Were these games meant as PSAs at all? (Evolution 2)
Dreamcast Pacing: Evolution 2 Part 2
I think after Evolution 2 I’m going to have to play something that’s a little more well known an RPG on the Dreamcast to illustrate the points I made in the last post (Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinite Part 2) a little better. Because the story and... I can’t say “lore” but the hints at greater lore existing for this world and the characters in it are heavy, the implications are heavy... but the pacing of this game is snappy and the mood is sleepy. Somehow.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a little strange to see Yurka and Linear do their whole “We’re two sides of the same coin” thing completely off camera for everyone else. The storyline for both games kind of plays out as a Solved Mystery. We, the players, know that Eugene is the bad guy, that Director Whitehead is the bad guy, that Yurka is trying to win Linear over to his side for some kind of destructive goal...
But unlike something like Columbo, there’s no deduction for us to perform. We don’t need to find out anyone’s motivations, they say them outright. Surprisingly, I’m fine with this...
I do just wish we’d gotten more of this series. On consoles more suited to RPGs. I wish we’d gotten to see Mag actually grow up some more into a responsible adult. I have a hard time believing he’s 16, to be honest...Linear looks young, too, but she’s at least more mature than him. Mag is just kinda... no thoughts, head empty, oopsie save my sister!
I wish there was more to talk about with this one other than my thoughts on the platform that are even dominating my Phantasy Star Portable discussions and the story. I think my next playthrough will be something... not a Dreamcast RPG. Because these things make me think a lot about how much they were held back by the console itself, as well as...
Well, it can’t be immature theories of game design, right? World of Sacred Device came out too close to Final Fantasy 7 to take any influence from its cinematic framing, but the presentation is immediately stepped up six or seven notches compared to it in Far Off Promise. But the thing is... this doesn’t even feel like a scaled up PSX RPG...
Phantasy Star as a comparison piece feels more thematic now I guess? Because Jason Graves over on Youtube phrased it as “Phantasy Star 2 is an 8 bit RPG on a 16 bit system”, and while I don’t care how many bits the Dreamcast pushes because we are well beyond it mattering for consoles at this point... The Dreamcast was a hail mary to try and stay in the console game. It’s kind of a mess, and RPGs like this feel like such a mixed generation monstrosity that I can’t help but find them fascinating. Even of the console was a mess...
To the point where every third party controller I’ve ever seen for it moves the cord from the bottom of the controller facing the player to where the cord... usually goes on a controller. You also can’t really make them wireless, because of the goddamn VMU you have to stick in the back of the controller. Which is your memory card. I don’t think there were any third party controllers with VMU functionality when I had access to a real Dreamcast. I remember having a mad katz controller that had no VMU port and a first party controller, and I kept the VMU in the second port to use a controller shaped like a controller with the cord coming out the back. The first party controllers were... weird. The shape was so weird. Google it, I can’t do it justice. Rounded. With a notch to hold the controller cord under it.
I hated playing on a real dreamcast because the controllers sucked. I’ve loved emulating the thing for a while now because it’s got a hell of a library.
As far as Evolution goes... well, the third dungeon is surprisingly multilayered but without much of substance in it. The floors are slippery in places and the teleporters don’t really hide anything. If it were a first person game I could call these dungeons “Teenager’s First Wizardry Game”. Mag gets another of the visions of prehistoric society at the bottom of the dungeon when we find a weird walker mech after mostly finding ancient recording equipment and cameras among the “Appraisal Items”.
Barely anything happens with the story for this excursion, too. Marking three out of... I have actually forgotten how many Orbs. It’s kind of nice to see Mag take an interest in Linear’s life outside of them just running around together in old ruins and hunting for secrets of the past. They have a conversation about Yurka, who’s been a little weirdo to her but in a “You are light and I am shadow” kind of way. We already know Whitehead is the real bad guy if we have the media literacy of an adult, but this is a story for young teens. Mag wants to meet Yurka because any friend of Linear’s is a friend of his, and Linear kind of... lets on a little bit that there’s more going on in Babey’s mind than just flowers, adventure and ocarina practice.
After the incident with Eugene in the last game, Linear very much seems to know what she is. She doesn’t know where she comes from or the history of Evolutia, though, and doesn’t really seem to have a desire to find out beyond just... hanging around and going wherever Mag goes. Mag doesn’t seem to really have a single thought in his head aside from “Wow I love adventure :)”
It’s a little frustrating sometimes? But that’s coming from an adult when the target audience is probably closer to 10 than Mag’s age, 16. It’s kind of a thing where you age the protagonists in children’s media a little higher than the target audience because younger kids think older kids are cooler by default?
And as I start the fourth (if we’re going by the same metric as the last game, penultimate!) dungeon, Director Whitehead reminds me to save after asking me if I’d saved my game before? The game isn’t so short that a kid could get all the way here without saving... is it? I know you can’t expect someone to have played the game before it, either, but... it’s bizzare. It’s taken me (discounting the fast forward feature inflating the time on my file in game) about 7 hours to get here without doing that procgen side dungeon at all...
So I drained my soul a little bit getting 40 floors of that out of the way. It’s just... kind of a nothing dungeon. You get appraisal items to get some money out of it? But barely any EXP. Enemies don’t drop any money either, so it’s all appraisal items and Assignment rewards for your income. The purpose the game gives you for the dungeon is to earn more TP to learn Moves (special abilities, think spells in a game with no “Magic”) in case you haven’t earned enough in normal gameplay.
World of Sacred Device had procgen dungeons for the entire game until the run through Eugene’s battleship. But they were better than this, by virtue of being snappy and quick with smaller floors with more to find. Most of the items I found in the Society Training Grounds were... status cures? It’s not that bad but it’s long. Verrrrry verrrry loooooooooooooooong.
It left a bad taste in my mouth that the rest of the game hasn’t.
The fourth dungeon/assignment is... Carcano snuck in and stole all the macguffins I’d collected and ran off, I have to go get them back! And we know exactly where he is because of the tracking device Whitehead seems to have conveniently placed on the orbs. In the opening cutscene, Carcano had stolen one of the Orbs, so it makes sense that this would be the place to go after finding the other three.
The dungeon is three entire floors, then a bit of an easy boss fight, then Carcano turns good and Yurka assaults Mag. Linear gets angry that Mag is being mean to Yurka in a misunderstanding, and he manages to get her to leave Mag and Company for the final dungeon.
There’s... really nothing to the Bandit Trap dungeon. 10 minutes in and out, Carcano boss fight. Story.
Yurka uses this to demoralize Linear and then get her to think that if she stays she’ll be a burden on Mag. There’s...
I’m going to have to play Evolution Worlds again at some point. Not looking forward to that. But I seem to remember her specifically being rewritten to show a lot more of a forceful personality, and this seems much more... sensible than how they portrayed her in the Gamecube, with Yurka just saying a few things and her going along, instead he’s convinced her that he’s in constant danger near her.
Which... given Eugene in the first game...
It’s not “fun” storytelling anymore. This time, Linear was manipulated by a boy her age into abandoning her family for him.
These do start to feel like cautionary tales, don’t they?
I was going to try to wrap up the rest of the game in this post but I’m nearing 1600 words as I type this, so my next post will be the Evolution 2: Far Off Promise wrap up.