*Spoliers Ahead* I don't know what version of the game everyone else was playing but this was an absolute slog.
1. The dungeons were nothing more than trial and error Gordian knots that leave you feeling like a rat in a maze, with no creativity between them beyond different enemy types and simple switch puzzles.
2. The enemies. Hey kids, do you want to spend the next few hours being batted about like a pinata and failing to miss most of your hits like 'you're' the one wearing the blindfold? No? Well TS for you!
3. Bartering. A long, slow, time consuming process and they just had to add it into 'this' game. This is why we dropped this economic system. It was boring and impractical in ye olden times and Secret of Evermore will only reinforce that sentiment as you trudge from one stall to the next to acquire armor that will barely improve your defensive stats. A patent and blatant mechanic for padding out the game's run time. Thankfully it's optional, so avoid it like the plague.
4. The characters in this game felt so empty. No motives, no personality, no explanation as to why they're even there or what significance they have to anything going on. You just stumble upon them, but if they weren't in the game it would literally make no difference to the 'story', at all.
Even the bad guy is non-existent. He never menaces you as you progress. His influence and motives are vague and unclear. In fact I can't even remember one distinguishing feature about, you guessed it, his personality.
Then there's the hero, the quintessential blank slate, who was given a few select lines to get you laughing along, except the humor is so juvenile it would make even a Saturday morning cartoon villain roll their eyes. Every 'joke'...every...single...one...is the character saying how some recent occurrence reminds him of a scene in some schlocky B-movie for which we have 'no' frame of reference. It wasn't funny or clever the first time, and it sure as Shinola wasn't funny the tenth time thereafter. Good grief!
5. The story. This will be the first thing I forget when I try to recall the game years from now. The very definition of making it up as you go along. A lab, with the most boring, generic scientist ever, creates a machine that pulls people into Evermore. Said people are stranded in themed environments ranging from prehistoric, Greek/Roman, Medieval and futuristic. Why? What are the rules of this world? Is it born from imagination? Why do the characters want to stay there and not return to their own time? Do the different regions trade, go to war? What was the scientist trying to accomplish in the first place? Who are these people? Why should I care? Why did I do this to myself?
6. And let's not forget the weapons. Squaresoft has a grand legacy when it comes to its roster of arms which can become as, if not more, iconic that the users who wield them. Cloud has his Buster sword, Sephiroth has the Masamune, even Randi, the hero of Secret of Mana (SoM) has the Mana Sword, imbued with the spirit of his father, the previous Mana Knight. The hero of Evermore? He gets a bone...yeah. All the weapons thereafter are increasingly disposable upgrades with no sense of attachment developed, whatsoever. If I were to be kind, I could say that the bazooka is the stand out weapon, but you can only let loose with that in the final section of the game and even then you have to grind for cash to get the ammo needed for it.
7. The gameplay. Not the worst part of the game, thankfully, but there's a very simple reason for this. The entire game is a carbon copy of SoM and an inferior one at that. Certain decisions still baffle me, like the spear weapons. In SoM, Popoi the sprite is the spear user. When attacking, he stabs the spear outwards which allows him to put some much needed distance between himself and the enemies. You know...like how a spear 'should' be used. The hero of Evermore, on the other hand, much prefers to leap forward and stab down, thus negating the entire purpose of using these weapons ahead of the swords or axes.
The knockback is also completely over the top, particularly in boss fights. This in itself should not be a point against the game, except that it can get so bad at times with stun locks that result in the player being thrown halfway across the screen into a corner where they will be stuck in some cranny and with no means to react while the enemy whales on them.
Look, I get it, Squaresoft handed their baby off to others to try and milk the engine for a bit more cash, but because of its similarities to SoM, one of the best SNES RPGs and arguably one of the very best 16-bit games ever made from that generation of gaming, comparisons were going to be unavoidable. It is for this, more than anything else, that I cannot pull my punches with Evermore. A game that used the same features, released two years after its predecessor, was somehow utterly devoid of all the charm, design, evocative music and characterisation that made its forebear the highly and rightfully regarded classic that it would go on to become, remake notwithstanding.
8. The music. Not entirely bad. This is Jeremy Soule we're talking about here, after all. No, the issue for me, is that there were one too many areas with sound effects and no music. Not a crime but, again, drawing comparisons to SoM, the music there had so much...soul, ironically. Every single track was beautiful and dripping with magic and whimsy and then when you arrive in Evermore's first area, the Bugmuck (how appropo a title for how I felt) you are greeted with...insect chirps. Just chirping. Incessantly. No mandolins, no cellos, no Spanish guitars. Just squelches, belches and farts. The soundtrack to the disappointment that would follow.
9. That last boss. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I misjudged the demands of the challenge being set, or maybe, just maybe, I was already so bored and frustrated by everything that went before I just wanted it to end as quickly as I could. This mess they throw at you was the closest thing to an epic climax they could come up with? Imagine, if you will, that you want to play an RPG with a fulfilling final encounter and you are instead thrown into a pinball machine as you watch, helplessly, as your hero is bounced around from pillar to post while spiders and raptors and lizards (oh my) smack you around as you frantically try to open the menu to cast another alchemy spell, which will need immediate following up because all the enemies can nearly one-shot kill you and there's essentially no invincibility state between hits. A fight with multiple stages, which was not replicated in any other boss fight that preceded it mind you, that took an inordinate amount of time due to the obnoxiously large pool of health that even the minor enemies scurrying around had, culminating in the most face-palmingly awful final boss I have ever gone up against in recent memory. Whose retinue of skills involves moving back and forth and shooting. I think the Space Invaders had a deeper pool of AI to draw upon than this. Conversely, the fight immediately before him however, was easily the most 'infuriating' I've experienced in recent memory, with its spider and lava lizard combo, which makes this all the more sad and pathetic when you finally go up against the bloody side-scroll-shooting idiot.
10. The cat. This? This one is just for me.
Considering the game only has two party members all throughout, rather than the three that are standard in other installments of SoM (yet another step down from the main series), it would have added some much needed internal party drama and genuine laughs if the cat could have been added to the group but no, the developers instead seem to have a hate-boner for felines.
The hero's dog likes to chase cats and this is, in fact, the catalyst for the game in the opening sequence. This I can understand. It's a tale as old as time with the added bonus of being more compelling a concept than the game's own story. At the game's overly long climax the dog is, once again and rather foolishly, chasing the cat in the soon to be destroyed space station. In this faux bit of final drama the plot seems to suggest our hero won't make it out in time, but of course he bloody well does. At this point everyone has escaped. Everyone...except the cat. When the credits rolled, it was at that very moment I realised something. Something that perfectly encapsulated in my mind what was wrong. The only moment of concern, the only drop of emotion that this miserable experience could elicit from me was when I found myself worrying about the poor put upon puddy tat. Did the cat get a happy ending? Elizabeth and her stupid speccy face did. Horace and his will-they-won't-they bromancing ass did. Camellia and her gigantic ass did. But not the cat. Then again, the game concludes with the 'it was probably all just a dream' trope. I just wish that it had been me doing all the dreaming instead.