I think I probably wrote too much for this entry, but I can’t help it. I really like Secret of Evermore. It’s not a perfect game, or an amazing game, or anything deserving of “all time classic” canonization. But it’s fun to play, it does some interesting things, and its Americans-trying-desperately-to-make-a-Japanese-game serves as an interesting counterpart to the modern trend of Japanese developers trying desperately to make American games. Oh, how history’s shoe has been placed upon the other foot. Hoist in history’s petard. Or something. I don’t know.
I actually remember both SoE and SD3 (as SoM2) listed under Coming Soon titles in Nintendo Power back in ’95, so the former wasn’t exactly a replacement to begin with.
And it also marked the debut of Jeremy Soule! And that’s pretty sweet.
Secret of Evermore not a good game and it only obtains it’s noreriaty to this day thanks to marketing bullshit and the continued warbelings of those who don the tinfoil hat.
If this game was released as “Evermore” it would never be on this blog and it would probably go the way of Aero the Acrobat and Tecmo’s Secret of the Stars, the punctuation of jokes about bad old games.
Get the hence, Evermore, oblivion awaits ye.
You are a very silly person.
They set us up the bombs?!?!?
I still can’t forgive Square for shamelessly porting every single Square SNES game under the sun to PSX/GBA/DS/PSP/Wonderswan/iPod/god-this-list-goes-on-forever and yet they’ve still never bothered to actually bring Seiken 3 over here. *sigh*
As for Evermore, I would like to try it out sometime (I was one of the many who blamed it for stealing Mana 2 from us!). Maybe it will show up on Virtual Console five years from now…. or you know, Square will finally run out of Final Fantasies to shamelessly re-release and get around to this one instead.
There is a patch out there that enables two-player mode.
http://fusoya.eludevisibility.org/soe/index.html
I loved Secret of Evermore’s music. It was so atmospheric.
The lack of a two-player mode was the only thing that really ruined the game for me. I really, really wanted to play the game along with my brother. I assume they made that decision because of the dungeons that required you to split up.
Nah, I doubt it worked in that direction. Dungeon designs are something you come up with after the core play mechanics are established. I’m pretty sure they wanted a game that was a boy and his dog, decided playing as a dog would be crushingly lame for P2, and made it a single-player title first. The dungeon designs came later.
Right. The boy can use different weapons and cast spells. The dog can bite and… sniff.
Tell that to twelve-year-old me who preferred playing as the dog. Who wouldn’t?
I think I’m one of the few people who actually preferred Secret of Evermore to Secret of Mana (and the fan-translated Seiken Densetsu 3).
Aesthetically and thematically it just grabbed me more, and it had a lot of neat gameplay elements.
My favorite assessment of Evermore is this polite but devastating critique left in one of the comments on Tim Rogers’ site of all places.
http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=390#comment-7987
skip to NOW TALKING ABOUT THE GAME
it’s focused mostly on the art, but it’s quite fun to read, even if I also liked reading Jeremy’s assessment.
I was always fond of this game as a child, but it’s one of the few games I’m afraid to play out of some silly notion that it could ruin my memories of it or whatever.
I remember great music, though.
A good article about a good game. I got this game for christmas 1995 as a 15 year old. I remember being dissapointed initially. I knew the game wasn’t going to be like SoM but I wanted it to be. It didn’t take long though for any preconceptions to be forgotten. I came to enjoy the game in it’s own right. I will always associate SoE with that Christmas and the beanbag chair I played it in. I actually replayed the game last summer and it was still fun.
Ouch! The Breath of Fire hate in this article hurts my inner blue haired protagonist.
I have such a love-hate relationship with the Breath of Fire series personally. The first one I barely played, but I rented the second quite a bit. That game was so broken. It had neat ideas like the whole “building a town” aspect, but seriously, if you did not grind for hours with every character it was possible to completely screw yourself over later on. I eventually got to the part where Sten (think that’s his name? The monkey guy) had to fight a boss solo, and he did 1 damage to everything because I didn’t use him in my party very much at all before that. There was a save in the prison-like area right before this battle, so it was impossible to go back outside and level him. It was basically impossible for me to proceed at that point. That’s broken game design right there.
I know the exact point you’re talking about. I was only able to beat that part by cheesing it with save states (I didn’t really play too many RPGs until after I had given away my SNES). I still think of BOF3 very fondly though.