02/09/00

Fat's reviews: Evolution

Platform: Sega Dreamcast
Publisher: UBI Soft
Genre: RPG
# Of players: 1
Difficulty: Average

I wrote this review before Brad's little "quickies" review. Yep, it's my turn to rip on it, too.

Console Role playing games are by far my favorite type of game to play. If it's a real good RPG, there isn't much that'll take my attention away from it. Games like Final Fantasy 3 (recently re-released in the PSX anthology as FF6), Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star 1, 2, and 4 (3 was gaa-bage), Shining Force 1,2, and 3, Grandia, and Panzer Dragoon Saga (for the Saturn, short but highly recommended if you can find it) are the type of games that keep me up at all hours, just wanting to see what will happen next.

It was with great anticipation then, when I finally recieved the first Dreamcast RPG, Evolution. Just the smell of a new game brings back fond memories of games of yore, and the color instruction booklet (a bit of a rarity in most Sega titles, though more and more of them have been in color recently) only added to the excitement. The potential of greatness on an RPG on the DC is very high, and I've been waiting to see what the Dreamcast can do to make a great RPG even better. Well, in short, I'm still waiting.

This game covers the town and dungeon (mostly dungeon) exploits of Mag Launcher, a fiery, happy go lucky kid that some have called the Anti-Squall (Final Fantasy 8's sullen, brooding, and frankly boring hero). Mag is armed with a "Cyframe gear", which is an ancient weapon that can be upgraded with parts in the dungeons. His particular weapon is a giant hand that can be upgraded to do many things. Mag travels with his mysterious, silent female partner, Linear, and 3 other selectable characters: Gre, Mag's Butler who's good with a rifle but even better with his scolding ability, Chain, a rather masculine little girl that has a flying fin Cyframe, and Pepper, a foxy, though tacky, lady with a cannon cyframe. Together, these intrepid explorers search different ruins to collect treasures and fight monsters to help Mag pay off his family's great debt. His final goal is to find the secret of the lengendary Evolutia, the ultimate Cyframe. The 8th imperial soldiers are searching for this cyframe as well...

Typically, this is how a play session of Evolution goes: Get a mission to search the ruins, pick your partner, buy the items you can afford (you don't get money by killing monsters, only by selling treasures and items), take your plane to the ruins. Search the ruins, fight rats and roaches, run into traps, get too much stuff in your inventory, find a warp point back to town, sell off some stuff, go back, search more ruins (the levels are re-created every time you go in, so your past maps are useless), hit more traps, fight more rats and roaches, get too much stuff again, find another warp, etc. This can go on about 5 or 6 times until you reach the end of the ruins, and you fight the boss there. Beat it, and you get the Ruins treasure. This will help pay off your family debt. You'll get a little bit of story progression, then it's on to another set of ruins, and the loop begins all over again. The game isn't very hard, unless you skip fighting a lot of monsters, then you won't be prepared for the upper level creatures or the boss, so you have to fight as much as you can, but...man, that gets BORING.

Graphically, the game is solid, but pretty plain. That's the nature of random dungeon games, I guess. Stationary places like the town and Mag's house are nicely done, with lots of detail. I wish there was more of that in this game. The characters are rendered in a nice, hi-res anime style, with good animation. The special attacks are usually screen filling and impressive, though some of them have quite a bit of slowdown. As for sound, the music ranges from average to pretty good, with some nice atmospheric dungeon soundtracks. Control is standard fare, and is adaquate except for the rather badly timed jump button. When you actually need to use it (not in battles, fortunately), it can be a frustrating endeavor. The menus are well laid out, and it isn't hard to find the commands you need. The game's text translation isn't the best, but I've seen worse (The worst one I can recall is Enix's Robotrek for the Super NES).

The bottom line is that there isn't a whole lot that compels me to play this game. As a beginner's RPG it may be OK, except that beginning players may get bored with it quickly. As for hardcore RPG players, there really isn't enough to keep them coming back either. It does have a decent, though not overwhelming story, original elements and nice ideas, but the main play of the game is just too repetitive.

One other note: right on the package, this game claims to work with the VGA cord, but when I tried to use it, it said it wasn't compatible. Now, all of us VGA Monitor DC players know that ANY DC game works on VGA, with some good timing of flicking the TV/PC switch or plugging the box into the Dreamcast at the right time (basically after the drive's initial spin-up when you first turn the DC on, in autoplay mode, anyhow), but that's not the point. If a game says it should work in VGA, it should.

• GRAPHICS: 8.6
• SOUND: 8.9
• CONTROL: 7.1
• Worth a rent?: Yes
• Worth a buy? Only if you're hard up for an RPG.
• Worth buying the system for?: Um....NO.

Fat's Final Thought: If there's one word I'd use to describe Evolution, I'm afraid it'd have to be "boring". More proof positive that graphics don't make the game. Guess Brad's definition of fun and mine are 2 different things...

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