickier and more diverse in design) to sprinting (that controls more freely than SD2's pegasus boots-ian dash), from progression (quasi-levels that leave the world map for much later) to dungeons (lengthier and far more creative). Not everything works - though: Its weapons feel samey beyond their niche, bosses are as varied as they are annoying, and the second half disappoints, relying too heavily on mazes, hidden paths and backtracking to confuse the player.
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Title
Secret of Evermore (SoE) is a 1995 action role playing game made by Squaresoft. It is often called a sequel to their previous hit title Secret of Mana [聖剣伝説2], but I think of it as being more of a "spiritual successor" in that the only thing they really share together is their game mechanics and Mana went on to have many actual sequels in Japan. In exchange for this one game, we got almost none of the Secret of Mana sequels until years later when we got Legend of Mana [聖剣伝説 レジェンドオブマナ] for the PlayStation.
Evermore was never released in Japan it was only released in America and Europe and the reason it was released only in those regions of the world was it was made by a branch of Squaresoft in America. Ok, so Squaresoft was kind of feeling themselves in the early to mid-nineties and they started spending money like crazy. One of the crazy things they did was try to open up a north American branch. A branch that subsequently died when this game was a commercial failure. I would like to go into a more detailed history of this branch of the company but its history is basically making this one game. The reason Square thought it was a good idea to have western branch develop a western focused game, is obviously relatability to the target audience. Relatibility is kind of a theme of this review as you'll soon see.

I mentioned a friend who gave me Final Fantasy Mystic Quest in the review I did of that title. His name was Jacob. This same friend introduced me to a lot of RPG's and one of our favorite games to play when we hung out was the aforementioned Secret of Mana [聖剣伝説2] (SoM). We both collectively rented that game about a million times to the point that the lady at our local rental story eventually sold that copy to that same friend. More on that when I fish my review of SoM. Having loved SoM both of us were extremely hyped for Evermore. So Evermore came out and my friend bought it, he liked it but like most people, he thought it was ultimately inferior to SoM. He ended up trading his copy to me for an N64 controller and a copy of King of Fighters 96. I never regretted this trade. SoE, in my opinion, is still a somewhat underappreciated game for its era... Well actually after thinking about it and giving it a more critical eye, I think the game has some excellent aspects and a few areas of creativity, but it' not nearly as good as I thought of it before this.

The graphics are pretty good there is a lot of detail and movement in the environments and each era feels distinct from each other as you're playing them. The opening sequence that shows the professors monolithic house with the rows of statues is kind of emblematic of this games art direction at it's best. There is a lot of realistic looking environments with a grand aesthetic appeal automatically punctured by some crazy cartoon elements. In other words like most aspects of the game, it's muddled just a wee bit. This is one of those games that I was in love with the concept art for it and it's really unique looking art even for a game today, I'm not exactly sure what I would even liken what the characters and environments look like in concept, I guess the closest corollary I could think of would be newspaper comic art. Had they went more with the art style displayed in the concept art I think we might remember this game more today and it might have a more distinctly western feel. A problem with this game and a problem that continuously plagues western games that try to ape Japanese stuff and one I elaborated on heavily in my Doki Doki Literature Club! review is they try too hard to insert realism into a situation that is cartoonish and exaggerated which leads to an imbalance that tilts towards blandness. There is a lot of great things about this game graphically and it has some dramatic flair and cartoonish elements, but looking at it with a hindsight critical eye and playing this and Mana back to back to do these reviews, I see that there are a lot of areas where this a much blander game and worse for it than I thought at the time. Alternatively, it also isn't "realistic" enough in its tone or setting to undercut what is lost from trying to make this a more serious game in comparison to Mana.
The absolute best thing about Evermore and the one aspect of it that has held up without qualifications is the music. I've always really liked this game's soundtrack for its fairly unique qualities given the era, it's very ambient sound-oriented and the few musical tracks it does have are tied to specific areas and boss fights. In this way, the games sound design is more modern in execution than it's contemporaries in that it reserves its music for dramatic moments and to evoke a certain feeling in some places. I think one particular standout track for me is the ocean theme in the second era, it's representative for a lot of the game's music in that it has a very ominous and mysterious tone to it and it includes a lot of nature sounds and ambient noises. It really captures the feeling of being close to an ocean for me. This is my second favorite Squaresoft soundtrack after Final Fantasy Tactics [ファイナルファンタジータクティクス], which is a game I love so much I fuck it through it's CD hole. I would definitely say SoE's soundtrack is the most unique one in Squaresoft's library of games. The guy who did the music for this Jeremy Soule would probably go on to be the most successful person who worked on this game and he has done among other things the Soundtracks for Icewind Dale, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and all of the Elder Scroll's games from Morrowind onward. I would note that his music is the only thing that has held up in quality since that title in Bethesda's subsequent games. Whether or not you agree with that statement he did the music for this game when he was nineteen years old and he came up the games name of "Evermore." This dude can't be stopped he has a little bit of rhythm and a lotta Soule.
I love the inn music for this game, especially the song in Fire Eye's village inn and the Bach-like song in that one store in Nobilia. Even though it kind of goes against the era it's put in, but then again a song by Bach wouldn't really fit any of these "eras." As he isn't from ancient times and he isn't from the medieval period. As generously as you can put it he is pre-modern, but really he is just modern. I guess like a lot of aspects of this game they fucked up. But this seemingly minor fuckup is something I want you to keep in mind for a future criticism.

The gameplay is almost exactly like Mana's in that it's an action RPG and like the Mana games it uses a round menu system. Unlike Mana, this game is not multiplayer. Which was one of the things that majorly disappointed Jacob and I'm no doubt sure many others about this title. So leveling up weapons. In this game, all of your weapons had two levels, including the dog. There are about four weapons of each type: Spear, Sword, and Axe. Before I talk about this let me explain how SoM's weapon system was slightly different. In SoM you had those three weapon types but even more shit like Boomerangs, whips, brass knuckles and Bows. Each weapon in SoM saw upgrades that you periodically got in the game. By contrast, SoE gives you a new weapon to level up in each era. SoE's probably sounds less daunting on paper especially since you only need to level up weapons with one character. Well, that is assuming that in Mana that most people bothered leveling up more than one weapon each on every character and that they did so alone or all the way to completion each playthrough. I doubt most players unless they were no-lifing it like I did, actually went through the trouble of leveling up all this shit. In Mana it also helped that you were stronger than your weapons, well that isn't the case in Evermore leveling up your weapons is more important than leveling up your self because basically, all your strength comes from charged attacks, but with how the weapons work and how some of them are integral to your exploration like the spears and axes in the second area, the weapons and leveling them actually becomes more important and hence more time consuming and unfortunately without those exploratory incentives redundant. I'm not exactly sure which games system I prefer in terms of the actual game mechanics, but I will say that Mana offers you more variety and is less punishing for switching a weapon so it probably ends up being more enjoyable at the end of the day. Assuming you even bother with weapons in Evermore... Because as you'll see in the next paragraph magic is basically brokenly overpowered.
This games magic is called alchemy and unlike spells, in most of Square's games instead of Mana you had to have specific ingredients to do a spell. It's a neat idea that like a lot of these games unique qualities has some unfortunate negatives. In some ways this made the game easier in that if a spells ingredients were cheap and abundant you can spam the shit out of them with no real limit and most spells didn't have a casting time, making some boss fights unfortunately trivially easy. Especially if you took the time to level spells up. Some spells though had notoriously hard ingredients to get and they weren't worth the trouble of getting them in the first place, the "Atlas" spell comes most to mind with this. Aside from the humor of seeing your main character strike a pose as strong man Charles Atlas, there really was no point going through the trouble of getting the obscure ingredients of this spell. Even with its flaws, I think this was an interesting take on magic and with a few changes to it I can see it being made into a system that functions properly. Spells can also be used against multiple targets, so some leveled up spells like crush could clear whole rooms in an instant. This game like the last game also allowed you to seek help from the four main characters in the form of "call beads," like you could the shrine characters in Mana but I almost never used these in this game, because Alchemy was so absurdly overpowered.
Given all the above, the boss fights in the game are very easy. I remember dying to some as a kid, but in hindsight, I really don't understand how. Some Bosses in Mana are a genuine challenge and the last fight in that game is appropriately very hard and utilizes every bit of the mechanics of the game. Every boss fight in Evermore is extremely easy and has some way to cheese it. While I'm mentioning enemies I'll say that some of the enemy and boss designs are interesting. One of the game's enemies Frippos, which are a mix between frogs and hippos, have always stuck with me. As interesting as they are nothing in this game comes close to being as great as a Rabite. SoM cast a long and successful shadow and this won't be the last time, Evermore failed to live up to it.
This game has a lot of filler, the first example of this was with the weapon leveling up system I mentioned before. Since almost every weapon needs to be leveled at least once to traverse new obstacles, a large amount of your time spent in this game is going to be leveling up weapons and magic. The second big way in which this game has a lot of filler is it relies a lot on mazes and gimmick areas that require you following exactly the one correct path to the next area. I never noticed this that much as a kid, but in hindsight, almost every area has at least two portions if not more that can be described as a maze. This not only feels like filler but it leads to a lot of monotonous gameplay and tasks. It only feels worse in the areas where you know "The Secret of Evermore" and can easily traverse them. In the medieval forest, there is a maze-like area in a forest and I remember a friend telling me that if you see a certain creature in the trees, you know you're going the right way. Since knowing that the area doesn't feel better it feels like even easier padding to an already easy game. I don't mind backtracking as much as most people seem to hate it in games criticism, I think like anything in a game it can be utilized well and in interesting ways. A lot of the penultimate third quarter of this game is backtracking before you reach the space station area. I don't think it's particularly grueling or bad, but a lot of people cite this as a "flaw" in the game's design. So I thought I would mention it here, in a game filled with a lot of filler and padding, this isn't a particularly bad bit of it in my opinion and the only real sin is that it forces you to notice how little else there is to do in the game and how few areas there are to visit once you can start backtracking.
Speaking of obscure items like the aforementioned Atlas medallions, in the middle two "eras" of this game you have a chance to "barter" in the market place, you have to make a long series of trades to end up with a series of rare items called "charms" that permanently enhance your character. I just read the book Debt: The First 5000 years, in which David Graeber states that there are no examples of the intellectual just-so story known as "bartering." Well here it is David if it exists in a video game it has to be true in reality. Don't bring up the fact that there is no anthropological, archeological or cultural evidence for this ever happening, I mean it functions in a SNES game so it must be real. The unreality of this practice aside, it is a fun little sequence that I a completionist could never pass up doing to the point that I used to have written out on paper exactly the number of items needed to get every item in the market place and start doing the long series of trades that result in all the best items. You also have to plan a bit ahead for the third era because if you don't have a certain amount of one of the trade items from the previous you're shit out of luck for a whole playthrough for not having the exact item the person needs. Which is one of the reasons why barter doesn't and hasn't worked in real life. if we only ever traded what we absolutely wanted or needed we would be pretty fucked as a society especially in smaller groups that rely on each other for survival. I mean this games takes it to an insane degree where the miserly old merchant won't trade his wares unless you have some trade goods from an eight hundred to a thousand years in the past, but the principle still stands, this is why barter is an impractical system and why gift and promissory economies prevailed in history. So tell this stingy fucker to give me some credit, I'll have something he needs at some point.
One of the rare items in this game that you get actually occurs near the start of the game and it's in an area that you have to get to through this quicksand maze in the starting Dinosaur era. This item unlike a lot of the other ones isn't so much as a power increase as it is an essential grab because it actually allows your character to run... As a kid, I didn't think much of this because I managed to get it by accident and never missed it during a playthrough, but I can imagine someone doing so and I can't really think of a good reason why something like running needed to be potentially gated away from you as a player. Especially if you fucked up and missed it in a playthrough and can't go back to that area until three-fourths of the way into the game. I can understand wanting to make players feel incrementally more powerful and capable, but missing this one item, that allows you to do something that people could just easily do in the previous game, could really reflect badly on the game and nerf some peoples enjoyability to the point that I wonder how many people missed rare items like this one and felt the game was worse than Mana for missing basic features that were actually in the game but gated away like this. I'm certain this had to have affected some reviewers perception and enjoyment of the game and most of the contemporary reviewers I have read or watched on this game mention it as a negative if they mention it at all. I think this was a fuck up and it's part of a general rule I think game companies should keep in mind when making a sequel or continuously developing something and that is that you should try your damn hardest to never-ever nerf anything or gate away something that was basic to the previous character unless it has story/thematic significance. For that second one, if you're Raiden, I'm ok with you being less strong and capable than Solid Snake, because the whole game is built around your ineptitude. I'm glad I conveniently mentioned that game here, because like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty these games have a few story and thematic similarities. Spoiler: Like playing a game where you're in a game.

So this game starts out with an experiment gone wrong in a mansion on a hill. An old professor who looks like Dr. Wily takes himself and his two friends and his niece into the fantasy world of Evermore. A virtual world where the participant's imaginations and desires can come to life. The game takes place in several historical periods that are the aforementioned representative fantasies of the participants in the docs experiment. Dinosaur times, ancient times (Egypt, Greece, and Rome), medieval and the future.
I really like the concept of this game in that it's about an average boy and his dog going on a virtual adventure together. I like games about boy adventurers and I'll have more to say about this particular aspect of the game later. It probably helped that I was a boy when I played these games and hence could relate to the character in that way, but it also gives the games a sense of childlike wonder and innocence to the adventure. This game reminds me a lot of StarTropics, which funnily enough has a somewhat similar back story to this game in that it was a game by a Japanese publisher made by and for a western audience exclusively.
There is a meta-quality to this game that almost everyone I have ever seen review it misses. I mean the main character gets caught in other peoples fantasy creations that they're roleplaying with their fictional creations. Only something goes wrong and they're stuck playing the same fantasy forever. The idea of this is a great setup, unfortunately, it is more interesting and funny on paper than it is in the actual game, which mostly despite this meta-quality goes on to be a regular RPG of its era. That is to say, this game's story has some interesting qualities to it, but I wouldn't call it Shadowrun [Mega Drive/Genesis] or Phantasy Star II [ファンタシースターII 還らざる時の終わりに] tier where the games seem prophetic and way ahead of their time in storytelling. The boy reacts to the predicaments he finds himself in, in humorous ways. The main characters in the game aside from yourself and the dog which don't even have an official name are mostly resigned to being the three people who were part of the professors experiment all those years ago and the professor himself. The first one is Fire Eyes, a little girl that was the professor's niece and she was obsessed with dinosaurs. So she formed an area based around pre-history that reflected this want. The second guy was a POC man named Horace Highwater who was a museum curator and he sets up the second area themed around ancient societies. A weird thing about him is he is digging for antiques when you meet him even though he is living within the cultures he is trying to study. He should stop being an archeologist and become a fucking anthropologist because you can have first-hand experience learning about these cultures instead of studying bones and relics and trying to interpret what happened with them between the lines. Camellia Bluegarden was a librarian who liked medieval shit and so she like the others created a medieval world to inhabit, she crowned herself queen and married a hyperactive king.
Is it out of bounds to marry someone you created in some way? Should this queen be taken to task for her evil sexual actions with a virtual character? Has she committed husbando rape? I hope not, but I guess we should consider these serious possibilities when reviewing a game with a concept like this. Which leads me to an actual question I have about this game, did she actually create that king in her sexual fantasies that became a medieval kingdom in Evermore? You see something I noticed about this game's story that was underdeveloped and under-explained was the process by which a person creates their surroundings in Evermore. Meaning how did Fire Eyes, create the dinoland and Horace the ancient area and how did the queen create her royal honeymoon? Did they just want it and it appeared around them? Or were these made before they stepped into the experiment like a holodeck program in Star Trek? In a similar game like let's say Chrono Trigger [クロノ・トリガー], the reason other periods exist is obvious because the progression of time works the same way it works in our reality. So those other periods we visit in that game don't need an added explanation. The lands we explore in Evermore don't really have as obvious an explanation and I think an underutilized aspect of the meta qualities of this game was taking advantage of what the actual process was by which these different era biomes were created. Had they been programmed beforehand for instance, some areas might be glitched out or not fully programmed. If they were an aspect of the creator's imagination maybe some things are comically wrong about the time period. Since Fire Eyes is a child for instance, maybe they could have played around with the idea of some fantasy creatures being mixed in with the Dinosaurs. This would also give the main character an opportunity to comment on it humorously. Something they tried to desperately do in this game was make the main character more relatable with humor and "references." Well, the humor fell flat and the "references " I'll comment on later. Had the jokes been about the games design and game tropes I think they would have aged better than what is in there now and the world would ironically feel more real had they expanded on the unreal aspects of Evermore's existence.
So I wanted to talk about that tangent first because the villain in the game is used to explain one thing in the world and that is why evil exists in it. When the other "real" inhabitants of Evermore conceived of their worlds, they conceived of them as mostly peaceful vacation spots they would visit. Somewhere the simulation of Evermore realized that you needed evil for good to exist so a villain was "created" or already existed to fill that spot. You see a bad aspect of not knowing the process by which these areas created is not knowing exactly how the villain actually effected the world in the negative. On top of that, the villain in this game is kind of an underwhelming reveal, but aside from who he is, his boss fight isn't that great either. Funny story. The first time I got to the end of the game an infamous glitch happened to me and he could do no damage to my character at all. So I had an invulnerable first run against the boss. Who ends up being the professor's robotic butler. The only interesting aspect of his motives is like the "villains" in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening [ゼルダの伝説 夢をみる島], he wants to keep the simulation of Evermore running because his life ends when the simulation does and I think on top of that, he likes having the level and control and power over every aspect of the world that he does and he doesn't want to go back to being merely a butler... Or at least I think that is what I think his motives are. You see him in the real world later after you save the day so that kind of negates the whole existential crisis half of his motives, so I'm not even exactly sure what his motive was supposed to be but this comes the closest to an interesting one so I'll be charitable and give it a pat on the head despite some minor inconsistencies here. So I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care about this villain and there are a lot of aspects to him, that make him not very evil, but not in an interesting way where you realize he has more depth, but in a badly written way, where he was intended to be a mustache twirler, but they somehow fucked up that easy concept.

Aside from the rather small character focus, the game does have some memorable quirky moments like a lot of games of its time. There is a caveman character named Blimp who lives out in a bloody swamp in the first area after you help him there with a gigantic swamp snake problem and I don't mean the one in his grass knit skirt. He sells you a crucial ingredient for the levitate spell. I always remembered old Blimp for some reason. Some people said it was daft to build a hut in the middle of a swamp, but he built it all the same and like the king seeking "huge tracts of land" his hut sinks and he comes with you to the second area. He opens up a shop in the second area with the boss you helped him kill's head mounted on his wall. There are a few other characters like Blimp that I remember and feel some mild nostalgia over seeing again. Another one is the skeleton who gives you boat rides in the desert. I remember one of my early playthroughs being ruined because I named myself a cuss word and the skeleton charged me more amulets of annihilation to cross the desert. Needless to say, I never made that mistake again. This game doesn't have as many memorable moments and side characters as other games from its generation and a lot of the ones that do exist are front-loaded. So after the first two eras, there isn't that much the game has to offer in terms of story memorability.
I'll end this character section on a semi-high note. While I don't think the boy was executed that well in terms of overall relatability, I do like the idea of a stripped down RPG adventure where you have one talking protagonist and a dog as a team. I also just really like the dog as a companion and as you progress through the game, he goes through changes. He looks like a wild beast in the dino era. He is sleek and white in the ancient era and he looks like the Egyptian statues of dogs. He is a pink poodle in the medieval area and in my most recent play-through I named him Haru, although the dog was more beautiful than its namesake. The final area turns him into a robotic dog with a toaster body. The dog can sniff out hidden items and his attacks stay consistently strong, especially if you level up his two weapon levels early. His AI also doesn't seem to fuck up as much I would have thought before replaying it and if you're doing the right things in the game, the dog can usually stay alive without much input or help from yourself. The game fucked up in a lot of ways, but a lot of attention to detail and creativity was foisted upon this dog character and he actually plays an interesting part in the story of some of the areas. This is one of the best dog companions in any RPG and as dumb as that statement no doubt sounds, there is actually a lot of stiff competition in the genre. I always liked his beast look in the starting area, because my family had a ghetto security system in the form of Rottweilers and his beast form always reminded me of the dogs I grew up with. Now the game reminds me of my dear old dead dogs of yore. These things I don't want to know.

A lot of the historical areas have a paper thin depth and to the extent, they offer you anything in terms of their historicity it's only in blunt aesthetics and nothing else. I can imagine a much more interesting story especially now in modern times where an RPG is made like this and manages to go more in-depth and manages to use historical backdrops and ideas better. Imagine a game about a character who goes into games that are about a historical time period and he lives out what the... Actually isn't that the plot to those shitty Assassin's Creed games? Look put aside those terrible examples and let's just try to imagine a good game about a person traversing a virtual history actually Chrono Trigger [クロノ・トリガー] is already basically that. You know what... Next section.
To be fair to the game a bit I think the second era comes the closest to capturing the historical feel of what it is supposed to be. The two dungeons are themed around Egypt and Greece and they manage to incorporate the era in some interesting ways. The Greek temple contains a Labyrinth type area and the Egyptian one is a pyramid. They both have a lot of monsters and enemies that pertain to these cultures. This era also has the barter market place and even though we now know this to not be very historically accurate, I can forgive these game creators a little bit in that a lot of the academic community doesn't want to give up on the fairy tale of barter either and it does make for a memorable area of the game and the marketplace itself is awesome in concept and not something I would expect to see in a game this early.
I think this game is pretty short and could have used more "eras." I mean just imagine the boy in an opium den surrounded by some Chinese men, but seriously I think it could have used at the very least two more eras to get across themes of the story and really showcase the history going on here. They also might have fit that Bach tune into a more appropriate era had they done this. I feel like this game had a lot of ideas and themes smashed into a few eras where they barely or only loosely fit and more of these or more gradual transitions between the existing eras that showcase the changing times in a way that also varies the gameplay and graphics more would have made the game an undoubtedly memorable experience and more accurate. The biggest example of this is the second era. As much as we like to think of Ancient times as one period, for instance, the reality is the Greeks hit their individual peek centuries before the Romans mattered and Egypt about a thousand years before that. It makes a little bit of sense to lump them together in our minds as geographically, culturally and militarily they were similar. I mean they definitely didn't see themselves as similar, but in hindsight, we can note some similarities between them as outsiders looking in. They were all relatively close to each other and all these cultures did "interact" with each other as in Rome ended up conquering both, but neither of the other two was at their period of ascendancy as they were being conquered in fact by the time Rome Conquered Egypt it had already been conquered by the Ptolemies who were a line of generals descending from the initial Ptolemy who worked with Alexander The Great and Alexander and the Hellenistic age was the last major spark of relevance from the Greeks. There were hundred-year spans of time between all of these but lets all lump it together, cause kids dumb and ain't know about this. Well, we might actually know about it if the game cared to take some of its otherwise excessive realism and put it to good use and space out the eras of Nobilia in such a way that they give us a good understanding of the development and differences between these cultures and historical periods. I'm not saying this would singularly make the game a masterpiece but polish like this elevates a game more than people think and would make it harder to dismiss the game had they taken these steps. It also would give me a better hindsight appreciation of the title, the way I do for some games that I replay and realize had concepts and factual accuracy that make them more remarkable than I had previously thought.

This game is part of an unofficial genre I call "boy adventurer's," it includes the Mother series, some Zelda games, StarTropics, A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia, Pokémon [ポケットモンスター], Chip's Challenge, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones [魔神英雄伝ワタル], and many others from my childhood. I always drifted towards games in this highly nebulous categorization because I was a boy, adventuring in these games and what do you know I found this to be quite a relatable circumstance. These boy adventurers were role models to me and I grew up with big dreams of going on quests and entering dungeons in real life. Aside from the fact that the games made me delusional about how fun life would be, they also played a role in developing me as a person and a major part of that development was the relatability of these protagonists and my own life. Now you might take that relatability as an easy thing to understand, maybe even to the extent that you're wondering why I would write something so obvious and I'll get to why I'm mentioning all this in a second, but let me talk about a seemingly completely unrelated subject first.
As a white guy who liked rap growing up, I would always ask other people around me, a lot of which were incidentally white, what they thought of the genre and a common phrase said ad nauseam and one I still occasionally hear today was "I don't like rap at all... Except for Eminem." If you go back even further in time you had to hear the phrase "You take the 'c' out of crap and you got rap." Hardy har har, funniest joke I ever heard. Now it's hard to imagine a time when rap isn't as ubiquitously liked as it is now and everyone pretends they were always on the hype train with the genre, but I have to ask what was fundamentally different about Eminem as opposed to other rappers in common perception? I think it was his bleached blond hair, no actually it was the way he danced... Or it could be that he was the one white rapper that white audiences not accustomed to the genre most associated with another race could relate to. "Some people only see that I'm white ignoring skill cause I stand out like a green hat with an orange bill." Now, this is true for Eminem, but it's also been true for a lot of people in genres that previously came from another culture or a subculture within our collective one. A person with seemingly more relatability to "mainstream" audiences is marketed as such to them. A lot of people didn't like Jazz in this country until it first went from the black community to Jewish people and through them to even whiter pastures. A lot of white audiences couldn't get down with black Rythm and Blues, but they could get down with it when it was repackaged and sold with white artists, with a little bit of country in it and called Rock & Roll. I would say this was also true of the absence of these attempts at repackaging, I think "Funk" for instance a genre I think is actually historically underrated in terms of its influence on the culture and as a confluence of talent in regards to future genres as in the previously mentioned rap, never quite got as big as other genres and one of the reasons I think this was the case, was the genre never had an "Eminem" to make it palatable to white audiences to more easily relate to it. It had some one hit wonders like Wild Cherry but they lacked the staying power and frankly the talent beyond that one song to become a cultural force big enough to encapsulate what was great about the genre and really market it to a wider white audience. It's almost like relatability matters to people when you can see extremely obvious examples of it in your own life and it's history in relation to basically all of American music in the past hundred years. Now why am I bringing up another obvious example of relatability? I'm getting to that right now but before that actually, I have one more series of seeming tangents to talk about.
In the early 2000's I went through a streak of really liking Stevie Wonder's early stuff and I wanted to know more about him as a person outside of his music. One of the first things I read about him was an article about his involvement in making MLK's birthday a national holiday. As one of the most famous POC figures to support the idea people asked him why this being a holiday was so important. He made one really basic and clear argument about why he decided to do this. He said that he, of course, recognized the importance of MLK himself as a person and contributions to society and the advancement of racial equality, economic equality, and freedom, but his bigger reason for supporting this holiday was that through the lens of one person MLK a small part of POC's overall contribution to society would finally be recognized and celebrated. Through MLK's birthday, they can finally have it acknowledged even in the slightest sense that black lives mattered in the history and founding of this country in a positive way and on their terms.
So there is this concept in modern day media called "representation." Representation is basically the idea that smaller marginalized groups should be marketed to in the same way as the reverse of the previous examples I gave but for the same reason. These other groups want characters in a story that they can relate to in the same way that "mainstream" audiences wanted to relate to a certain type of person in the past when they were trying to understand something from another culture. A big part of what's missing about the concept when people talk about it is how there is an intangible sense of relatability with the ways in which we can more easily relate to someone who has seemingly shared our own experiences given admittedly superficial differences, than those who haven't. In having these characters at the forefront it is also an acknowledgment that these people and their contribution to our overall society is one that is validated and acknowledged like the rest of us. Boy adventurers were an important part of my life and through the lens of their reliability to me, I can easily see why people in other groups want the same type of representation in media. Girl's deserve girl and women adventurer's they can relate to and who give them the same aspirational adventuring stories I had as a kid. It isn't enough to just have waifu bait, as much as I may like to joke about it, they should have serious protagonists who get to do the things boy's did in these great games. That is not to say none exist or have existed, but I think the lacking of this in comparison to the opposite is obvious. Other groups should have the same for obvious reasons.
I think part of what is hard to understand about this to the extent that I'm willing to read good intentions into people who claim representation doesn't matter, is we're almost trained to pretend we don't care about such things and that were unaffected by the influence of media and only our individual choices matter. Part of this is an over-fetishization of the individual and their intentions to an insane degree. Those aforementioned boy adventurers being a part of that. Well we're affected by media and I mean that really is part of its appeal when you think about it for longer than a millisecond, if media didn't matter to us at all and we didn't relate to what is happening on the screen, then literally nothing about this would matter, but it obviously does. I mean you're reading this on a whole site dedicated to rating this medias worth to yourself in relation to what other people rated it. Even if you're one of those people we all just "love" who come here to tell us rating isn't important and you want to assert your own individuality by not rating things on a rating site, you're still coming to get validated in the negatives against a perceived grain of conformity. The reality is context and what you're trying to accomplish within it matters. It's obvious that people gravitate towards media they relate to in some way, that is not to say people can't break those barriers and like things that weren't explicitly made to relate to them, but I think other groups of people want the baby steps white males have been given within these things to help them along the way towards appreciating and being appreciated in kind.

All that being said. Was trying to directly market to Americans with a tailor-made JRPG even a good idea in the first place and did they do a good attempt at this? Americans have a lot of American pride about stupid shit, but aside from a few nods to the idea that we should "buy American" every half a decade or so, there really isn't that much brand loyalty to American products in particular or at least not as much as I'm assuming an outsider would think given the general way over patriotic nature of our culture otherwise. There are some cases where this is true admittedly at least historically. For instance, people would only buy American cars for a long time, especially if you were from the WW2 generation that didn't want to support the two biggest countries we fought who were the most successful car manufacturers internationally but this attitude wasn't even so much about the cars being American as it was about them not being from certain other countries. Aside from a few isolated examples like this, I can't think of many cases where Americans buying American things is seen as an important patriotic gesture. Even during the times when we have buy America streaks, it usually isn't backed up by any kind of big economic change in policy or in peoples actions on the street.
Ironically Japan and Japanese people from what I know put a lot more stock into the idea that A Japanese product made by the Japanese is superior to foreign products of otherwise the same build and quality and/or that they should support a Japanese product because it is Japanese. They aren't the only culture that does this, I mean when talking to Europeans no matter what country they come from they seem to have erected a dichotomy in their mind that the culture and products their country makes are more "authentic" in comparison to America's perceived in-authenticity and mass produced soulless products... That they all end up buying anyway. Gotta love that nationalistic consumerism. I mean at least in the Japanese case they stick to their guns and they only buy their own shit unless it's being sold by a Japanese shell company that puts a local national veneer on a foreigners product or you happen to be Apple which is the one American company that managed to have major traction in the Japanese market. Alleged and potential Xenophobia aside for a second. All this takes a level of consumer awareness and knowledge that most Americans just won't even invest that much time into a product, not even when it comes to things that might improve their lives like in terms of their own health and well being. I don't exclude myself from that either, Aside from the fact that I won't eat certain things, I'm basically too lazy to research health and nutrition to any great length, but at least part of that has to do with the fact that I feel like I have lived long enough anyway the only things keeping me alive is that it makes other people unhappy that I live and that I need to finish this review. I guess I'll be a shitstain on the internet's pants a little while longer. So with that in mind. I'm not sure how many people even knew that Evermore was a Western made game and its marketing didn't really reflect any more relatable aspects to it, in fact, I remember seeing the commercial and hating it because the dude looked like a dime-store ripoff Might-Max. People often cite bad marketing as a reason the game wasn't more appreciated at the time and I can agree, in a similar vein to that of EarthBound [Mother 2 ギーグの逆襲] it's marketing did itself no favors, but something else about the game in its attempts to be more relatable actually made it more obtuse and unrelatable to me.
This game is filled with mild references to made up sci-fi and horror films, but none of the ones a person say like I or I would go as far to say someone even ten years older would get. In fact, I wasn't sure whether they were made up titles for the game's character to reference when I was a kid and even as someone who likes horror movies a lot, I still don't understand 90% of what this fucker is attempting to refer to. If only there had been a space adventure movie and a movie about a tomb raiding adventurer that both came out at around the time this and the generation just previous to it could relate to the boy referencing... Maybe the creators could have tapped into the collective consciousness of humanity, a background life "force" if you will to discern some films whose references kids could easily get. There are so many sci-fi, action, horror movies and western comics this game could have referenced from around the time period it was created, that we could have more easily understood and instead it opted to comically try to reference horror from the fifties and even with those, not like the big titles like Body Snatchers, The Blob, Godzilla and The day the Earth Stood Still, but more generic and obscure ones. Some things they could have referenced instead: RoboCop, Ghostbusters, Predator, Alien, The Terminator, Commando, Die Hard, Beetlejuice, Ninja Turtles, Gi Joe, Transformers, Marvel and DC comics, Star Wars and Indiana Jones, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Gremlins ETC. I think especially given the first era something they really should have referenced that was huge at the time was Jurassic Park. I mean it seems almost like you had to try not to do this at the time more so than you have to try doing it and yet, they managed to not find even the most obvious culturally relevant references ever. They do make one reference to an actual movie I recognize, in the opening sequence when they show Podunk the theater is called the "Bijou" theater which is most likely a reference to Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life. Why would anyone wanna be stuck in a crummy old town like Bedford Falls? *Kicks Tire.* I heard through another reviewer that the other stores in this sequence are named after the people who made the game like Al's Barbershop is named after Alan Weiss. Another thing they could have referenced and this might have added to the games "meta" qualities is other games and RPG's in particular.
I read that they didn't want to actually reference things people might know in a familiar way because mentioning them goes against copyright? I've never heard that mentioning something goes against copyright laws and it seems counter to a lot of other fiction I have seen that constantly references other fictional properties. At the very least if they were scared they might just reference games made by Squaresoft. an omission of which I also noted in my Final Fantasy Mystic Quest review, which was made with a similar purpose. In the arena boss fight in the second area, I should mention that in the crowd you can see some of the characters from Final Fantasy VI [ファイナルファンタジーVI] and I heard in one review that they weren't even technically allowed to make this reference which is why it occurs in an area that you might miss if you don't stop to look at the crowd. In the medieval era, a hidden vendor is run by Cecil from Final Fantasy IV [ファイナルファンタジーIV] and he actually references other events from that game and rewards you for recognizing him. One of the charms I talked about much earlier is called a "Chocobo Egg." These three things are the only references to other games we see or hear about. I'll assume that since this was made with just Western audiences in mind they might think that references to Japanese games might be defeating the purpose. This is an ironic aspect of the game in hindsight that it was made to be more relatable to western audiences. I think given how interested Americans and Europeans are with Japan and it's culture this game might be more relatable today had it been just another sequel to Secret of Mana. If you want Asahi, Budweiser with some rice dumped inside of it ain't going to cut it. I think this is actually a sign of the positive we're more interested in engaging with and learning about cultures on their own terms without a filter necessary. In an ideal world, we would all be able to do this, but we don't live in an ideal world filled with cultures and peoples at an equal standing that will be as appreciated as everyone else without some added help required. In this case, though I think people would appreciate something uniquely Japanese over something that is a hybrid. I think the game failed to be relatable in other terms, at least not in the way they thought it would be. As a simple western tale with Japanese gameplay. The odd Amerojapanese world with references I'll never understand don't seem to correlate to a direct reality I can fathom in mind. Even though I think this game failed in its main purpose, I'm still glad it exists for a lot of reasons. One as an odd attempt at relatability, as a game with interesting aspects to it given the weird circumstances from which it was made. The biggest legitimate criticism I can imagine someone giving this review and the game is that they're muddled. They strove for higher concepts and ambitions but may have fallen short of their internal goals. I can accept that someone might like Secret of Mana more still because it feels like a more polished and cohesive experience and it's also a longer game which gives you more stuff to play through. That they might like Chrono Trigger's take on time travel and traveling through eras more than this game. In fact, I would agree with both but something about this game has kept me coming back to it, there is a great concept within it somewhere and some really unique aspects to its design that no other Squaresoft title did or has ever had since. It might have a wee bit to do with that relatability. Salute that boy adventurer and other young pioneers as they're passing you. They're saving the world one epoch at a time.
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Aurochz 2016-10-13T15:10:10Z
2016-10-13T15:10:10Z
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Boy Adventurer Nostalgia Great Tunes AmeroJapan
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Blah_Blee Secret of Evermore 2024-02-28T00:04:40Z
2024-02-28T00:04:40Z
6 /10
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
netbol Secret of Evermore 2024-01-11T07:35:30Z
2024-01-11T07:35:30Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
LocoJake Secret of Evermore 2024-01-03T17:56:44Z
2024-01-03T17:56:44Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
xNobility Secret of Evermore 2023-12-10T00:28:41Z
SNES • XNA
2023-12-10T00:28:41Z
3.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
VicHugoSA Secret of Evermore 2023-10-23T20:23:56Z
2023-10-23T20:23:56Z
1
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Calyk Secret of Evermore 2023-10-15T05:09:43Z
2023-10-15T05:09:43Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
HipHopJugend Secret of Evermore 2023-10-04T16:36:32Z
2023-10-04T16:36:32Z
5.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Kowareta99 Secret of Evermore 2023-09-24T07:37:26Z
SNES • XNA
2023-09-24T07:37:26Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
FilletHam Secret of Evermore 2023-09-16T00:20:03Z
2023-09-16T00:20:03Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
soyoyo Secret of Evermore 2023-08-25T23:29:05Z
2023-08-25T23:29:05Z
3.0
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
facunded Secret of Evermore 2023-08-21T13:45:07Z
2023-08-21T13:45:07Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
rapsodyofzephyr Secret of Evermore 2023-08-18T20:21:07Z
SNES • XNA
2023-08-18T20:21:07Z
3.5
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
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ESRB: K-A
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  • Linkaby 2022-01-19 14:07:07.16255+00
    Gente... que review absurdamente grande é essa do Aurochz??
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    • Giann96 2024-02-28 04:41:06.707555+00
      😂
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  • 1nM4t1r14l 2022-08-13 17:40:42.927827+00
    this game is so fun if you ignore all the bugs and some of the mechanics, hope it gets a remaster
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