Evolution 2 Far Off Promise
Evolution 2 Far Off Promise
I should provide some context on this one, shouldn’t I? Evolution Worlds was a badly mangled rerelease of two Dreamcast games with the filesize of 1.2 Dreamcast games. Cuts had to be made (most things that didn’t have to do with the main plot about Linear), things had to be rebuilt, and the entire first game was turned into a few hours of prologue for the rest of it. The meat of the game being Far Off Promise was a good call, a you’ll see me say a few times later, but...
It’s a much lesser experience, and with Redream being a thing now, emulating the Sega Dreamcast is actually easy a hell. Don’t think too hard about some of the features being locked behind a donation, most dreamcast games only need savestates for cheating and one slot is usually plenty, and the rest of them are just upscaling features. That said, I donated. Six dollars wasn’t that much to support otherwise free software.
I’m not going to spoil the story for either game aside from talking about the villains and their motivations. Which... is most of the story, on account of there not being a thought in Mag Launcher’s head aside from “ADVENTURE!!!! :D “
No thoughts head empty teen boy man.
I get why they cut apart and stuck the two games together, even though it was a doomed proposition from the get go. Running up against filesize constraints on the Dreamcast was already a thing, running up against them on the Gamecube must have been agonizing, and Ubisoft being the publisher for all three games must just not have wanted to give them a second disc. Which would have solved the entire problem, releasing it as a two game compilation instead of a chop job like this.
I can’t find anything on why they didn’t. Probably because Evolution Worlds landed like... not even a wet fart. A Nothing. People simply don’t know about it. It wasn’t considered good, or even awful. If someone knows about it they probably thought it was fairly easy breezy until the final boss where the difficulty took a huge uptick.
So now that my absentminded meandering ass has given you context for why I care at all, and why i think you should, too... on we go!
Christ, my preliminary thoughts on this having cleared the first dungeon are... something.There’s a single procgen dungeon that you can tell they used to make the floors for Evolution Worlds’ prologue, the retelling of Sacred Device, because...
They all open with the same “Airplane” shaped first floor with nothing on it.
Not too big a deal but they probably should have just procgenned those dungeons on the fly. It would have saved filespace for more of the story that wasn’t just related to Linear, because Worlds doesn’t really... “get” her. It’s not really a dub thing, either. Her dialogue is more expressive and forceful in the script despite her being just as timid in mannerisms and falling into the same traps she did in the original text because of how timid she is.
That nitpick with the Gamecube version aside
Evolution 2: Far Off Promise is genuinely such a massive step up from the original on every level that it took me by complete surprise. All kinds of memories of the Gamecube version having weird inconsistencies down to the visual fidelity between “Halves” has been validated so they could keep the outfit changes for Mag and Linear between games. They didn’t really update the models for the “Prologue” of Worlds.
I was being incredibly generous when I called it the “First half”, but it does explain why Worlds felt like two different stories crammed into one game. Like episodes of a saturday morning cartoon.
It hit me that the vibe going between the two games is 90s to 00s Saturday Morning Cartoon. The visual fidelity and cinematic framing, if I had to pick two wildly popular cartoons to frame it, is like watching the first season of the Pokemon anime, and then any given season of Avatar The Last Airbender back to back. This isn't meant to insult Pokemon as a show, but to demonstrate the evolution of visual design in children's TV shows over a period of time... much longer than the period between these two nearly back to back releases on a short lived, doomed console.
With the second dungeon complete, I can definitely say that Far Off Promise is just... more than Sacred Device was. I’m not going to go into every single story detail but I will say the major themes are “Destruction for the sake of new creation”, and whether or not Humanity deserves to live on, or if Prehistoric Civilization (clearly just humans but More Advanced) deserves to live on despite having destroyed themselves eons ago.
Something I haven’t really talked about is the concept of Cyframes and the setting’s overall tech level. It’s essentially hovering around 1940s Europe, with the Leopold Empire being an analogue for... pre-Nazi germany, wearing WW1 uniforms and the Crown Prince stomping around like he’s the Kaiser, demanding ownership of the protagonist’s adopted sister in the first game. As a trope I’ve heard it referred to as “Schizo Tech”, and I think it... doesn’t fit the bill, here.The tech level of the world is very consistent, actually. The advanced technology comes from “Prehistoric Ruins”, and Cyframes are also prehistoric tech, and the fact that nobody can figure out how to reproduce or fully repair a Cyframe once it hits a completely inoperable state is enough to convince me that they don’t have secretly hidden superadvanced tech.
Star Ocean The Second Story’s planet of “Expel” is schizo tech, where on opposite ends of the same landmass you have a medieval kingdom making a ballista that shoots magic (A Symbiological Weapon that gets rehashed in 3), and an advanced engineering lab where a girl with very little experience has built “Bobbert”, something that our protagonist Claude mistakes for a remote controlled car from “Old Earth”, as he’s from a Star Trek pastiche called The Pangalactic Federation. That’s schizo tech.
I really don’t want to spoil the story of this one. Almost nobody knows anything about this duology, and if they do they’re likely dunking on the Gamecube version. Redream. Then I’m sure if you saw me post these somewhere you know where to find the game!
So... let’s talk about Yurka.
I’m not going to discuss the political implications of Yurka being dark skinned and being the embodiment of Destruction to light skinned Linear’s Restoration aspect. I assume they meant to simply make them ‘Opposites”, but... It’s Japanese and from the 00s. Japan has a problem with fetishizing dark skinned people in weird ways. I am not qualified to discuss this at length.
Yurka is very plainly not evil, though. His movements and demeanor come off as more... afraid, to me. Director Whitehead very clearly is taking advantage of the boy to try and get some kind of Prehisctoric Power from him, but for what ends, we don’t know. It almost feels like commentary on those old Adventure Magazines? Or the “Adventurer’s Guild” concept from older JRPGs?
I could be thinking too deeply into a game that is the equivalent of a YA Novel without a major focus on romance, though. Linear and Mag just acting like idealized siblings and the implied budding romance being between Mag Launcher and his friendly rival from a family that’s been rivals with his a long time, Chain Gun. She’s a year younger than him, and they’re both pretty sensitive about looking like they have stunted growth. They’re... actually friendly rivals. Chain demands payment for services rendered if she goes on an Assignment with you, but... that’s a normal thing. Chain’s got a highly mobile Flight type cyframe and her moveset is all about area damage. Pepper is a hip 20something with a gun cyframe on her hip and clearly designed to be an attractive up and coming young lady on the go. She’s set up around ranged damage and utility.
Mag is a little more varied, but mostly a pintsized powerhouse. Punch attachments, hammer, stuff like that! There’s also a spoiler character I won’t go into here, and Linear Cannon herself, who has a varied skillset around buffing, healing, and shuffling the enemies around on the board.
There’s also the one I actually use to round out my party, because he does not charge for services, because he lives in your house. Gre Nade is Mag’s butler. Not that he’s really getting paid much beyond room and board and caring about the family, Mag’s father left them all in massive debt before vanishing and leaving Linear on the doorstep three years ago. He’s focused on debuffing the enemy and has a lot of weird skills. Also skills focused around having effects on Mag alone.
I think I’ll leave off, here. The next post will likely contain my thoughts on the rest of the game.
Go play it. Don’t hate, emulate.
PS: I will be paying for Premium and adding screenshots when I get paid.