EoE: End of Evolution (2: Far Off Promise)

25 Jan, 2026

Or, I saved the world and all I got was crippling generational debt!

So. The final dungeon was uneventful. Just 15 floors of The Usual.

Then we fight Yurka. Who’s level 94. Either he levels with the party (I activated cheats because I was ready to just beat the game) or they have an even worse difficulty spike in the original than the gamecube game...

And then after the fight, Yurka explains that he and Linear were created to... kill the entire world and then remake it. With a tool called “The Ulticannon” that links the two of them. Because the Prehistoric Civilization had reached a point where they lost the will to live and were subject to horrible diseases because of it, so they made the two of them to kill everything and then restore the world to... kickstart the next stage of evolution? Because they had reached the end of evolution that they were capable of.

I’m gonna be real with you. End of Evangelion came out in 1997.

This game came out in 1999 in Japan.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. This is a wild tonal shift from the rest of the game and the game before it. Even at the darkest moments in Sacred Device, Eugene was still an incompetent dork and most of his troops would rather just lay down than get punched by your giant cartoon hand.

Meanwhile, strong but goofy little Mag Launcher is now the last hope for the entire world. He handles the pressure with aplomb an genuinely remains one of my favorite funny little guys, and I love how he never got good at the Ocarina, so when he rushes out at the Completed Ulticannon and starts playing the Ocarina he gave Linear three years ago... It’s a genuinely touching scene that salvages the moment for me.

Linear breaks through the brainwashing... Maybe it was brainwashing? Her eyes went dead the moment she decided she was going to help Yurka instead of staying with Mag. But the shine comes back to her eyes and she breaks out of the Ulticannon, it goes all dark and twisted and destructiony, and Linear begs you to save Yurka, too.

You beat the snot out of him and the ulticannon breaks, and... he... dies? Maybe? The text is unclear. Mag is either convinced that Yurka is still alive or pulling an “In the next life” thing with him because he very much tells Linear that they’ll all be friends next time they meet despite a very dramatic death scene. It could be a reincarnation thing that’s lost in translation?

Then Mag, Gre, and Linear leave town together, the whole “Mag is late for the train” thing from the opening cutscene gets brought full circle with him revealing he was late because he’s bad at wrapping gifts and just finished wrapping Linear’s birthday present...

Then on the train they open a letter that Mag assumes is the Adventurer’s Society thanking him for literally saving the entire world... but it’s the bill for the hotel and damages.

A frankly ridiculous number for a week in a hotel that gets added to “The Launcher Family Debt”, and a new game plus where you can start to pay it back I guess? There’s a bunch of teases for the next chapter that never came, but. C’est la vie.

I’m not going to, I think I’m done here.

All in all I’d say this game was pretty alright. Stronger as a part of a duology and not the meat of one entire game sandwiched with a prologue that ends with Eugene. Back to back it’s painfully obvious, and not just with graphical fidelity, that this game was a sequel and not the same game as World of Sacred Device. Not only is the graphical fidelity higher, the framing of cutscenes and cinematography actually exists. They didn’t really edit the visuals between parts in the gamecube version, either, so Panam Town and its inhabitants and Mag and the gang all just suddenly look better between chapters. I’m not counting Mag and Linear changing clothes (Linear throws on one of Mag’s jackets over her sun dress) as the same kind of thing, though.

I dunno that I really have any other input on this one, to be honest. The entire set of actual actionable problems I have with the game are probably largely a storage space issue on the Dreamcast disc format. The game is short and the dungeons are pretty featureless liminal monster spaces even if they’re not procedurally generated like they were in the last game. They’re “Designed” as in given a layout and maybe an interesting gimmick or two if you want to use...

Carcano, in the literal final dungeon, because he has a few grappling hook spots. But hey, it’s something. At least you can chart a quick course or know where the good treasures are.

Aside from that, that’s probably it about the game itself.

More about the platform that I’ve been banging on in both ongoing writeup series at this point feels warranted, then, to even out this “review’ of a game I genuinely do like...

The Dreamcast and Sega’s internal culture really killed this series before it could get up off the ground, and the dismal Gamecube port finished kicking it to death while it lay there bleeding. Bumbles McFumbles talked at length about Yuji Naka refusing to hear any kind of criticism about SEGA or its image, claiming that The West wasnn’t important to the Dreamcast’s sucess, that anything other than “Accurate Arcade Experiences” were actually completely uninteresting to the public and RPGs were a “dying fad”.

Given that the Dreamcast’s launch competition (and thus, the things that games like Evolution were up against) were genre defining titles in Japan like Final Fantasy 7 (1997, right before Evolution: The World of Sacred Device) and The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (1998), SEGA’s complete refusal of influences that changed the game for not only entire genres, but an entire medium? That’s what doomed the Dreamcast.

I don’t think the system “Wasn’t suited” for RPGs because of filesize limits, either. The PSX had smaller disc size and had some of the best longform RPGs of the era. Just because the games came on CDs doesn’t mean you couldn’t just have multiple CDs. Skies of Arcadia, Grandia 2, and Shenmue sure did!

If devkits had come out with enough time for people to actually use them, if the company’s entire fate hadn’t been left in the hands of Yu Suzuki and SHENMUE, and if Yuji Naka hadn’t interfered at every level to try and make the Dreamcast his vision of what he thought gaming “Should be” and expected the gaming public to fall in line, a lot of series wouldn’t have just sort of ended, probably.

I big recommend Bumbles McFumbles videos on Balan Wonderworld, because they double and triple expose a lot of things people just kind of discounted because SEGA of America were also making a lot of bad decisions and also contentious, awful people.

But when SEGA of America asked for more RPGs and more longform games like what The West wanted, Yuji Naka refused. We got Evolution, we got the system blockbuster RPGs Grandia 2 and Skies of Arcadia, and we got the actually groundbreaking Phantasy Star Online Part 1 and Part 2. That said... there’s not a lot of notable games we didn’t get in the west that haven’t been translated already, or that can be translated in some cases. The Gate of El Dorado series is... a weird, multipart, 2D RPG Anthology that looks incredible but I haven’t seen even a hint of an idea someone will translate it.

But I guess that’s an okay place to end this writeup. Evolution The World of Sacred Device and Evolution 2: Far Off Promise are good! You should play them! I wish it had gotten a continuation.