This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Sometimes when I look back and examine small parts of my personality, I realize that I am an incredibly weird human being. Like let’s take for instance why I played through the single weirdest game in my collection. I spun this game as one of three to choose between, but despite having it on a shelf from when I bought a bunch of cheap dreamcast games I knew relatively nothing about it. So, I pulled up a quick video on Youtube just so I could see what the gameplay was going to be like. It was a video review of this guy absolutely shitting on the game because he didn’t understand it and was bad at it. I ended up watching almost the whole video, skipping here and there, but the damage was done. This person was so upset about this game, in fact they were refusing to even call it a “game” because there was nothing “fun” about it, that I knew I had to play it. I had no previous attachment to the game, was previously confident that I was going to play one of my other spins, but because this random person whom I had never heard from previously was so against this game, I had to play it. Part of why I had to play this was because the premise sounded interesting, part was to truly see if this was blight club worthy, and a final part was to hypothetically show that I was better at this game compared to this random person.

I need to stress first, that upon playing it or beating it that I didn’t comment on this person’s video or on any social media. This person doesn’t care or even remember the game (it was years ago), and as someone who used to have a Youtube channel where I played and ranked video games, I know the type of ass hat that gets all bent out of shape because you (the reviewer) did not agree with them on a particular game. There is a lot of bad juju on the internet, in general, and I don’t ever feel the need to add any muck to it no matter how small the argument is. So, to that Youtuber who probably doesn’t make any videos anymore, thanks for doing your part in exposing me to the weirdest game I have ever played.

Seventh Cross Evolution is an incredibly hard dreamcast game to define. I will do my best, but it might be something you have to see for yourself. You start the game as an amoeba and work through evolution stages until you become the strongest being in this small world. While the amoeba stage is brief (like 5 minutes tops) you eventually evolve into your starting creature. This creature exists only in a small circular moat (can’t go on land) and you try to survive and gather resources for as long as you can. You try to kill smaller prey animals and absorb their bodies upon death, while keeping an eye out for enemies (in the first world, crabs) that are looking to kill you. For every kill that you manage, you get evolution points which can then be used to… drumroll please…. evolve your creature, but we will get to that in its own section. Eventually you will keep evolving until you can comfortably go into different biomes, fight off “bosses,” and reign supreme. There isn’t really a lot of plot in the game, upon starting the game you are dumped into being an amoeba and you don’t get a lore dump until you basically beat the game.

Now perhaps this game doesn’t sound that weird to you. However in order to truly to portray the magic I have to explain the main crux of this game, the evolutions. When you have enough evolution points, you bring your dumb creature over to a monolith where you can now take part in the magic. This is going to be a long winded explanation, so obviously save your questions until the end. At the start of the game you will have assigned colors to attributes. Basically you are asked which color represents Defense, and which color represents attack power, etc. Well that didn’t matter much at the time, but it matters for evolution time. So, think of this game like an RPG. Your character does have stats, and the evolution process is both the leveling up in an RPG and the equivalent of getting better equipment in a shop. You are shown a big 10x10 grid that you get to populate however you want using those colors that you determined at the start of the game. You can fill out every square with alternating colors, you can make a smiley face, you can fill the whole thing with one color, or put a single drop of color on an otherwise empty grid, literally whatever you want. When you are done with your masterpiece and approve it to move on, it will generate a single body part (Head, Body, Legs, or Arms) at a level from 2-30 (you already have every limb at level 1). You will also gain attributes based on how you filled out the grid. If you built your limb out of just the color for defense, your defense stat will go up by the following formula (attribute increase = Level of limb generated divided by 2). However the more colors you added to your evolution grid, those stats will be ordered by what color was used the most (gets the biggest bump, etc.). Depending on what you are building towards, it might be best to focus on just making limbs with attack power, or defense, so those stats increase instead of trying to balance it out.

Quick aside, the limb you created is an equip-able body part that if you have enough resources, can be put on your body, right now, to make you stronger. Those resources are gained by absorbing the bodies of your prey, but not every fallen prey generates all the resources so you might in fact make limbs that you are not going to be able to equip until you get farther in the game. These same resources are ones that you automatically use to refill your health after battle as well as your magic (yes there is magic, I HAVEN’T GOTTEN TO THAT YET). You can’t turn off the auto healing or magic refilling, you can cast a spell to refill some of your health via magic, instead of using those resources, but you are just moving pieces around. So you will constantly be in a cycle of fighting to kill enemies to gather resources so that you can convert them to either re-fill your health and magic (automatically), or to be spent on equipping a limb that you generated at the evolution change. Those limbs that you DO generate belong to different animals, presumably on this planet, that then give your stats an additional boost while equipped. Change your legs to that of a shark (yes sharks don’t have legs, really it just means lower body), and the terrain you can go on changes. Changing your arms can allow you to potentially attack from a distance (ranged attack) or even just do more damage with your melee attack, and so on. There are even hidden buffs if you decide to collect and equip a full set of limbs from the same animal.

Here is where things are truly bonkers, this game has been out forever and no one has cracked the evolution grid, because supposedly you train it by what you make. I don’t know if I adhere to that belief, but when you are starting off you never know what you are going to get. I probably spent more time then most in that opening area, because I could not generate a pair of legs that allowed me to travel on land (that I could equip) for the longest time. The instruction book and materials online are not very helpful either, purposefully vague, and you won’t find any help trying to build a specific limb, because they can only go based on what they “taught” the model and not what you have been doing. Some people say it is a mix of certain colors that generates a certain limb, others say it is the quadrant that you put the pieces in, but no one is sure. The good news is that, unless you are going for a weird 100% run, you won’t need all 30 limbs for each section, and you will be jumping from level 1 to level 5 or 10 as long as you have the right resources and don’t need to equip each limb in succession. Needless to say you will have a the weirdest amalgamation of a creature imaginable at some point. I was rocking a human head (level 30), metal body (level 28ish), Devil arms (level 25ish), and some weird hovering limbs that allowed me to move quick because I didn’t actually have legs when I fought the final boss. As you progress through different biomes, you will presumably change your body quite a bit to fit the situation, but also because you never know when you might unlock a better limb for the situation you are in.

Ok, so outside of the evolution aspect what is the actual game.. Well most of the game is traversing through a 3d biome that comprises of 3 to 4 screens (doors or caves will separate the screens) while fighting enemies that come looking for you. There are no towns, no friendlies, no creatures that don’t want a piece of you (no matter how strong you get), so while you are navigating the screens you are almost always in a constant fight, which we will touch on in another second. While you are navigating looking for doors or caves to move between screens, you are walking around a fairly barren 3d environment. Doesn’t matter what biome you are in, we are talking about a few hills, trees, and rocks of different sizes composing of the area. Your character can’t jump, can’t switch from walking or running, climb, nothing that you might be accustomed to doing from the dawn of 3d gaming, you just move at the speed that is determined by your attached legs. Outside of finding the boss screen of each area (mainly designated by its music change) you will just be meandering around an area to either grind out killing enemies to go through the evolution process and upgrade stats or find new body parts, grind for resources to equip new body parts or attempt to take on the boss. There are some optional bosses you can stumble upon, and some enviro pickups (mushrooms, plants, etc) that might give you a small resource boost without fighting, but there isn’t a lot to discover. You are never going to stumble upon a treasure chest or whatever the equivalent would be here. The areas can be rather maze like when you are starting off, but since you are going to be in an area for awhile (grinding) then you will quickly get the lay of the land and know where each entrance and exit to the area is. Really the only thing to look for are monoliths where you can save your game and (once you beat the first boss) can teleport between in case you want to grind at an older area.

For as much as you will be in combat, it is a rather simplistic system. You don’t go into a combat screen as all battles take place while you are exploring and free moving around. The combat is semi turn based, and while you aren’t filling up a bar or taking turns 1 to 1 on attacks, you can’t hammer on the attack button and have the character attack for every time you pressed the button. I am sure that the speed at which you attack, is perhaps determined by your AGI stat, but I didn’t notice much change as that got increased and I mainly focused on other stats once I truly grasped how to level up. When you do see another creature there will be a targeting box that changes color based on how far the enemy is from you, and that determines how you can attack it. Depending on what type of limbs you have equipped (ranged arms, Close combat arms, or both), if the color is Orange, you can hit your ranged attack button and it will do what it is going to do, if the box is red you can do melee, and if it is green it means you would only be able to reach with magic. So let’s talk about magic.. You have multiple stats that pertain to this, but the one I want to focus on is INT, which determines how many spells you actually have access to. Does not matter if you have a fish head or a person head you can do magic, but the difference in INT means you might only be able to cast fire 1 versus megaflare. Those aren’t exactly the same spell names the game uses, but its pretty close and they might as well be final fantasy spells. Those spells can be anything from healing yourself, cleansing yourself of poison, or doing damage based on one of the 4 elements (air, earth, fire, water). So much of combat though is a guessing game, because you will never see damage #s come up when attacking, either through spell or regular attacks, and you won’t know how many hit points anyone has that is not your main character. I would sometimes kill one bird in a single melee attack, and then kill that same bird (not literally, but same type in the same area) after three melee attacks. Did that first bird I killed have less HP, meaning that the enemies have variable amounts? Did I land a critical hit and not know it? I can’t tell you. I also can’t tell you if enemies have natural weaknesses to one of the 4 elements.. You fight a dinosaur that can breathe fire on you at one point. My gut tells me to use water to take care of him, as water is usually highly effective against fire enemies in all other RPGs, but without damage numbers I have no idea if I am right. You will eventually come to this realization too, and worried that you are healing or not hurting an enemy means you will revert to a lot of combat just by mashing the attack button to kill anything that is not a boss. All that is to say that combat can get very samesy and very quickly.. Some of the spell attacks seem cool or have fun animations, but I never wanted to burn through those on just level grinding, because since refilling my magic came at the expense of resources, I wanted to only use it for healing with the worry of death hanging above me. What this game does do well, is seeing in relative real time, the effects of those stats. Fighting an enemy with defense at 100 and then fighting that same enemy at defense 150 is a big difference. Attacks that might have caused you to panic and heal after every two hits, suddenly barely moves the needle on your HP. There was even one boss where my defense was so high that their physical attack did not damage me at all. I was able to get in close and just tank it to death because the AI is not very smart.

So you go through 6ish different biomes, everytime you defeat a boss transferring to a new area and having to level up so you can feel strong enough to take on the next boss. If you die, you are transported back to the beginning of the game and all of your equipped limbs are lost. This is where my friend the Youtuber lost it. Now when you revive you will still have whatever stat gains you had previously, you will still have unlocked all those limbs that can then be equipped again, but you will have to harvest all the resources to do so, and depending on how far you were.. that might not be worth it. Like in any video game ever around this time… I would suggest saving fairly regularly, and especially before you make a boss attempt. The reason for that is simple, if I died I would just reload my save so that I wouldn’t have to re-gather resources to equip my character again. Sure I might have lost out on 10-20 minutes of progress hiking to the boss and attempting to fight him, but regaining that 20 minutes will be a lot easier than whatever time it would take me to get back to the same area with the same limbs as starting from scratch. The way I see it, in the context of the game, this is Darwinism. It is survival of the fittest and if you are not the fittest and get killed or eaten, you get to hopefully go through the evolutionary steps again for a second attempt, you don’t get to just start over already as a shiny golden god. Perhaps that is too cruel, but it literally never bothered me because I had a save I could load if I died, and I will specify that I really only died while attempting boss fights and not just walking around an area.

I will touch super brief on the actual plot of the game, which gets dumped after you fight the final boss. If you don’t want to be spoiled, you can skip this paragraph, but trust me its really not that amazing. You are on Earth and it was uninhabitable after world war 3 and after a virus deployed. Hundreds and thousands of years later, scientists wanted to see, since other creatures evolved on earth and survived, if they could harvest those evolutionary genes and put it into humans so that they could return to earth. You end up being that experiment. There is a good ending and a bad ending, that is dependent on whether you have researched all lvl 30 limbs before you fight the final boss. You don’t have to have all the limbs (for instance you can be missing whatever the 28^th head is) only that you have the lvl 30 limbs which are all human parts. If you beat the boss and see the pre-end, then play a little bit longer while dressed as a human, you can essentially “re-start” civilization on Earth. I did get that ending, but I can’t say I played this game for the plot.

For some reason this game had a unique hold on me. I can fully admit this is not a great game. The combat isn’t crazy inventive and can be seen as quite boring, there is no real plot or character to keep you motivated, and the environments aren’t interesting to explore, but all of that aside I found I played through the roughly 10 hour game over the course of 3 days which is a rarity for me. Partially it was because the game is a perfect game to listen to a podcast or music with. A lot of the game is grinding and fighting the same enemies over and over until you turn in your points for new limbs or for stat boosts, so you can really turn your brain off while you play. However, the other part that kept me playing was how truly strange this game was. I loved seeing all of the weird limbs I could connect, the strange creatures I could become with parts mixed from all sorts of real and fake animals. I enjoyed the old school “numbers go up” mentality of getting stronger and stronger, fighting a boss, and then doing it all again. It was the basic joy of making it through a biome and then waiting to see what weird bullshit would be in the next one. I would almost never recommend that someone play this game to completion, but I would encourage everyone to play or watch someone just do the opening area (granted not the person who refused to call it a “game”). Is it the greatest game of all time, oh heavens no, but it is certainly the most weirdly fascinating game I have played. One that I would have never experienced if it wasn’t for Joe Youtube for telling me how bad it was.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No of course not

Where does it rank: I suppose this could be controversial but this game is ranking higher than it should based solely on uniqueness. Is the combat great, no.. are the environments interesting, no.. is the story worth exploring, no... but I can say with some certainty that outside of the SNES game Evo: Search for Eden, I'm not going to play another game like this. I had a surprisingly disproportionate large amount of fun playing a game that I know isn't good because it just caught me at the right time. I have this game ranked as the 102nd greatest game of all time.This is out of 187 total games.

What's it Between: Seventh Cross Evolution currently sits between Blazing Beaks (101st) and Mario Golf (103rd).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Ooh, this thing! Tickled you not only ended up finishing, but in fact enjoyed your time with it. I've only seen snippets of the game— don't think I fully appreciated exactly how off-kilter it was. Good stuff!

Wonder how this'll stack up against L.O.L and Evolva? Of course, we know they all shall eventually fall before true Darwinist darling, Billy Hatcher.

@manburger: now I'll have to add those games to my list.. but yeah this game is bonkers and I will fully admit it's not great or even for everyone, but it was so weird I had to see it through.. I mean the final boss is basically a robot angel that is there to "test" the evolutionary animals.

I've never heard of this game but sounds fascinating. Thanks for bringing to my attention!

Bone Lizard Stab Crawler is my pick for best creature.

@chamurai: I don't know what it runs for now.. but I would probably not suggest getting it.. it's absolutely bonkers but it's certainly not a game I think a lot of people would actually like.