Evolution: The World of Sacred Device
Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Dreamcast.
...Man, I really don’t get the hate for the Evolution Duology. I get strong reactions to Evolution: Worlds on the Gamecube, which was a butchery and mushing together of the skeletons of two different games, but... The Evolution Duology on Sega Dreamcast gets a lot of the hate that’s aimed its way as soon as people find out it’s a weird, botched port compilation thing.
No, the games do not have the same problems as the Gamecube “Remaster”, they are not identical, etc etc.
There’s still not a lot to say about World of Sacred Device. The translation is mostly good outside of incidental dialogue? With some weird formatting that cuts off parts of the dialogue in ways that... actually don’t muddle the story at all, it’s just confirmation stuff?
None of the mistakes really take away from the game, but it does kind of boil down to being a dungeon crawler with simplistic, procedural generation for its explorable ruins. Which is still better than the set locations in Evolution: Worlds that look like they were randomly generated.
Evolution Worlds cuts the entirety of Sacred Device down to three dungeons, the ship where you take on Eugene, and the “meat” of that particular “compilation” is the second game, Far Off Promise. Which...
While it does feel like two games haphazardly pressed together (it is), Worlds does cement Sacred Device as more of a framing device for the Launcher Crew and their dynamics, Linear’s relationship to Gre and Mag as family even if not by blood, and that she’s Special as Fuck, even if her being Evolutia in its entirety is maybe erroneus judgement on Pedo Prince’s part. I dunno! To be honest I’d give World of Sacred Device a 6.5 out of 10 if I were to have to rate it on a numeric scale. It’s pretty alright, I don’t hate it, I don’t regret playing it, the character moments are incredible when they exist...
But overall it’s very slight. My save reads as having 35 hours played, but that’s largely because of the fast forward feature. It likely only took me about 15 hours to clear the story and the postgame.The biggest thing to talk about is Eugene, the Crown Prince of the Leopold Empire...
Dude is gross. Textually. He’s obsessed with Linear after thinking Mag brought her as tribute, only to later find out she’s actually his target. Evolutia.
You may want to skip past the next section because my language is about to get a little bit colorful and abrasive.
I hear a lot that Linear is “child coded” and it makes Eugene a complete creep and thus the game itself is evil when I bring it up in mixed company if anyone has heard of the game or the series at fucking all and let me tell you Linear is not child coded, she just actually is a fucking kid! The game’s manual tells us she’s 16! Eugene is textually creepy, too! He’s a blueblood aristocrat, the fucking crown prince of a WW1 Germany anaologue who assumes he’s being given a “Maid” as tribute, then becomes utterly obsessed with her before even finding out she’s Evolutia.
Eugene is a weird and creepy guy I would legitimately say should be on a list, you know the list. The thing that makes me think this isn’t a big deal and is in fact handled respectfully is that he’s the GOD DAMNED ANTAGONIST! If you think bad people doing bad things for you to stop as the good guy who does good things is a problem then maybe go play solitaire, because Super Mario bros might be a little to morally complex for you, think of all the turtles Bowser sent after Mario, real problematic guy we might have to cancel Miyamoto about it.
Not only is Eugene a weird asshole who demands ownership of Mag’s Adopted sister, acting like his wealth alone would make him a good owner for an actual human being, he starts telling her shit about how roses are most beautiful just before budding, and his opinion on women is the same, and she’s very beautiful to him!
Yeah, he’s a fucking weirdo! Linear is a fucking kid, also he’s the final goddamn boss, go kick his ass about it! Accountability? Hold him accountable? If you really have to hold a fictional character accountable for crimes they committed for the purpose of you, the protagonist, the goodest good, to stop? Go fucking stop him and get out of my hair about it I’m just writing this god fucking damn. He feels like he’s going to infiltrate the Leopold Empire’s Socialist party, kill or shitcan everyone else, then take over the country and depose his father and call himself Eugene The Mustache Man and wage a war about it.
If any of you correct me on the terminology of someone attracted to teenage girls specifically I will not hesitate to launch you into the sun. The distinction doesn’t matter. Under 18 means 25 to life. Don’t be Drake.
This part of the article is brought on by someone telling me the game promotes sexualizing teenage girls because Eugene exists.
I swear, my own side of the aisle is embarrassing sometimes. Be smarter about stories, other lefties!
...So on to the second game I guess?
So the first thing I saw when I opened the second game was “Linear Watch” on the bottom of the title screen. It appears to have been a cute little downloadable app to your VMU where you could have a little Linear Cannon face that changed with the time of the day. The Sega Dreamcast VMU was weird, but it’s outside the wheelhouse of this particular discussion. It’s... really adorable, though? I like how they were pushing Linear as Adorable and not like... other ways JRPGs pushed teenage girls at the time.
Immediately upon loading the second game and seeing the opening cutscene... I get why it was the meat of Evolution Worlds. World of Sacred Device feels very slight, aside from its villain. The opening seconds of Far Off Promise feel like more.
There’s also voice acting! The dub was a product of the Evolution World’s mush-together, and unfortunately I think a lot of the voices are... unfit for the characters. Linear is fine, but Gre, please stop smoking 20 packs a day you are 48, bro. Spend that money on some medical care for whatever pituitary problems Mag has, he’s sixteen, shorter than Linear, and sounds like helium is a regular part of his diet. Hew’s a good kid, Gre, his dad walked out on him and left him in an incredible amount of debt, you don’t get to neglect him too for your smokes!
Really, though, it’s incredible what a few years of experience with a console can do. The games are night and day in presentation quality. The engine hitches less, the environments have higher levels of detail the voice acting is pretty clear as far as the Dreamcast’s compression goes... I’ll get into that more in the next post, though.