A boring and repetitive jaunt through Japanese video games of the past.
Rating: 2/5
Platform: PC (Keyboard)
Time to Completion: 2.5 Hours
Date Completed: June 21st, 2013
Thoughts: The whole schtick of this game is the evolution of the way the game looks and plays as you progress. It starts out looking and playing like Zelda for the NES and ends up at some weird mish mash of Final Fantasy 7/8/9, a simple one button spamy 3D action game, and one cave that was supposed to be Diablo for some random reason.
Maybe those that have a fonder memory of the above mentioned games than myself may get more out of this, but it didn't do much of anything for me outside of the first 20-30 min of the game where in I thought it was a novel idea. Sadly it wore thin very quickly and it just became tedious and boring. There's a reason they don't make JRPGs like they once did and it's because random battles every two feet suck. The only thing that kind of made them interesting in other games was that your characters leveled up, loot would drop, you gained access to new powers and things of the like. In this game however you don't really do any of that. When you kill enough enemies you level up to just get more HP and occasionally your attack/defence are supposed to go up but it made no difference to how the game played. The money from the kills go to buy a one time upgrade to your sword and shield which makes no real difference either.
Sadly the story is a hodgepodge of your typical JRPG tropes of finding crystals, putting items back together, airship captains named sid, and being a destined hero to save the world blah blah blah. Every plot point of this game is ripped straight from a famous JRPG and the whole thing just seems to lack any kind of identity of it's own.
There's a fine line between paying tribute to games you loved growing up, and just straight up copying them. Evoland jumped head first onto the side of straight up copying and it's not ashamed to admit it as it wears all of it's inspirations on its sleeve. Anyone that grew up playing JRPGs and console games in the late 80's early 90's will no doubt see every reference clear as day. Sadly it all just amounts to copy and pasting bits of story/gameplay from each game they referenced into one frankenstein of a creation and it's not interesting.
If you REALLY love all the games this is based on you might get a kick out of it, but unless you are super fan #1 I would pass on this game. Even if you are super fan #1, wait for a sale as you can blow throw this game in one to two sittings as it's about two and a half hours long.
