Game Index

  • Persona 2
  • Xenogears
  • Xenosaga
  • Star Ocean
  • Evergrace

    • EVERGRACE

    I really wasn't going to do a section on Evergrace but, seeing as people either laugh at it or ignore it altogether I should probably go into this saying that it's the only Fromsoft game that I actually enjoy. The only praise you ever see this game getting is it's soundtrack and, while that's fair, I believe a lot of people approach it with the wrong mindset.

    Evergrace was actually a PS2 launch title and a long-time project within Fromsoft. They were originally designing it for the PlayStation and kept running into issues, their original vision for this game being too complex for the console's engine at the time. This is actually a reoccurring issue you'll see in the videogame industry(see one of the earlier iterations of Resident Evil 4 being too complex for the gamecube to handle). When the PlayStation 2 arrived, the original work they had done was scrapped and they began to rebuild the game, once more, from the beginning. That is where Evergrace sort of shines. You can tell they barely had enough time or money to complete their vision but, at the same time, you can actually see their vision shining through the rough edges. Think of how it feels to play FFVI, the character's expressions are so limited and yet, even then, you know exactly how they feel because the writing is so robust.

    That said, I have to mention something offhanded in that as I was playing this, I started to get an odd sense of Deja-vu. It was about six or so hours in and I started to sense that I had played this game before. Then, it dawned on me in a weird way. I was playing what was essentially the proto version of Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance. A game nobody but me and like three other thirty something women played. The dreamlike atmosphere, the two characters running parallel to each other, being able to swap out which character you were playing as at free will. It made me feel weird that this is never discussed or cited as an inspiration for DDD, surely there's no way lightening struck twice in order to make two extremely similar games so far apart in time.

    That said, the game is much more on the side of experimental; the main pull of the game being that you have to rely on the armor and weapon each character is equipped with. It's not just a series of buying the best armor, no. Each piece of armor/weapon actually coincides with the kind of enemy/environment you'll find yourself encountering. There are even puzzles that require you to select the correct "outfit" combination in order to progress. With that, there's also degradation that goes along with everything you're equipped with- the game suddenly becomes a survival game in a way. You have to manage your equipment enough so that you may survive long enough to drag it back to the shop and have it repaired. There is no item 'breaking' in a permanent sense which, honestly, does add a new angle to weapon degradation. Other than that, it creates an atmosphere where you have to decide if enemies are worth taking on. Fighting them will degrade your armor/weapons over time but defeating them will result in money which you can then use to repair your equipment. It's a lot of micromanaging which, honestly, I adore more than I probably should.

    While the soundtrack is what this series is best known for(and trust me, it is so worth it just give it a listen) I did find myself getting sick of it after a while. It's not that it's bad it's just that there's a sort of difference between music you can concentrate and farm enemies to and music that you want to actively sit down and listen to with your full attention- that being said, the music in Evergrace can be distracting once you're actually trying to figure out when best to strike the enemy. Also Bjork just seemed to fit the entire mood of the world. Idk, it's really something that you'll have to experience to understand.

    I played the honest English version on my PS2. I had actually ordered this game from Ebay after seeing images from it and it honestly did not disappoint. I do know that Fromsoft had a bad time with translating/dubbing their earlier stuff so I wasn't surprised when this version of the game ended up feeling...not entirely accurate. That said, I don't know, I'm a big fan of David Lynch and if any game could feel like a David Lynch fever dream it would be this. The entire world feels like you're wandering around in a dreamworld that you're not supposed to be in. There's a sort of taboo-feeling quality to stumbling upon the things you do- things your characters know nothing about and have nothing to do with. The only thing that slowly becomes clear as you move through the game is that the two characters- while inhabiting the same areas- are actually both going through them years apart(there's a time-space distortion thing going on because of course there is). Yet, it's a world on it's last breath, still holding on all this time.

    The last cutscene(no spoilers) still sticks deep inside my brain due to the footage somehow being oddly distorted. Like they recorded it and something happened to it, I'm not really sure why but I think about it all the time.

    In the future, I'd like to play a properly translated undub version of the game. I know there was someone on the archive who was summarizing the novelizations(yes, there are novelizations) but those leave something to be desired. There's just something about the experience of playing Evergrace that is hard to describe. Good or bad, I can't say this game is honestly either. I beat it and I didn't even have the privilege of emulating it so no quicksaves, if you die, you get booted right back to the menu screen. So, if I can beat it, you can at least give it a good run and check it out, it's honestly worth your time.