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What kind of crazy name is that for a game and what the heck kinda game is this anyway? Well, if you're a pretty avid SNES/SFC gamer, you may have heard of a "cult classic" known as "E.V.O.: The Search for Eden". Well, that game was called "46 Okunen Monogatari: Harukanaru Eden e" (or 4.6 Billion Year Story: To Distant Eden) in Japan. What's all this mean? This is E.V.O.:SfE's big daddy; it's the original "E.V.O."

46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinka Ron (or "4.6 Billion Year Story: The Theory of Evolution") was made by Almanic in 1990 and published and assisted by Enix staff. Koichi Sugiyama (or Sugiyama Koichi if you prefer), most notable for his compositions within the Dragon Quest series, composed the music for this game and the game looks drastically different on the surface from the SNES/SFC game, but you'd be suprised that most, if not all of the core elements are here and, rather, they were adapted and preserved in the SNES game. From here on out, I'll refer to the game as EVO-98 as it's easier to remember.

In EVO-98, you still deal with the process of starting as a weak lifeform (you start as a simple creature of the sea, work your way up to a land creature with legs, larger creatures like Dinosaurs, etc.) and you grow by travelling, meeting people, fighting, evolving and meeting Gaia, but this game is much more evolved and in a sense, superior to the SNES game. The game has way more characters to interact with, much more dialogue, and a much larger world. The game is also top-down and has a few more RPG elements tacked on, but this also means a few more (minor) puzzles, so it's less "English-Friendly".

As you watch the roughly 20 mins. of footage we have for the game, one of the biggest things players of the SNES game will notice right off the bat is that EVO-98's battles are turn-based like a traditional RPG, and this may seem to get old fast. Well, it kinda does, but the game was smartly programmed. Fighting is just a means to gain "Evolution Points" and while major (as you must evolve to move on in the game), it is offset by many factors which makes this game's pacing more acceptable than the SNES game IMO. In conjucntion to earning points by fighting, you can find them lying around in dungeons (like the SNES game) and by getting struck by environmental hazards, which build your EVO points should you survive them (they aren't particularly dangerous).

Fights are also managed within seconds due to the game's superior evolution system. You can allocate your points whenever you want to different stats which boost health, attack, defense, and intellect (great for using special skills like resting). You are CONSTANTLY getting stronger and there's less grinding in the game. You'll eventually get more points than you know what to do with as long as you don't run from too many fights, though there's a limit to how much you can raise your stats per "Chapter" as well as how many points you can stockpile at once (For example, the first chapter's limit is 250, the second chapter's limit is 500, etc.).

Other aspects of the game that also existed in the SNES game include becoming weaker at the start of a new chapter (though you aren't as badly off in this game), the ability to save (you can save almost anywhere, though there is no "Book of Life"), and of course, evolving as mentioned before. Evolving in this game is done by leveling up a specific area of your creature, which will move them along on the evolutionary chart (which is in the upper-right side of the screen). You can review the evolutions you've made in a chapter and there are quite a few that you can become, though they don't differ too much statistically, so it's mostly a matter of preference. Unlike the SNES EVO which had mutations, EVO-98 doesn't seem to feature such a thing, although you can have freak accidents depending on how you try to evolve your creature, resulting in a Game Over (Humans observe what remains of your creature through a magnifying glass).

Now with all that out of the way, the game sounds good (but too much like Dragon Quest and not enough... well, appropriate) and looks decent, but it's an old PC game, so you shouldn't expect anything out of the ordinary, especially in the visual department. The game can take a bit of time to complete as the game is on multiple disks and there is a bit of going back and forth to be done in the game. This is a video of the largely uneventful introduction which basically explains how the game begins and how you start underwater.