I'm not done with Final Fantasy IX just yet, but I thought I should write about Secret of Evermore while it's still fresh in my brain, having replayed it a few weeks ago.
Secret of Evermore was first released in 1995 on the Super NES, the lone product of the no-longer-existing Square USA. The idea was to make an adventure game similar to Secret of Mana, with similar battle and menu systems. Only the game doesn't actually have anything to do with Mana. This game is a tale of a boy and his dog, who are accidentally transported to the fantasy realm of Evermore. Created specifically as a personal playground for its inhabitants, Evermore is falling apart, beset with monsters and evils that its creators didn't intend upon.
When I first played through Evermore years and years ago -- I was still in college at the time -- I recall not enjoying it particularly well. On my second playthrough, I liked it just fine. It's strange how something like this could happen, that your estimation of a video game that was mediocre at the time when it was cutting-edge could improve long after the technology used by the game has been rendered archaic. I'll be upfront and say that this game isn't as good as Mana; not nearly as good. It's a much shorter adventure, which is either good or bad by your personal estimation. I'm not sure how a game's length determines its quality; if the game's bad to begin with, why would you want more of it? If you love the game and it ends quickly, how would extending it make you love it even more, as opposed to simply making it tiresome? But I digress. Evermore has an unusual magic system based on the ancient quackery of alchemy; after learning spells, you have to collect ingredients in certain amounts and use them to cast the spells. This is really more trouble than it's worth, for the sole reason that -- while most ingredients are easy to find -- you'll only need a small handful of the spells you can learn, as many of them have functions almost identical to each other.
The big thing with Evermore -- something that I recall from the first run and that remains true today -- is its atmosphere. Visually, the game isn't much to look at. When you factor in the sound, it creates a level of immersion that's almost unmatched even to this day. But that's not a good thing. The music is very subtle, ambient and downright cold, making Evermore a game that's very un-game-like. The word I keep coming back to is "unfriendly." Evermore is an unfriendly game. It's not hard, it's not overly demanding, it's not even that tedious... but it doesn't make you want to play it. It goes out of its way to submerge you in this fantasy world that is completely uninteresting.
Given the ten-year span between the two times I have played this game, it will be interesting to see what I think of it in 2016.
