Secret of Evermore Review! - The Game Collection!
1,263Welcome back to The Game Collection! It’s been some time since I reviewed Secret of Mana, and its predecessor Final Fantasy Adventure and its remake, Sword of Mana. And I’ve been craving some classic Super Nintendo Action RPG action! And you know what that means! Let’s take a look at an interesting glimpse of what could have been, Squaresoft’s next iteration on the gameplay that defined a console generation. I am SuperDerek, and this is Secret of Evermore! :D
Secret of Evermore is a bit of an odd duck in the discussion of Mana games. It’s clearly not a Mana game, but it comes up from time to time for a couple of reasons. First and most obviously, the game uses Secret of Mana’s engine, full-stop, and from a gameplay perspective is functionally identical to Secret of Mana. But something else you may find interesting is that this game was made… in America! Squaresoft for a few short years had an American development team, who as far as I can tell, only ever made a single title, and you’re lookin’ at it. And while this could segue perfectly into a discussion about how country of origin has no influence on a game’s genre, I’ll instead sidestep that rabbit-hole and focus for a couple moments on what makes this game unique.
Secret of Evermore picks up with our hero leaving a movie theater with his dog. They just finished watching some cheesy B-flick, when the boy’s dog, who I named Turbo, chased after a cat. The hero, a Marty McFly stand-in, chases after Turbo, all the way to a mysterious decrepit mansion on the outskirts of town. After following Turbo into what looks like some kind of sci-fi science lab, a butler redirects Marty to another room where he is assaulted by robots. Luckily there’s a bazooka lying around, with which Marty puts an end to the attack of the killer robots. But then a giant machine zaps our heroes to another world! Luckily before our duo can get lost in space, their shuttle crashes down to the Land of the Lost, inhabited by prehistoric primitives and dangerous dinosaurs! To make matters even more interesting, Turbo somehow turned into a direwolf, which is pretty handy. Now it’s up to Marty and Turbo to explore the land and try to get themselves back to the future! Except pretty early on it’s revealed they’re not actually in the past, but in an alternate reality where the world is shaped by its inhabitants. Only now there’s big trouble in little paradise and… Well you probably get the gist. This whole story is basically a B-movie mashup fever-dream, and you’re just coming along for the ride!
Evermore, despite reusing the majority of the game mechanics from Secret of Mana, manages to feel distinctly like a western style RPG, and I believe this was absolutely played up by the development team. Their choice of settings, the talking hero, the focus on the action star hero archetype, and it works extremely well all-in-all. As a fan of several B-movies myself, I found myself easily putting myself into the shoes of our protagonist. Plus, I guess his stylish ‘do and man’s best friend sidekick don’t hurt either. Secret of Evermore is another game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and that might be a turn-off for people who like their games to be serious business only, but clearly, I’m not one of those people. The whole thing is Saturday Morning Cartoon levels of wacky, and depth too for that matter. There’s no moral of the story they’re trying to tell, there’s no hidden meanings to be discerned. The good guys are good because they’re good, the bad guys are bad for the sake of being bad, there’s no ideas being challenged. This game is meant to be taken at face value, it’s here to deliver one thing: Fun. And on that front, how did it do?
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