Game:

Evergrace (2000)

Duration: 31:40

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3

After about a week (I'm in the process of moving out so, expect lots of down time for the channel) we're back with the From Software Retrospective. This time I'm covering one of From's lesser known and also slippery releases: Evergrace.

This title, let me be very honest and to the point, I did not like. At all. It's got a Sudeki + Kingdom Hearts feel, with the From Software's traditional "go forward, hit, then go back and dodge" kinda ordeal. The only problem with this is that, it's go a enemy AI similar to Donkey Kong Country where, the enemies barely move between fights. And it doesn't work here because, while Donkey Kong Country's enemy AI is one of the most ingenious enemy AI ever created, based on a simple placement and collision detection to create some of the most ingenious levels you can ever play (boy oh boy, you can really tell I'm playing some Donkey Kong in the foreground to this ain't I? :D), Evergrace being a RPG, and a dungeon crawl experience with lots of enemies to grind, ends up sucking and sucking pretty badly.

So what is wrong here? No enemy reactions for a starter, the difficulty comes only from lack of mobility to hit the enemies (a feature that I wish didn't become a From Software's staple, because it kinda ruins some Dark Souls games here and there), and some really silly backtracking based level design. Which to me doesn't work because it's not like King's Field or Dark Souls where you either level up fast, or you get new gear that makes you really cool or more powerful to tackle difficult bullet sponging bosses.

And then there's the storyline... and I'm really not fond of this game's settings at all. The characters are melodramatic, which is fine, works for lots of Japanese fiction and pop culture, however they're not given anything interesting at the visual end, or even at the gameplay level. The game is weird too, because unlike other From Software titles, it's really a copy of a Square-Enix game from it's period, complete with teenage looking characters in strange but colorful fantasy worlds, and with Disney/Zelda inspired enemies and fantasy characters... and it's in my opinion not very good. I wish it would be better, because I do like the idea of a From Software Zelda... but at the end, it's not for me.

So yes... this is the closest attempt From Software ever got to making it's own Zelda or Kingdom Hearts. Maybe if you love these two games, you're going to love this one. To me it ends up just wreaking off of Alundra 2 or Sudeki on the Xbox console. A shame, really.

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