The year 999 is where our protagonist and new companion begin their story together, at the dawn of the 50th anniversary of the victory. You see, in the year 950, Demons and Humans were at war with each other and history took a turn as the humans overcome the creatures and won the war. After a brief rescue, you both investigate a nearby magical stone and find yourself whisked back in time by fifty years! As you explore your surroundings, you come across the girl as she is under attack by some punk-demons. The story of Evoland 2 is much more structured and apparent – you’re an unknown protagonist who is taken in by a young girl and her father when they come across you one day (think The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening). However, what I ended up with was around 15 hours of a much deeper and well thought out RPG game which appears to have its story and mechanics first and the visual gimmicks second! To say I was shocked and highly impressed would be a massive understatement. I’d not played this one before so I was expecting another three to five-hour adventure based on various visual effects hidden in chests. Great dialogue exchanged between me and the NPCs…Īfter playing the first game and completing it in one sitting in around three hours, I wasn’t expecting much from Evoland 2. Also, as the game has been out for many years on PC, there are a number of guides out there should you need a helping hand in finding some of the more obscure and hidden items. There’s a card game, which is a lot like the one in Final Fantasy VIII, with a bunch of cards to find throughout the world, as well as stars to collect, money to save, enemies to slay, and other random tasks which are all non-missable from what I can see. You switch between them because the various visual styles all have different perspectives on the environment – a stone which blocks you in SNES mode may actually only be a small slab which you can easily walk over in 3D mode, for example.įor the trophy hunters out there, Evoland 1 is rather simple. Some of these puzzles are really intuitive as you must swap between PS1-style 3D graphics and flat SNES-like visuals. It’s a nice straight forward quest which doesn’t require much thinking even though you will have a few puzzles to solve along the way. You’re a guy who meets a girl and you end up on a mini-adventure together as you chase after the guy who attacked her village. There is a story buried within this first game but it doesn’t really stick out. However, purchase a DVD drive and the loading times will vanish – pure genius! That’s right, upon unlocking the pre-rendered backdrops, the game adds in loading times between screens, something we all had to put up with back in the day. You’ll find things like 16/256 colours, a 3D map, random encounters, music, a backstory, NPCs, and even pre-rendered backgrounds like we saw in games such as Final Fantasy VII. Each time you find a new chest in the world, you’ll unlock a new mechanic or art style. That’s where this game thrives and stands out from the crowd of ‘retro-like’ games, it doesn’t try to be old-school, it literally IS old-school as it recreates the original styles. It’s like ‘the history of RPG games’ in one package! Upon obtaining a chest, you can now move left, then up and down soon you’ll be moving from screen to screen with per-screen transitions followed by smooth scrolling. You begin the game as a blocky GameBoy sprite who can only move right. I’ve played this game before and replaying it on the PS4 brought back a lot of fond memories. I’m not saying the game is bad, it’s just rather short, clocking in at around three hours, and it seems to shove visual and mechanical gimmicks into the gameplay more than a solid story. The transition from one style to the next is cool.Īs I stated above, the original Evoland feels like a proof of concept which was put together with the game created as an afterthought.
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