Review #199: Evolution Worlds

 A generic name for a forgettable game.

 Evolution Worlds is a Gamecube port of Evolution 1 and 2 on the Dreamcast. Two RPGs for the price of one sounds too good to be true, and it is. The game itself is rather dull, but even then, this 'compilation' has suffered from cuts, mostly on the Evolution 1 part of the game, making it the least ideal way to go through these games... or is it?

 The premise of the game, well, the first part, revolves around Mag Launcher, the last heir of the renowned Launcher family, a family of treasure hunters, tasked with taking care of the mysterious mute waif Linear by his father. In this world, there are weapons called 'CyFrames', which most party members use by the by, that come in many forms, Mag himself wears a gigantic robot arm on his shoulder. There's an ancient artifact known as "Evolutia", of  which many adventurers dream of finding, Mag included, but an army(where do they come from exactly?) eventually comes to Mag's town in search of leads. The second game is even worse, featuring a very underdeveloped and shallow villain. Evolution 1 certainly gets the raw deal here, as the 8 dungeons have been reduced to three, which also translates to longer cutscenes in order to convey more information. It doesn't work very well. Both stories are generic, predictable and dumb, trust me, you've seen these plots thousand of times before in animes or other games, but done much better. The dialogue is laughably bad, often times redundant and reiterative, with some fantastic logic thrown in the mix(' I don't want to hurt you!' so she's gonna destroy the world! MAKES SENSE.). The main cast doesn't get it much better, they are as underdeveloped as the supporting cast.

 The game mixes Rogue-Like dungeons with RPG-like battles, but these elements don't mix very well. Rogue-like games feature simple dungeon designs, usually randomized, with nothing else to do but walk around trying to find the stairs to the next floor. This holds true with Evolution, but while combat is very fast paced in rogue-likes, in Evolution touching an enemy means loading the turn-based combat arena, finish the turn-based battle, and then load the dungeon again. It gets boring fast. Dungeons have virtually no puzzles, there's the occasional hidden wall, and the very last dungeon introduces moving platforms and, for the first and last time in the game, poles that a character(That you get only moments before this last dungeon!) can grapple to and from. Oh, and the game doesn't tell you that he can even do it, so you have to figure out by yourself what the hell those poles mean, and that this character needs to be in the lead in order to use them. Fun. Another elements borrowed from Rogue-like games is the very limited inventory capacity, which makes you be more mindful about what to keep and what to throw, and trap tiles that can hurt you or heal you if you step on them. And you'd better have an extra 4 blocks of memory on your memory card, as 'Interim Saves', which means saving and quitting upon going up or down a floor in a dungeon, takes up a whole other file, unless you plan on going through 15 floors in one sitting, which is very boring.

 Combat is a fairly simple affair, firstly, there's 'party formation' on a 3x3 grid, characters on the front lines deal and receive more damage than the ones on the back, as expected. Battles pan out as any other turn based RPG, you have your basic attack, item, skill(Spells) and Defense, with the addition of 'Talents', which work just as spells, but instead of consuming FP, they have a time-based cool down. Defeating enemies rewards you with experience points, sometimes items, and TP. TP is used to learn new skills, what's more, you can learn them mid-battle, in which case you'll be able to use them for no FP cost on that one time! Money is earned by clearing dungeons or selling items.... but party members beside Linear and Gre will take money every time you clear a dungeon, with up to 80% of the prize money being taken away! Basically, money was needed to upgrade CyFrames, so I just wound up using Gre all the time. Hilariously, on both 'last dungeons'(What would be Evolution 1 and 2 last dungeons, respectively), the game takes away Linear, for plot reasons, which means you'll have to use at least one underleveled party member. Neat. It's not that big of a deal anyways, since they level up pretty quickly and the game isn't hard, but it's a hilarious curiosity.

 Graphics are very, very dated. They don't look very well, and the animation is nothing to write home about. That said, I do have a soft spot for this type of early-PS2 era graphics, so I kinda liked them, reminded me of Okage, but without the engrossing art style. Music is fairly decent, but ultimately forgettable. Voice acting.... is bad. At first I didn't much care for it, it didn't seem terrible, and for a cutesy game like this, it was alright.... but then the second game happened, and at the end of the game it tried taking itself too seriously, and repeating lines you've already heard before, but... they were delivered so poorly.

 Now then, I admit to not having played the games on the Dreamcast, but just as Evolution 1 was reduced to three dungeons, there's weapons and items missing from the Evolution 2 side of the game, but I doubt the extra dungeons and cutscenes from Evolution 1, or the extra weapons from 2 would've change my experience with the game. If anything, more dungeons would've made me tire of the game sooner, and dislike it even more. At the end of the day, Evolution Worlds is a very forgettable game, nothing is particularly broken about it, but it doesn't do the things it does very well. It's just another RPG, unremarkable at best and dull at worst.
 3.5 out of 10