Plotwise, the poor protagonist/movie buff gets zapped into the matrix, called Evermore, that consists of four realms themed after the eras that the four human creators found the most rad: Prehistoria, Antiquia, Gothica, and Omnitopia. The more you use something, the more powerful it becomes. In addition to regular experience, each of your weapons (except the Bazooka) and each of your alchemical formulae level up as you use them. You kill baddies, gain levels, get items, equip gear, and wield magic (science) like you would in most any action/RPG.Īlmost everything has a level to it, though. You use pairs of ingredients as fuel for alchemy, the game's equivalent of magic spells. The boy's companion is his faithful dog, who can sniff out ingredients that are lying on the ground all over the place. This is an action/RPG, which means you control a boy with a stick who runs around and hits things to make numbers fly out of them. What those unfamiliar with the game should know: I highly recommend finding a copy of and playing the game the regular way. There's plenty of depth to the alchemy system, the plot, and the dialog of the game that I leave the viewer to experiment with. I won't even be stopping to level up after a point.

I won't be doing any heavy analysis of the plot, or even stopping to observe the dialog (the game has plenty). The game combines an offbeat plot, irreverent sense of humor, and unique gameplay elements to make the mana-less Mana game.Īnd because of the offbeat plot, irreverent sense of humor, and unique gameplay elements, I've decided to dash it all to ribbons. Hah!įor me, it was a fresh innovation and a welcome change to a patterned series of games.

There's no connection to gods sending god-beasts to punish people who punish trees who created the gods.Īs a matter of fact, there's no Mana at all. That is, there's no world-tree-hugging harem of heroes carrying on about how we need a special sword to use as a trowel to prune the tree and either save or destroy everything by the pruning. The plot is far removed from anything else in the series. It's game-engine-wise everything you could ask for in an action/RPG if you have any like of the Mana games, whose engines, by my estimate, have never been quite the same way twice. Squaresoft made Secret of Evermore back when I was a lad as the second game in the Mana series (I think).

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