Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 446: Secret of Evermore

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

Nadia Oxford time-skips through the history of gaming with Jeremy Parish, Jared Petty, and Ash Paulsen to discuss one of Squaresoft's most curious experiments: Secret of Evermore, their attempt to create a game in America, by Americans, for Americans. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week on Retronauts, the brave little toaster dog. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Retronauts. I'm our host for this week, Nadia Oxford, of the Axe of the Blood God RPG podcast. Thank you for joining me. I'm accompanied by some very good friends of mine. We have Jared Petty.

We have Ash Palsett, and of course we have Mr. Jeremy Parrish. I'd like everyone to say hi and introduce themselves, starting with you, Jared. Yeah, I'm Jared. My day jobs at Limited Run Games, where I mixed up. with Jeremy, and my night job is making the Top 100 Games podcast, which I do for fun. That sounds like a lot of fun, a lot of painful fun. How about you, Jeremy? Go ahead. I just do the stuff he just mentioned pretty much. Also, sometimes I'm on retronots. I don't know. On occasion. We have you slumming around the place. Someone is hot rotting. I like that.

Yeah, so I live right above, like, a major street in Los Angeles, and that has. happens sometimes. I apologize. Well, as we record this, this is actually St. Patrick's Day. So my neighborhood is not just St. Patrick's Day, but also Purim, which is a Jewish holiday where you get completely crunk. So I get it from all sides today. It's actually really nice. No, no, Purim was in secret of manna, not secret of Evermore. Oh. I always thought her name was Purim, but no, apparently is Perim, so Purim. But I think Porum is a better name. But it's often, it's often Romanized as Purim. So I choose to believe as it should be that she is the first Jewish.

Jewish JRP hero heroine, yes. Nice. I will take that because Secretramana was also one of my first RPGs, and we will certainly get to that today, but first, Mr. Ash, you have been talking, but you have not introduced yourself. Please say hi. So my name is neither Purim nor Perim. It's Ash Paulson.

I'm the creator and co-founder of Good Vives Gaming, which is basically the entire Game Explained crew back together under a new umbrella. And for my day job, I work for Renaissance PR, where I do content creator outreach for various indie games. And just I'm super happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Nadia. Oh, we're very happy to have you. And we just had you on Axel the Blood God for our Kingdom Hearts ranking. And that was discussion all right. That was so fun. That was so fun. I was buzzing about that. Like, I've been buzzing about that ever since. Like, I got to have a super nerdy Kingdom Hearts in-death conversation with some good buddies. I was so happy. That was so fun.

How many bodies did you have to climb over for that? Like, that just sounds like a bloody slaughter waiting to happen. It got pretty contentious at times, for sure. It got a little heated. It got a little heated. It got a little heated. Yeah. And it was a good time, very positive energy.

Good time had by all. Everyone should go ahead and check that out. But today we're actually here to talk about what I consider one of Square sauce more interesting projects outside of Kingdom Hearts, I suppose. And that is Secret of Evermore. Now, this was Square's first Western game. It was an action RPG developed in Redmond, Washington. It had a really interesting solid development team behind it. But there was a lot going again.

this game. And I think we're going to talk about that today. First, though, let's start with our histories with the game. Have you guys played it? Do you have it? Did you buy it? Ash, why don't you go ahead to start? Okay, so I did buy it, but I had a weird kind of mindset going into it. So I had just recently discovered Squarespace at the time through Final Fantasy 6, a.k.a. FF3. And FF6, like, completely opened my eyes to a whole new side of gaming that I had never, ever experienced before. And so when I played that, I was like SquareSoft. I got to pay attention to these guys, but it's probably never going to get better than FF6. And then Chrono Trigger happened. And it got better than FF6. And I was like, Square Soft. Oh, my God. These

guys can do no wrong. And I'm going to buy every single game that comes out from them. And then Secret of Evermore happened. And by that time, I had played Secret of Mana. So I was like, oh, man, I'm excited for this. This is going to be the next big, amazing, great game from Squersoft. And then it kind of wasn't. Well, not kind of wasn't. It really wasn't. And I still am glad I played it just for the history and just for the context of what this game means in the wider context of Square at the time. But it didn't land for me the same way, obviously, that Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana and FF6 did. So it was very much like a waking up moment for me, like, okay, Squaresoft is awesome, but yeah, they can misfire sometimes. But at the time, either, I didn't know that it was,

I didn't know the Square USA history when I first played it. So I knew it felt different, but I didn't know why. We'll get into all of that, of course. But Jared, how about you? Yeah, this is what I think of is a permanent marker game, which is a game that I got my hands on eventually either through rental or a yard sale or something where they came with permanent marker already written on it, somebody else's name or a price. And that's because I love, Secret of Mana. I looked a lot of early square games, but I was not as plugged into the square publisher kind of personality cult yet as I would become later on in life. So I played a lot of square RPGs, a lot of Inex RPGs as well, loved that stuff. But I also remembered, you know,

Kings Night as well. So, you know, King's Eve cut. Hell yeah. I knew there were, you know, I knew there were some ones out there that were a little painful that I could kind of half remember. But Evermore came along after Amana, and I didn't pay as much attention to it. I think because it came out at the end of 95 and at the beginning of 96, Civ 2 came out. And this is when I was really starting to get sucked into PC gaming. And so I missed this one when it was new contemporaneous. It kind of came back to it. And I think I have a warmer relationship with it because I wasn't just frothing at the bit for the Secret of Mana sequel to come out immediately.

And what I did encounter it, there was enough distance between them that I didn't get punched in the gut as hard as some folks did. Right. That makes sense. And how about you, Parrish? Well, as the resident old-timer here, I was already pretty well tuned into what video games were all about and the happens of the business, the internet, all of that. So I was very well aware of this game as it kind of led up. I saw, you know, the Nintendo Power previews. I saw previews in other magazines. I remember, you know, flipping through a magazine at a bookstore, and they were gushing about how there were pre-rendered graphics for some of the bosses and installations. And I was like, ooh, neat. That's high tech. Everyone loves that.

That'll never get old. I had been aware of square games since Rad Racer came to the U.S. actually. But I got them confused. I got them confused with. rare coin it, like they conflated in my brain for a long time. But then, you know, I kind of gradually spun them out separately and, you know, played Final Fantasy when I borrowed it from a friend and played all the way through it, rented Final Fantasy 2, bought Final Fantasy 3. It was really secret of mana that, you know, I got that on a rental and played it for basically

an entire Christmas holiday when it first came out and just thought it was the best. I really liked it. And so needless to say, when they were, I learned they were making another game in kind of the series, I was very interested in it. And I also was aware that, yes, there was a real secret of mana two coming out in Japan. And it had like pumpkins. And the screenshots of the pumpkins looked really cool. But I was, I was interested in playing both. There's this kind of either or mindset that people had. But I didn't have that. I was like, I would like to play Secret of Evermore and Secret of Manateau. And so, you know, one of those came to America right away.

And one of them came to America many years later. Now I've played both. And I'm happy about that. Decades later. But yeah, there was, I don't know, there was like a sense of resentment about this game for a long time as if, I don't know, as if it was like a replacement for Secret of Manit too. We can talk about that later.

But, you know, by the same token, I, had also played Breath of Fire, which Square published in the U.S. even though it was a Capcom game. So I don't know. Like I, I just kind of saw it as all pretty fluid and flexible. So I bought Secret of Mevermore when it came out and said, hot dang, this is good. And maybe I didn't like it as much as Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 3, aka 6, but it was still good. I still enjoyed it. And it was different. Like it had way more text and dialogue. And, was more focused around single play and it had some interesting systems and mechanics and you know the jokes didn't always land but I appreciated that they tried which was something you didn't really see happening in video games

that often so yeah I was into it I don't know between this and earthbound it kind of felt like there was this collective thing happening and role playing games on Super NES at that time this sort of like you know

re-digesting America Kana sort of thing. And so it just all kind of fit into, like, it all seemed of a piece. And that happens sometimes. Like, you know, in, I tackled this, kind of talked about this in some of my NES works videos for 1988, but there was this, this like brief period where a bunch of games that had sort of similar themes and names and conventions came out. You had Rambo, you had Iron Tank, then you had Metal Gear.

which all had kind of this, like, sort of military Rambo storyline broadcasting by, like, you know, communicating by transmitter sort of thing going on. Both Metal Gear and Iron Tank had a hero named Snake. And like, to me, it all just kind of blended together and was like, yeah, this is just what video games do. They all have this thing happening. So, I don't know. So, like, with that, with that mindset, I guess, or just that sense of, you. you know, like video games are trend-driven, and sometimes they do stuff that's all kind of of a piece, to me, Secret of Evermore, just fit right in. And I still think fondly of it,

although I haven't really played it since it came out. So, you know, maybe I'd look back at it and be like, wow, they blew it. But I don't think so. I think, you know, I'd actually be more forgiving of it now, kind of understanding the behind the scenes and, you know, understanding some of the systems even better than I did at the time. So, I don't know. I'm fond of this one. I just want to, you know, reach out and tousel its hair. That's a good kid. I agree. He's a good kid. That's a very good kid. I like the utopia that exists in your head, by the way, about how all video games were a nice sort of melting pool of trends, and everyone just kind of got along and was inspired by each other, and console wars just never happened. I mean, I'm not saying

you're saying that, but it just feels like... That's not quite what I mean. I guess I just meant that like there were there was there's always something in the water with video games absolutely i see what you mean now yeah uh as for myself like i i have made earthbound comparisons here and we will get into them because um my story is almost like a mix of all of yours i was very much looking forward to evermore when it was announced by this point i had been into final fantasy three slash six and secret of mana both of which had huge impacts on me so of course i was like holy crap secret of Evermore, this has got to happen right now. And Parrish, like you mentioned,

like there were a lot of really enticing looking previous for that game and, like, game players and Nintendo Power and everything like that. And it just seemed to look really good. And back then, video game release dates were extremely loosey-goose more so than they are now, if you can believe it. And I

remember hearing that Secret of Evermore was going to come out in the summer, and something called Chrono Trigger was coming out after that. But then it turned out it was reversed. Chrono Trigger came first. and I played that first and I did not have a big budget I was saving up for the N64

by that point so it was a matter of I got Chrono Trigger of course it blew me away by the time Secret of Evermore came around I was a little less than impressed and I read the reviews and their viewers were like, this is pretty good it's not like going to blow you away

but it's pretty good and you know those are generally correct reviews but this was an age where I had just played Final Fantasy 6 I had just played a chrono trigger, and I hate to say it, but I kind of stuck my nose up at it for the same reason. I stuck my nose up at Earthbound. It was just like, I don't want this kiddie stuff. I want to go back to the apocalypse and jump off a cliff because my boyfriend might be dead.

Were you one of those kids that hated Wind Waker back in the day? Oh, no. No, I was actually always a Wind Waker defender, even when like the graphics were kind of in that really early prototype. Same. Nice. This is pretty good. This actually works out a lot. When I saw the game in motion, like in the later trailers, I said,

how can you not love this? This is incredible. But by that point, I had settled down a bit. I was no longer in my teenage years. By the time Eremore came out, I was just in the throes of angry, late teenage puberty. So, of course, I was like, ew, I don't want to play the boy in this dog. That's stupid. You're such an edge lord.

The great irony also being that earthbound, when you dig underneath the surface, it's arguably the darkest of all of all the people talking about. Oh, it is absolutely. It's like, I have written essay. about, not to get no tangent, but I have written essays about Earthbound, if you want to look them up, primarily about how is the failure of adults to protect children. And it's a game where Ness starts off getting the shit beaten out of him by cops and looking at that now. And it's like, did they always mean for that to be disturbing or would they think it was funny? I don't know for this day.

But, yeah, the reason we kind of bring up Earthbound here is because, as Peros brought up, whereas Earthbound formed a cult, a huge cult following after the fact, so you could have ever more, well, it certainly has its fans. They're not nearly as driven as, like, say, the Starman crew. They're, they're very much in the vein of, like, perhaps Parrish and I were like, oh, it's a pretty good game. Speaking personally, I can say that I did try playing it later, and I was like, okay, well, I'm not too impressed with these graphics. I was a little bit of a snob, but my husband for Christmas got me a repro cart for Secret of Evermore. So I said, okay, I'm going to sit down, play this on the S&ES as God intended, and I did.

And I'm like, wow, this has some really great ideas, but gosh, it is unbalanced as heck. And I did not find it a lot of fun to play. And something I will get into a little bit later is that this is a game that has several patches to even out the difficulty, and neither of them are as good as they need to be. So something really went wrong with tuning the difficulty there. And I think that was one strike against it versus many strikes, actually. So we'll get into that. But just to recap a little bit about the game itself, again, Western developer RPG by Squarespace, released on the S&S in October of 1995. So that's another strike against it. Of course, a lot of games by 1995 are just

being overlooked. It's an executive producer, and this is really interesting. The late, great Douglas E. Smith, creator of Lodrunner. He was specifically hired by Square Enix to make an RPG with an American motive. Jeremy, you've done a lot of fantastic work

about Douglas E. Smith. Like, he wrote a really great retrospective on him back at U.S. Gamer. Oh, did I? I've written a lot about Lod Runner, but, wow. I don't remember really, I don't feel like I know that much about, about Smith himself.

You know, I've forgotten more about Douglas E. Smith than you've ever known. Yeah, I mean, like, okay, so Smith was one of the first people who worked for Bruderbund, which was an American publisher. It's now part of the learning company, I believe. It was bounced around to different owners. But they were kind of a collective publisher that would really like to elevate. elevate its talent, you know, kind of like EA in the early days, where they would work with amateur developers, help them polish up their games, and get them into the market. I mean,

they also worked with a guy named Will Wright, who published a game called Raid on Bungling Bay with them. And that is the genesis, the inception point of the entire Sims franchise. So, yeah, they were, they were an incubator for great talent. I think they might be more familiar to a lot of people of a certain age for publishing the print shop, which was not a video game. But, um, I didn't know he published, they published the print shop. They did. They did. They published the print shop. Uh, one of the default images, I think, was you could print out the Bruder bundle logo with the crowns. Uh, you would take up like, you know, six or seven sheets of that, that tractor feed banner paper. Um, but, but anyway. That's the sound it would make. So they, they,

they worked with Smith to publish load. Runner, and it was a big hit on PCs in America. And then Bruderbund, maybe they saw that things were happening in Japan or Japanese publishers were like, hey, you publish cool stuff. You should license your games to us. But in any case, they license their games out to Hudson and to Sega and a few other publishers. And Lod Runner became a huge phenomenon in Japan. I know Douglas E. Smith said in an interview with IGN in like 1998. That's how long ago this was. Wow. That, you know, Load Runner was popular here, but what people don't know is that the majority of its sales happened in Japan. And I will say Kate Willardt, the game historian, a few months ago,

put together a chart, charting like the first six-month sales of Load Runner across all platforms. And it was like, you know, 100,000 copies on Apple 2, which was a massive hit back in 1983. But then she showed the comparison for the SG-1000 version, which was also about on par with the Apple II version,

which is crazy because there were only a fraction of SG-1,000 units sold compared to the Apple 2, which was a massive, like just widespread system on multiple contents. But then she showed

the Famicom sales, which was published by, that version was published by Hudson. And it just, it was like 10 times as many. It was just unbelievable numbers. And so Smith really, he played an important part in the legacy of Nintendo because Nintendo at the Famicom, which became the NES in America, didn't really become a big deal in Japan until the third parties arrived, beginning with Hudson. And when Hudson published Nuts and Milk and Load Runner, like that was when the Famicom really just began to go out of control in terms of sales

and skills skyrocketed. And it wasn't because of Hudson, but there was this correlation there where all of a sudden people were buying Famicom systems and everything up to that point had been like, hey, here's Donkey Kong. Here's a port of, you know, Donkey Kong 3 and Mario Brothers and here's Mahjong. And those were, you know, successful. But all of a sudden people you know, were buying the system by the millions and they were like, we want more games. And here was Hudson saying, here are games for you.

And they made load runner. They took Load Runner with its little stickmen and single color bricks. And they made it cute. In fact, very cute. The enemy robots, they ceased to be like stick figure robots and they became bombermen. They reused that sprite as their mascot character for decades to come.

It's just like this weird confluence of video game history. Around the same time, IREM also produced an arcade version of Load Runner that shipped, I think, also in 1984. And once Lodrunner lapsed for Hudson, the license, IREM started publishing it on Famicom Disc System and put together like super challenging versions of the games. So it just sustained its popularity there for years. And, you know, Hudson eventually it kind of faded away, but Hudson would go back. to the well, along with other companies. I want to say Bondi published a Game Boy version of it, but then Hudson went back to the well and created cubic load runner. So I'm not really talking to that much about Doug Smith here, but you do have to understand, like this is all context

to help kind of, I think, explain why he was a great choice for Square USA to tap to basically be the guy who would take this, basically the engine for this game that was fairly popular in Japan, not so much here, and help guide it, you know, help be a key creative figure in terms of this Japanese publisher launching its actual American studio. And so yeah, like I said, there's just a lot of history here. And it's, I actually did not realize that Doug Smith worked on on Secret of Evermore, but just knowing that is really cool and shows like there was this connection there for sure. Yes.

All the kind of Westerners who were really early making inroads into Japan, such as Hank Rogers with the Black Onyx and later Tetris, or Robert Woodhead, who created wizardry, which was just a huge, huge cult and then mainstream success over there. like all those guys just, you know, they kept those connections because that's how Japanese business works. Like once you make a connection and you, like there's trust established and a good working relationship, that's just like that, you know, word is bond basically. Like that is a thing that is secure and stable forever. And so, yeah, like there's, you know, there is some real legacy heritage type history going on. with Secret of Evermore because of Smith's involvement, which I think is really cool.

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...the... Anyway, I've talked about a lot of things that aren't secret of evermore for like 10 minutes, so I'll turn the table back over to you. No, no, as you say, it's a really important bit of context, even just kind of continuing the third of conversation very briefly. I think that your NES works series has taught me just how much the start of the Famicom and the start of the NES were so different. For years and years I thought, oh, they were kind of the same thing. I'm sure it was the same progression, but no, whereas, as he said, the Famicom had games like Lodrunner to really boost it the way that Super Mario Brothers did for us. Like, it's just a really, really interesting difference. I'm always interested to hear how, like, what role the West plays in that.

And as he said, I would imagine since Doug Smith had that respect behind him for doing that for Lod Runner, it's no wonder that Squarry and I said, hey, how about making us a game? That'd be pretty cool, wouldn't it? And Bob's your uncle, as I say. but unfortunately it didn't get the recognition I can't really say it deserves or not that's what I'm trying to figure out here and we've already talked a little bit about our histories with the game

and what I want to know is would you regard it as an overlooked gem or just kind of a game that its obscurity is not surprising and this is something I've this is an argument I've kind of written out more thoroughly but if you have any generalized opinions on where secret of evermore lies in our collective consciousness and whether that's fair or not,

go ahead and sound off. I'm receptive to that. This is a game, I think, that suffers from comparison again and again and again. We've made comparisons to earthbound because it has a semi-nistolic setting. It's funny in ways. It begins at a town called podunk. That's cute. That's adorable.

And it almost feels like it would be. belong in Earthbound. Unfortunately, what it doesn't have is that weird, esoteric, ethereal sadness of Earthbound. And without it, it's not quite as meaningful emotionally. When you look at the mechanics of the game, it does a lot of the things that Secret of Mana did right. I think the charge meter actually works pretty well, even though it's unbalanced in places, but that's a good way to keep you from just spamming in combat. I mean, you're effectively Martin McFly with a bone. that you're beating things well. You look like it, too.

Right. You have the vest and everything. I'm sure everyone in Evermore is like, are you, are you afraid you're going to drown? What's going on? Did you escape from the Navy? Yeah. Exactly. He's got his life preserver on.

But he's walking around with the bone, but it doesn't quite have the zip that Mana did. Right. That Sikint and Sikint-O-2 does. And it kind of suffers in a divergent way, I think just kind of on its own from what would become late monaitis where everything slows down. And as guys are have more trouble moving around, at the same time, it misses the beautiful, wonderful point of the two-player cooperative where you get together. The beauty of Secretamana is sitting down with your nerdiest of nerdy friends in the early 90s. And being able to play an RPG with another human being, an option RPG. And they give you the dog and they're like, here's this thing you could have had.

Right. You could have had this wonderful too. But we're not going to give you that. And it's again and again, these comparisons, that's how we criticize. We criticize by context. So it makes sense. Yet I can't think of a game where we so often like, well, compared to Corona Trigger, well, compared to Final Fantasy 6, well, compare to Earthbound, well, compare to Secret of Mono.

And that's the problem. It's a pretty good game. Yeah. It's just not as good as all the other good games there were to play at the same time. Exactly. And that hurts it. Yeah. I think that's kind of where I'm landing on it is like I wouldn't call it an overlooked

Jim. I think Jim is probably putting it a little bit strongly. Maybe a little bit generous. Probably a little bit generous. But I think it's a pretty good game. And I think it's worth playing, especially for anyone interested in the history of gaming and especially RPGs and Squarespace's history. And it's definitely worth checking out. And there's a lot to like about this game. But I do think it, as you were saying, it does suffer from those comparisons. And I think specifically where Secret of Mata is concerned, I think it really suffers from the comparison with Mata's aesthetics. You know, Secret of Mata is one of the most colorful games on the Super Nintendo, and it has one of the most melodically driven soundtracks on the Super Nintendo, whereas Evermore, it's not necessarily worse, but it's very drab and very bleak in comparison, a lot, many darker colors, and not nearly as colorful. And the soundtrack by Jeremy Sewell is very ambient and very almost kind of sounds very bleak, too, and a little sad, and it's very muted. Absolutely. Completely the opposite of Secret of Mata. And so I think when you see Secret of in that title, if you played mana, you can't help, but it kind of expect that, right?

And so I think that definitely is where kind of some of that comparison really made Evermore suffer. And I was really thinking about this while I was looking through your notes, Nadia. And I was really having in trouble trying to figure out why that kind of Americana vibe worked for Earthbound and is well loved in Earthbound, but maybe not necessarily as much and Evermore. And I think where it finally, my light bulb moment, and this is great. What you wrote down here is you called it Americana Boomer Wank. You said the story for Secret of Evermore immediately felt like Americana Boomer Wank. Don't apologize because that, I think, is a great point. They both have an Americana vibe.

But whereas Secret of Evermore, or what I should say, whereas Earthbound feels like it is being played and written from the perspective of a child going out into the way. world with all the wonder and fear that implies, Secret of Evermore feels like it's a boomer writing about his glory days as a kid. And what he remembers Americana culture was like when he was a kid. And there are a lot of tongue-and-cheek references. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I was around 11 when I played Secret of Evermore, I think. So I didn't really care about an adult perspective.

I like that perspective from the eyes of a kid that you get an earthbound. It's easy to insert yourself into Ness's role. compared to someone like Podunk Boy, which I just didn't really, you know, I didn't watch a lot of B movies as a kid. I didn't really have that kind of frame of reference. So it was really hard for me to identify, I guess, with the Americana vibe in Evermore versus Earthbound. And your Americana Boomer Wink line absolutely is what was the light bulb moment for me there. I think just to build off. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Jeremy.

You didn't get to say anything. Yeah, I was going to say Earthbound is written. from an outsider perspective. It's not written from people who lived through, you know, the American culture that they're kind of digesting through, you know, secondhand, third hand, whereas Evermore is written from the perspective of people who lived there and, you know, we're surrounded by this all their lives. And it feels very contemporary to the kind of cartoons that were on TV. Like, if you look at Animaniacs, Tiny Tune Adventures, Warner Brothers cartoons from that era, the early 90s, or even something like Batman, the animated series or Superman, like they're

full of kind of, you know, a lot of it's self-referentialism, but, you know, they're full of jokes about things that adults at the time would have understood, you know, not so much the kids who were theoretically the core audience, you know, I mean, Tiny Tunes and Animaniacs did that all the time making references to like Dean Martin and stuff like that like or Jerry Lewis like you know kids yeah kids in the 90s didn't know who Jerry Lewis was they don't understand hello nurse so it was for their moms and dads or even like you know the gray ghost episode of Batman the animated series oh that was great which is it's a brilliant ah just such a great piece of animation but at the same time like the fact that they stunt casted Adam West as the

gray ghost, you know, that's not for the kids. That is for the parents. And I feel like this was written from that same perspective. The writing in here is very much in that kind of vein. And I do think that really dates it. And it does make it alienating for people who don't have that proper context. But I understand why it happened that way. Because I think that was just how it was sort of understood that you wrote about kind of the American past at that point. I mean, even Star Trek did that, Deep Space 9 with, you know, like a pioneering special effects episode, Forrest Gump, you know, going back into the Tribles episode of Star Trek and inserting modern actors into it. But, you know, Forrest Gump taking archival footage and using CG to make it

look like Forrest was talking to Nixon or whatever. Like, that was just the thing at the time, you know, America patting itself on its back right before the country just went down the tubes. You know, there was like this last minute of like, we did it everyone. We beat communism. Everything's perfect. The future is great. Nothing's ever going to be bad again. But let's look at back where it started, this greatness that we have. So I get it. But yeah, I do, I do think that dates. Yeah, that's a good point. At the same time, I do want to go to bat for this game because, yes, it has flaws. But at the same time, like when people compare it to other super and ESRPs, what are you comparing it to? You're comparing it to this cherry-picked selection of Final Fantasy games and its offshoots, mana, and Chrono Trigger.

You're comparing it to Earthbound. You're comparing it to what else? Oh, nothing else, really? Maybe Act Razor, because, you know, that was kind of the same or soul. Blazer, because those were like the same sort of action RPG context. Right. But if you look at everything else that landed in the Super NES RPG bucket, it's mostly crap.

No one's like, you know, Secret of Evermore was okay, but I really wish I was playing Tecmo's Secret of the Stars. I wish I was playing the moon. I was going to find a place to make a Tecmo Secret of the Stars reference here. Nice. Sorry. I stole it from you. But yeah.

It's okay. Most super NES RPGs were actually crap. And those are just the ones that came to America. When you look at the games that did not come to America, the vast majority of those were flaming garbage. Flaming hot garbage. No, I agree. I agree with that.

Like, you are comparing Secret of Evermore to like the Crim de la Crem. Yeah, okay. So it doesn't deserve to stand on Parnassus and look down at the mortals and sneer, but maybe it deserves to, like, live on the slopes of Parnassus and not be, you know, not be kind of pushed down with the garbage, you know, the horrible scum living in the realms of Hades. No, no, absolutely not. I would agree with that, yeah.

So it is all about context. It is. It is absolutely all about context, especially since Secret of Evermore, even though it made some mistakes say with its titling, I think that's a big one. It's not a game that thinks, like, it's not full of itself. It's a very, very lighthearted game. I actually was going to get into the soundtrack and how it kind of mismatches the theme of the game, even though it's a really excellent soundtrack. But it is very strange. But I think maybe one of my bigger problems at the time was that you had this nameless hero kid who, by the way, his character art looks like Fred Flintstone is driving me crazy. I'm just expecting to let up a Winston cigarette.

But he doesn't have anything to him except mentioning this looks like such and such. from such and such. Like, what was it? Marisney's Lumberjacks is one of the movies he references. All he does is talk and movie references. It's actually Family Guy before Family Guy. It's actually hell. Yeah.

I was going to say, Secret of Evermore is actually a very, very ahead of its time kind of creation. Not only because of all the like, I view everything in terms of pop culture. I have no original thoughts of my own, just like Family Guy. You also have, you know, the ambient soundtrack that you guys were criticizing before. I mean, I think it's a really good and interesting soundtrack. There was nothing else like it on Super NES. Like, you know, maybe the early hours or early moments of Super Metroid where it's spooky and stuff and you've just got sort of ambient sound instead of melodies. But you just didn't hear that kind of ambient approach to music on Super NES.

That was really pretty far ahead of its time. And also the crafting system, like it's definitely flawed. but the using reagents and everything to create alchemy? Like, who did that back then? That was pretty interesting. Like, Dragon Quest, Skyrim. I don't know. Like, those would come along decades later and do that sort of thing.

But at the time, like... I mean, that's an Ultima 4 innovation. I think that's what that probably came in my guess. But, yeah, but who is playing Ultima 4 and thinking, ah, yes, I'm going to make an action RPG? I don't know. Like, still, just like, combining all these things. was, I feel like the game was kind of, you know, it just happened a little too early in some senses, but also a little too late. It's weird.

It was definitely a victim of bad timing. I will say that much. And if we want to just jump ahead directly to the soundtrack, because I was going to talk a little bit about that. Because I don't want to say it was a downside of the game. It certainly wasn't. The problem was back then we were so used to bombastic soundtracks. Like, God, there was an opera. God, dancing mad at 20 minutes on a cartridge. Chrono Trigger, God, the Undersea Palace theme is still one of my most favorite pieces of music ever composed on a video game. And this is soundtrack by, is it Jeremy Sol or Sole? I've always said soul, but I don't know if that's actually correct. It's the guy we don't talk about now. Yeah, he who shall not be kind of named, but because he was accused of rape in 2019, I will say that I don't think he's working with Bethesda anymore. I can't say for sure. but I can say this was his first, as far as I know, composition.

And from what I have dug up, apparently he was with Square because he was a bug tester on, I think, Final Fantasy 6. So at some point they realized, hey, you're really good at music. But yes, this is a very, very, see, if you don't know, and I'm sure you all know, but just in case our lovely audience doesn't know, Sewell eventually composed, God, Elder Scrolls. Yeah. That's kind of what I was getting out with the Skyron. in comparisons to, but also at the same time not celebrating a bad person. So it's challenging.

It's tricky. Why do people have? It always is. Don't even get me started on Dragon Quest. God, damn it. What is it with musicians and being charged? And Castlevania, no. Perish, I think you said it perfectly earlier when you mentioned that there's really no other

soundtrack like it on Super Nintendo, except for maybe some of, as he said, Super Metroid's early tracks. But I think, like, as Nadia was saying, I think this is a fantastic soundtrack. And I still, I often go back to it. I'm obsessed with video game music. But I think the issue was, first what you said, Nadia, was that it kind of betrayed our expectations coming off of FF6 and Kroner Trigger, which is fine in hindsight. But at the time, it was like, wait, this is what I was expecting. But also that it was just so mismatched to the game it was in.

Great soundtrack. Yeah. But it's such a lighthearted game. And the music is genuinely not just ambit. but it just has this bleakness to it, this muted bleakness to it. And it's just, it doesn't, some of the game, I guess, has that vibe to it, some of the later areas you go to in terms of the time periods. And there's definitely a, I guess, a pervasive sense of dreariness to some of the game, but I would argue that the majority of the game is much lighter-hearted than the

soundtrack would imply. Yeah. It does play to a kind of a tonal dissonance. I agree. I think this game, the soundtrack you're hearing sounds like something would be pumped out of like a PC ad lip speaker in about 1996. It's very much more in that world of like PC composition. And that kind of weird, I mean, it's running through the Super Nintendo sound chip, but it almost has that weird FM synthesis vibe to it. Yeah. That and the muted color palette. It feels like somebody played Secret Amata in 1993 and then made a Genesis game. That's a good way to put it in 1995. That's how this game feels. And to me, I mean, I can't qualify that. So maybe that's just bullshit. But it has a kind of a weird, Genesis-y American team vibe. Like, we saw some ideas here. Let's make

that. And I wonder if this wouldn't be better accepted. If Jeremy said several times this episode on the NES, on the, or on the S-NAS, I think he's nailed it. I wonder if we would accept this better if it had just come over across the aisle. Because in that library, it would hold a very different place. Absolutely. The music would not, the, like, the soundtrack just wouldn't have happened. The Genesis sound chip just didn't have the capability of, I mean, well, I'm going to give Square the benefit of a doubt and assume they're not going to, they weren't going to use

the Jim's driver, so their music would have sounded good. I was wondering about that. But, but even so, like, yeah, FM synthesis just, like, it's a totally different technology than the sampling that the Super Nies used. And the sampling and kind of that, um, soft-muted analog kind of quality to the sound is really critical to Evermore's soundscape. So, yeah, I don't think you could have done it. I mean, it would have had a cool soundtrack, I think, on Genesis.

Like, I love that sort of cold, artificial, spacey sound, but it's the opposite of, like, you know, kind of warm, ethereal super neas sound that Evermore created. Exactly. Yeah, and unfortunately I guess maybe that was one of all the fault whatsoever. Yeah, and unfortunately, I guess maybe that was one thing against it, but it wasn't its fault whatsoever. whatever. One thing I will get into is I think the game really heard itself by naming itself Secret of Evermore because just using the music alone as an example, yes, it was a brilliant soundtrack, but it was so different from Secret of Mona, which is a soundtrack I still hold near

and dear to my heart, that when you play a game that you think is the sequel to Secret of Monarch, because you have no information that says otherwise. So you want to associate the two in your head and assume one is a sequel to the other. But they're so different that to this day, I look at Secret of Evermore and say, maybe that shouldn't have been named Secret of Evermore. It really maybe, it did have a different name at one point. Unfortunately, I'm blanking on it at the moment, but it was something really weird. And I understand why it was something else. A boy and his dog.

And may as well have been. Just take the word secret of off and you've got a good title for an S&ES game. And I love that stupid cover, like big giant red thing. I don't know what that is, but I love it and I want to meet it. And there's a lot going for it. But you talk about that. I remember where I grew up, you know, regional advertising was very different then. I remember Secret of Mana being advertised on TV.

I remember Final Fantasy Adventure being advertised on TV. I don't remember even knowing there was a sequel to Secret of Mana until I saw Evermore ex post facto. And by then, I was just like, what? But if you were waiting for a sequel, I can't imagine how disappointed this game would be for you. Yeah. It just wouldn't feel right.

Especially when you factor in, you know, the knowledge that we would later come to have that, you know, there was a real sequel that Japan would get shaken in Setsu 3. And the narrative around that, through no fault of Secret of Evermore's own, the narrative around that became, oh, this is another Final Fantasy mystic quest situation where square things were too stupid to play the real sequel to Secret of Moda. You know, this is what we're getting instead. We're getting the scraps because we're dumb Americans. When that wasn't the case ever at all, it was never that. No, it was never going to be localized. Sikin Ness 2003 was a huge, huge, huge game. And something I learned much later is that when you localize text from Japanese to English, it takes up a lot more room.

So it just wasn't going to happen, especially that late in the SNA's life. But we are, see, this is a time when us desperate nerds were getting online because we were desperate for friends and people to talk to about video games. But information from overseas and even just the games in the street in general will still coming to us very slowly through magazines. So we would kind of parse out our own narratives for better for worse, saying how, as you said, Ash, oh, here comes another situation where we're supposed to get, we should get sick into Tessu 3, but we're not. We're getting this, you know, this dumb game for Americans or doing another Mystic Quest to us because, of course, we were very bitter about Final Fantasy 5 and missing out on that. Not really in favor of Mystic Quest. Again, Final Fantasy 5 is a more complicated than that, but either way, we knew Final Fantasy 5 existed, we knew we didn't have it, we knew that we got a substitute Mystic quest that was really, really dumbed down.

And it was kind of insulting to people who had, who loved Final Fantasy 4. So, of course, we had this bitterness towards Evermore through no fault of its own. And I think that was a huge black mark against it, unfortunately. Yeah, I think you're right. And at least I can say for myself, when you take that extra step that some of us did and, like, you know, import video game music, I went out of my way to import the soundtrack for Saken to Tessu 3 because, as I understood it, that was the true sequel to Secret of Mata. And it only further inflamed my kind of ingrained bias against Evermore, I guess, as a kid,

because I heard that soundtrack. And I was like, oh, this is what I was waiting for from the sequel to Secret of Mata musically. This actually is it, even though, you know, in hindsight, and I still appreciated Evermore soundtrack at the time, and certainly I do in hindsight. But when I took that extra step and listened to the soundtrack from the real sequel to Secret of Mata, I was like, God, but we didn't get this, and this is what I was waiting for. And so that kind of just further inflamed that bias, I guess. But this game does have a lot going for it. It's got a dog with laser eyes.

It's got time travel. It's got cute little set pieces. It's got perfectly decent combat through most of it. It's atmospheric. It's got good music. You know, it's a neat little game. And probably one that deserves to be revisited because I think a lot of folks probably quit halfway through.

And we'd like to use hidden gem, probably because we all grew up writing articles for the same outlets. We sure did. I don't know if it's a hidden gem, but it's at least a penny on the sidewalk. It's worth picking up. There you go. Definitely. See a penny, pick it up, and I'll tell you'll hide with luck. Why not?

Yeah, I definitely have seen a lot of the resentment directed at Evermore for stealing Secret of Manitou's spot in the Super NES library. But, yeah, like, you have to realize. that game came on such a huge ROM that it cost, what, like $9,800 yen in Japan, 11,000 yen. I can't remember exactly what it was. It was one of the really expensive games because it was on such a huge ROM that it cost a lot. And I don't think there were any games published by a third party that were that big in the U.S. Like the biggest game, I want to say, that was published in the U.S. was Kirby's Dreamland 3. But otherwise, the really big honking games like that and Star Ocean Tales of Fantasia, like localization issues aside, they were just out because the market wouldn't bear it.

They would have been so expensive that, you know, like you saw all the complaints about Fantasy Star 4 costing 100 bucks. Like if a super news game ended up being 100 bucks, there would have been rioting, there would have been, you know, pitchforks and burning buildings and things. like that, it would have been bad. By the nerds, the RPG. Well, and I think, like, I could be, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like I pretty clearly remember Super Mario RPG retailing for $69.99, which was unheard of for a Nintendo published game, because they gave themselves the luxury of a tax break, basically. Right.

Yeah, exactly. I just looked it up here, and they suggested retail price for Sigmunditsa 3 on the box is 11,400 So that's about 115 bucks Gone on it roughly And that would be American Because I paid Canadian

I paid over $100 easily For Corona Trigger and Final Fantasy I told the story a million times It was one of my favorites Where I was shopping with my parents And I was going to buy Final Fantasy 3 that day Slash 6 And I had to do something else

And my father went to pick up the game for me At Canadian Tire of all places A hardware store which sold games back in the day Because everyone did and I gave him the $115 that includes tax to pay for the game. And the woman's boxing up the game and she's like, this must be for someone very special. And my dad says, nah.

So it's one of my favorite stories. But yeah, it's seeking Dead Tepsor 3, if it ever came here. We already know what we just talked about what the price would have been. It would have been just astronomical. And we mentioned some of the games at the end of the S&A's life that did not have a hope of coming out here. Tales of Fantasia, Star Ocean. Forget it. It was just never going to happen, so here's secret of evermore.

And to our angry little minds, the story was that we just were Americans getting the leftovers once again. So we were very resentful little weasels, weren't we? We sure were. Yep. I think this is probably the segue you were probably the segue you were probably already going to make. but I think something that maybe further didn't help Evermore was that while it did improve on Secret of Mono's gameplay in some key ways, it also felt like a step back in other ways. It didn't feel like a wholesale improvement the way some sequels, like when you think of like Mega Man 2 compared to Mega Man 1, it didn't feel like a sequel that fully learned from its predecessors' mistakes, right? No, absolutely.

We will get into gameplay for sure in just a second. I do want to say, though, one thing I find very clever about Secret of Evermore is that, Just as a dog braid nerd, you are in set, you are going in a world that is set in different, quote, unquote, eras. So you have the prehistoric era, you have the antiquity. You have a gothic era and you have future era omnotopia. So for prehistoric, you have a wolf. That's what your dog is. That makes sense. For antiquity, you have a sight hound, a pharaoh hound, I think, or a greyhound, which is exactly the kind of dog breed they would have used back then. Same thing with the Gothic and the poodle. And I guess in the future we'll have to beaunt. dog so nice work there yeah nice work there i always assume that dog was supposed to be evocative of like canine like from from dr who or something i never thought of it that right oh i never thought about that yeah you know i i feel like the biggest knock against secret of evermore actually like thinking in terms of the fact that there's a dog in this game and use your companion and that's awesome but i don't think there's ever any any instance in which you can actually pet your dog in secret

of Evermore, which if there isn't, that's objectively the biggest knock against it. You can't have a dog in an entire game and not be able to pet it. Come on. I agree. That's a same. I honestly think we'd forgive most of Evermore's problems if you could play as the dog. Or if your second player could play as the dog.

Oh, Player 2, yeah. That would be so cool. Yeah. So you can't play as a second player in Eremor, right? Just to recap. Now without a patch. It's not like mana. Well, okay, there would be a patch, yeah. I don't know how fun. great. That's the great miss the point.

I don't know how fun it would be to play as the dog because the dog is more of a utility character. Yeah, it'll attack things for you, but the dog spends a lot of time sniffing for alchemic reagents. Yeah. And I don't know, like, asymmetric gameplay can be fun, but I don't know if that's necessarily asymmetric gameplay that everyone's craving. Like, I'm just going to sniff around for bits of thread or whatever while you're beating things up. You go, you go over I shall elaborate. You go over there and hit your mosquitoes with a femur, and I'm just going to smell the dirt. In my mind's time machine, inventing a sequel to Sikindenset 2, you'd be building a game around two-player gameplay from the bottom up, and the dog would have more to do.

I think that's more work. It's a talk about missing the point on the part of the developers thing. If you're going to frame this as a sequel to one of the best multiplayer games of its time. but honestly that's is that the developers fault or is it a marketing issue because I feel like you know it's a marketing issue I don't blame the developers at all for this yeah yeah like I feel like you don't play as a two player game because the dog has a completely different purpose in the game than being you know right a second player like it's there to help sort of fuel the alchemy system and at the same time it also has some some functionality in combat to help you out and back you up but that's not the idea is not for you to be like equals. It's, it's, I don't know, it's just a different game. And that's, I feel like I intuited that from the start where some, some people didn't. Not, not, that's not a dig at you, Jared. I'm just saying like, no, I feel like a lot of the complaints about the game kind of missed the, the idea that the dog is not meant to be, you know,

the sprite from secret of mana. It's meant to be like this thing that helps you, uh, develop your, your own character's magic skills. And, you know, sometimes he'll, he'll bite like an enemy dog or something. A raptor. Yeah. I couldn't agree with you enough, Jeremy. But it, but if I take myself back in time and I look at a game coming out in 1995 and two years before, a game called Secret of, I played 40 hours co-op with a friend and I had ring menus and it had two companions. And then I get my single player experience. I'm probably going to feel stilted. That's my guess. Yeah. In Fairness, I don't have any friends and I don't play video games with anyone. So that's, oh, okay. That's exciting. I'm still not playing video games with you, though. Okay, that's fair. I'm not playing video games with anyone except myself these days.

And I like it that way. Thank you very much. But I will say that the dog, to his credit, has far better AI than, see, I play a significant amount of single player. God help me. And it's, that AI was garbage. Just that was, just to remind people, you can. could not go ahead if your friends got stuck behind something. And they got stuck behind something all the time. I had a huge, huge nightmare in the sunken continent where there's a whole area full of

spikes or something that you have to cut down so you can get through. And your enemies will sit there. Sorry, your friends will sit there and get their asses kicked since they can't move beyond the stuff. And you can't move on beyond without them. But thankfully, the dog isn't like that. The dog is definitely a lot more free and loose. And it does get stuff down. Like Jeremy said, it sniffs out ingredients, it attacks things on occasion. It's a good dog-o, although I see it from Jared's point of view as well, whereas it would be a really fantastic experience for a second player if you could play it equivalent as a player. Well, and I think one other way in which the dog differs as well is not only better AI, but if I recall correctly, your dog is consistently

way stronger than you are throughout most of the game. And the dog essentially carries you to the finish line a lot in a lot of the time not completely obviously you have your alchemy but stat wise at least in my game if i recall correctly the dog was way stronger than i ever was maybe until the very end game i mean poodles they're a little mess you up poodles will mess you up man don't screw they're hunting dogs they are hunting they're retriever dogs they that's why they're shaped the way they are to keep their joints warm and uh that is dog backs today it does have a kind of a shades of, like, haunting ground to it that I like. The dog is really tough and he is really useful and he's your friend, you know, and that's a neat thing. You're not quite as helpless

as you are on haunting ground, but it's still really a neat idea. Yeah, I kind of scorned a little bit the whole, you know, boy and his dog theme, but I personally now, from my point of view, it's still a classic that you can't go wrong with. Like, I don't know if any of you have read where the red fern grows. Like, that is a story that is guaranteed to destroy you. And it is like the quintessential. God, now they think about it, all these boy and his dog things are meant to destroy you. I think the only one that won't is a boy and his dog, ironically. So it works out as a theme. It's hard to go wrong with here's a boy.

Here is your hit his dog. I always like games. I let you venture alongside an animal companion. You really can't go wrong in that regard. I think maybe, and we'll get into this right now, I suppose, is the real problem was that for me, and this is something I realized playing the game recently, Secret of Aramore is quite unbalanced and not very fun for that reason.

It's very easy to get your ass kicked early in the game. I can't remember if you can upgrade your weapons the way you can in Secret of Mata. But either way, you are outclassed for a lot of it. And I don't know if any of you remember that at all. Oh, 100%. I remember that game feeling incredibly oppressive difficulty-wise. And part of that, I think, is due to the nature of the alchemy system, which I know we'll get into more. Great, super unique system, for sure.

But so badly balanced in the sense that, you know, in Secret of Mata, you could just, you know, matching points were a refillable resource. So you could just keep casting spells to level up each spell. With alchemy, you have to have those materials. And some of those materials are really hard to come by in the early games. So you almost don't want to cast alchemy spells because you want to save them for when you need them. But then they remain weak because you're not casting them and leveling them up. And so I think that was one of the main issues with an otherwise really interesting, unique system.

That's a good point. Yeah. It's thinking about it, it's really kind of the charge versus magic points debate in a way all over again. And I don't think it suits Eremor very well, even though, as you said, it's very unique. I love the idea. But if you, you did need to cast spells to level them up, correct? So, yeah, that's just, that's not going to work out very well, especially since Secreteramana, and I think it was the same for Secretarmore as well. It was your spells that really hit against the bosses.

Yeah. Yeah. Do we want to talk about the alchemy system? Because it is very important. And it is pretty different. Although, as Jared does point out, it was something that you saw an ultimatform. But, you know, for a console-based RPG, crafting, forging, like, yeah, that's the thing now. That's, that's, you know, like a gameplay loop that just pads out the gameplay time.

Everyone, every developer loves that. It's a great way to create an artificial sense of worth for your money. But the alchemy system in this game is really interesting because basically you have spells. And in order to cast those spells, you need to find. the proper reagents for those spells and create the combinations and, you know, link them together. And if I'm not mistaken, you can either find spells like, you know, combinations in the world, but you can also sort of discover them yourself. Yeah.

But the thing is discovery is challenging because you only have a finite number of reagents. You always have to be on the lookout for additional alchemic, you know, resources. Your dog will help you sniff things out and you never know what he's going to find. Exactly. But it kind of feels like, you know, they were playing with the same idea that Squares Japan Studio would tackle a few years later with Final Fantasy 8 and the draw system. But here you know, the combination of materials. And, you know, the more you use a spell, the more powerful becomes. There's a little bit of saga going on there. And, you know, Secret of Mana did that too. But as you cast certain spells, they become more powerful. But the thing is, there are some spells, like really good spells, that you will never be able to level up because you will never find enough reagents to use them more than two or three times. There's a couple of items that I remember, you know, all this time later, I remember, like, I only found two or three of them. I'm like, well, okay, I want to cast this really kick-ass spell, but I wonder if I will ever find more of these reagents. And I never did.

So I use those spells like once. That doesn't make them more powerful. that just, you know, like, I'm sure that spell could have been godlike if I had raised it up a couple of tears, but I never had the chance. So it just feels like there were some mechanics that were very underutilized and they really needed to spend more time balancing and refining the alchemy system. Because I think it's a really cool idea and adds a lot to the gameplay and adds some strategy to the gameplay. But, you know, some of the more punishing limitations, I think, undermined the overall experience. Yeah, absolutely. And to be honest, I'm a person who has trouble using spells in the first place. So I'm like, oh, God, my MP, what shall I ever do? And no matter how many things are to restore it. And so as you said, Perish, where you have a game where it gives you like maybe one or two ingredients for casting a spell, you really don't want to cast any spells. It's not very fun. It kind of keeps you in a very tense state of mind. So I still love the idea. And, God, right now, what's the biggest game on the charts? Eldon Ring, which is all. I craft the hell in that game.

I'd like Final Fantasy 14. The crafting classes are absolutely nuts. Crafting is everything. And this is one of the first RPGs that I can think of that really kind of primitive as it was. It really introduced the idea to us. And I think it certainly deserves credit for that. Unless there was another RPG for the S&S that I'm overlooking in terms of crafting. Nothing comes to mind.

I don't tell my head. I can't think of anything. Yeah. But the problem is, you know, I think this would, the system would have worked if there were less permanence to the materials. If you had an easy way to kind of restock them and you had maybe like a max number of reagents or something, then, you know, like you could go into a dungeon and, whoa, you can only use that really powerful spell two times because that's as many of those

reagents as you can ever hold. But then, you know, you leave the dungeon and it's really easy to refresh them. And there are shops and stuff. There's like a bizarre. but they're they're not very consistent. Those are pretty scarce resources, and so it's not something you can rely on. It's not like in, you know, like a Final Fantasy game where there's towns all over the map and you can fly to one pretty easily.

It's much more difficult. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a system with potential, but also the need for refinement. Yeah. I like what Nadia said earlier, just pointing out the comparisons to, to Eldon Ring or Framsoft, that, you know, you do have crafting at Eldon Ring, you're going to find some resources, but you also have those precious, precious items of which they're a finite number in that giant big world, too. And you're just like, oh, God, when do I use it? Oh,

God, oh, God. And you can see some of that horror in this as well. Yeah, yeah, and probably guard by a giant that will step on you and kick you off the cliff as you strike the last blow. I'm not going to say that happened to me with Godfrew the grafted today. But I might have actually struck the final blow and fallen off a clip at the same time. And do you think the game counted it as a win? No. No, it did not.

Absolutely not. But I think that Jeremy did a great job kind of describing the game's issues in general or had some fantastic ideas that maybe they needed more time in the oven to cook. I doubt that the team had the luxury of time on its side given this was the end of the and yes is life. Who knows how busy Square was with other stuff? Maybe they couldn't give them the support that they needed. So you had a team that by all, for all intents and purposes,

they're very talented. And I want to point out an interview, sorry, not an interview, a review that Next Generation did. And Next Generation magazine, if you recall, hated everybody, everything, especially ArmyG's but even Next Generation said, you know what, this is not a perfect game, but this is a really promising team

and we're looking forward to seeing it comes out of it next. And unfortunately, we never got that chance. I think the team is disbanded. Of course, everyone moved on to different places. Like, again, this was a talented team. They all had potential. So we will never get a team like that ever again. And that's really a darn shame, I think. It's really a product of his time. Yeah, they're stuffed in a closet someplace with Aki Ross. That was my guess. But that's where the team was. Yeah, a lot of the team went on to establish Big Rain. The company that gave us, wow, I just totally.

blinked on. Oh, Shadow Madness. That's it. Oh. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, that was, that was a troubled game, too. Was it supposed to be like any sort of a follow-up to Evermore? No, it was, it was straight up them saying like, oh, Final Fantasy 7, we should do a game like that. Oh, dear. Oh, no. Yeah, it just had a lot of problems. It wasn't that great. It was still better than Legend of Dragoon, though. Oh, them's fighting worse as Cat and I have discover on our own.

on the Abs of the Blood God podcast. People will get very mad at you if you say that. Nice. But I'm not here to dump on anyone's love for games. Again, Secret of Evermore has its strengths. I think that, gosh, there are certain things that they could have foregoing from the start. Like, maybe I'm, this is controversial, but I feel like the Secret of Monter ring menu and maybe even the charge system as well, which Evermore had both of those. I felt like they confused newcomers more than anything than really add much to the game.

But maybe I'm alone in this thought. No, I think you're probably right about that. Straight up, I'll be completely truthful. I never really like the ring system in Secret of Mana. I've never liked the ring system in any game it's popped up in. And I don't think it's great and ever more either. I think it's a neat idea, but I think it ends up being more confusing and obtuse than anything. Yeah.

Yeah, I had a friend who I loaned Secret of Mata to because she was a huge Zelda linked to the past fan, and she had no idea what was going on. And when I thought back in retrospect, I realized, yeah, you know what? I understand why, especially I didn't give her any sort of instruction booklets. And back then, he didn't really have tutorials. He could, you can consult. So, yeah, I feel like maybe Eremor should have foregone that ring system. Again, it was another thing that tied us into Secret of Mata thinking it was a sequel to that. It didn't really help the game's case.

but if you want to sound in on that parish and or Jared, be my guest. I feel like the ring system only worked in Secret of Manna. That's it. Yeah. That's the only time it worked. And even then, it was kind of confusing. Not ruled. Yeah, I liked it in Secret of Manna as well.

It looked neat on the screen, that high-res drawing there. It just stood out and popped it a neat way. We didn't need it again. And as for the attack charging, without the mobility, it loses a lot of its mechanical utility. Like, it's there to keep you from spamming attacks. and knocking people across the screen, Zelda style. But if you don't have the foot speed and the movement ability to make use of it, if you don't have the punch to take somebody down at a proper number of blows without

having to sit there and wail away and they get torn apart, it doesn't work. And unfortunately, evermore, enemies are just too spongy. You don't hit hard enough. You don't move fast enough. And so they'd have done better with just knocking things back Zelda style. I think it would have been more engaging. No, I think I agree with that for sure Because Secretamana

For all its flaws I feel like the rhythm of hitting enemies Once you get it It's very weighty It has a really good feeling to it I still feel like Secretamana is like It feels like a good game to play

And that's one of the reasons why Like you see your first rabbiate thing I think is an adorable name And you hit it And it dies in two hits And then you level up And you can kill it in one hit It's a very good progression

That wasn't there for Secret of Evermore Secret of Eremor from the very start put you against Raptors they could take, as you said, Jared, like five hits, and they could stun lock the hell out of you. And they did. And that was very frustrating. Absolutely. I have to say, Nadia, there is one thing I'm surprised you haven't brought up about this game. One very cool thing, given that not too long ago, we ranked all the Final Fantasy 4 characters together. Oh, that is the fact that there is a really neat and so random cameo from Cecil and Rosa from FF4 here in this game. And it was really kind of a sweet cameo, too, because they're older here. They're, like, they're so in your head, you can kind of have the head cannon like, oh, you know, yeah, you see them get married at the end of FF4, but you get to see them grow older together and they're still super crazy about each other. And it's, it just gives you kind of a warm, fuzzy feeling, you know?

It was cute. So now I have a time-blank question. And then the after years came out. Does this happen? Yeah, I was going to ask, is this before or after the after years in terms of, in terms of time-line progression. Well, I thought about that, but then I was like, but then we have to bring in the after years into it. And nobody wants to bring the after years into anything. I would. I totally would. I double-dodgedyre myself.

Fair enough. I would say it's before because they don't have, maybe, you know, here's the thing. Here's what I understand. They went to whatever world Evermore is and opened up a weapon shop. In fact, Cecil gives you the bazooka, which is a weapon you could get. Yeah. Which is fantastic. And he asks you, hey, you heard of me? I've had a really famous adventure. And apparently you can tell him, no, I haven't done that, but it sounds hilarious.

But he and Rosa are married. They don't have their kid yet. So maybe my head cannon, they got married. They went to this place. I tried to open up a weapon store. It didn't work out. So they went back to Barron or whatever and decided, okay, we're king and queen again. Yeah. And then Saedor happened.

Popped out a kid and that was that. Yeah. It works for me. They're the end. Great stuff. Thank you for reminding me, Nadi. I have another thing about this game that irritates me, which is that it instantly gives you a really good weapon, the bazooka in the beginning. And then takes it away from you and hands you a bone.

Oh. And there's that. a super Metroid moment or a Metroid Prime moment. Yeah. That's only allowed in Metroid Prime at Castlevania.

Like any other time. I agree. Yeah. I agree. No. Because Castlevania and Metroid do that so well. Whereas because you

lose that stuff in those games and Castlevania you build yourself up back very quickly like, okay, well, you lost your everything, but here's a sword and you've gradually just kind of take things from dead skeleton

which I know was kind of a redundant thing to say, but you build yourself up, and by the time you're done with the lobby area, you have enough to go on and you feel confident without taking on the alchemy lab. It's not the case here where they take away your bazook and you start getting your ass kicked six ways from Sundays. You don't get that really sense of satisfactory progression, and that's worth a lot, I think. Yeah, agreed. So one of my last points here as to why the game just kind of got overlooked, a very, very simple end of the S&S's life cycle. It happened to a lot of great games, you know, RIP, Earthbound, Yoshi's Island, there's a big one that I missed. So it just, and the S&S had some really incredible games in its final years. So you were probably buying, again, Yoshi's Island and not Secret of Evermore, which again, as we've said many times already, it was a good game.

But next to what had come out already in the latter half of the S&S's life, maybe not so, maybe not so impressive. And I don't want to say exactly like just kind of landed with a wet fart, but. Because that's such a vulgar thing to say, I don't feel like it's half accurate. That was the secret of the soundtrack, all those sampled wet farts. You know, and it probably... Only the Super NDS sound chip could do it. It probably also didn't help either. That it wasn't just kind of...

It didn't really stand out against his contemporaries that released before and around it. But it also kind of paled in comparison to some of the super late era S&ES games were released after it, like Super Mario RPG. Yeah. And I just say it just kind of falls through the cracks when you, when you consider all those games it's often compared to that were released around the same time or even after it. And even before it, in Chrono Trigger's case, in FF6, it's just flanked on all sides

by games that are just more notable and far more, you know, impressive at their time. And even now, in hindsight, than Secret of Evermore was, even though Evermore is a good game that's worth playing. Yeah. It's interesting. Now that you mention that, Ash, I'm thinking about how the Supermar RPG was so many people's first RPG that they went to, and whereas Eremor got completely overlooked, even though Mario RPG came out like, God, it was almost a year later, 1996.

And I wonder why that was, if that was just because, number one, it was a more action, sorry, a more turn-based RPG with some action mixed in. Number two, just Mario, and that's what I really have to say. That's what I do. Yeah. Yeah. I can say for sure that one of my own best friends, he on principle, he doesn't like JRP's, he even hates Chrono Trigger. He has terrible tastes.

He just does. And the only Final Fantasy he likes is 12 because it's essentially Star Wars and he has the most Western influence in the series. He's super into era against JRP's in general. But he cites Mario RPG as one of his favorite games of all time because

Mario invited him into that genre in a friendly shallow, let's dip your toe into the shallow into the pool kind of way. And I think that's what really got a lot of people into it who otherwise wouldn't have tried Final Fantasy or The Secret of Mana or Chrono Trigger or Dragon Quest or anything like that. Absolutely. No. And I have to say Supermire RPG to this day, even though it's not my favorite RPG, it's really well done, very tightly done. Oh, that's great. We're not talking about, again, like Eremora, which just kicks the crap out as soon as you can.

It's, as you said, it lets you dip your toe in there. It's a very, very beginner-friendly game. And of course, it has charm out the wazoo. Like, it is bright. It is colorful. Mario does not talk, but he pantomime. everything and it's still fantastic to watch. It's hilarious. So, yeah, that's just interesting that it worked out that way. But that is certainly the way it worked out. And gosh, unless you guys have some differentiating closing thoughts here, I was going to ask you, although I guess we've given our answers by this point, do you think that Secret of Evermore deserved to be kind of talked about more or does it kind of deserve to, you know, exist in its corner, this dusty corner of 60-bit RPG history.

It deserves to be talked about less, but with less prejudice. This is a game we probably wouldn't talk about if it didn't have secret of stuck on it. And it just be... Jeremy made a really great point earlier on. The fact is, this is a better game than very many of the RPGs and action RPGs that came to the platform. It is a quality video game. And for all our complaints about this and that, the other of it, you know, you were talking about the difficulty a second ago. And yet, yes, it's really hard.

Was that them looking at Mystic Quest, going, we'll show you. You know, complain about Mystic Quest, we'll show you, fine. Well, this is going to be a hard game. I don't know. But I do think that it deserves more love for its good parts, and it deserves far less notoriety for its flaws. That's a good way to put it. That is definitely a good way to put it for sure.

And I also think the answer to that, at least to some degree, depends on who you are. I mean, I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend Secret of Evermore just to anybody, right? I don't think it's something that everybody needs to go out of their way to play, not even close. But if you are a scholar of games or you are super into game for the 16-bit era and you want to have the full context of all the games that came out in that era and want to be able to talk about it, you know, if you love the kind of thing the Secret of Evermore is or tries to be and you care about the history of games, absolutely you should play it. It's definitely worth playing. It's pretty good. It's just not necessarily required playing, I think, outside of that bubble or maybe a slightly wider bubble than that. And Mr. Paris, what do you think? Let's see. No, I feel like it's okay not to focus a lot on Secret of Evermore because it is ultimately kind of like a little video game Galapagos. Like, it sets an evolutionary dead end. It didn't really influence it.

anything else. It definitely showed some influences, but at the same time, it tried to be different. I don't know. Like, it's just this little thing that happened in video games, kind of a one-off, despite its kind of legacy connections. And I'm okay

with that. It doesn't need to be revered necessarily, but it's still pretty darn good. I like the description to use their video game Galapagas in that. That's great. You know, maybe don't, like, walk all over it and put your hands all over it because it'll, you know, just don't do that. But it is certainly worth observing and studying. And we were talking

about, say, for example, the crafting. And I can't exactly say, oh, the games looked at this and started crafting. It didn't happen that way. And you guys mentioned something about Ultima 4 having the same crafting system. So I guess maybe it kind of took it from there. But yeah, it just existed, didn't it? It was its own little dimensional pocket, which is very appropriate considering the theme of the game, which is kind of like, you know, dimensional hopping. So bravo, bravo, Bradford the Secret of Evermore. You gave us a really fun, lively discussion, I think. It's not an extremely long episode, but I think we packed a full of a lot of interesting thoughts about this really, really odd game. Yeah, this was a patron request episode, but I cannot find the name of the patron who requested it. And I apologize for that. I did find an auction I won on eBay for a copy of this game, UN Squadron, and Run Sabre. And the three games combined. cost me 75 bucks.

Wow. Just to give you a hint of what year was... That was 2013. That was a long time ago. That was certainly a long time ago in the context of the youth video game market for sure. That's really impressive. So good on you. And actually, I want to correct myself earlier, I said I had a repro cart.

No, apparently my husband, like, he sent me a message saying, you bought me the genuine article. So thank you, husband, for doing that. That was very good of you. I got confused me because he also got me a repro card. part of Terranigma at the same time. Ah, okay. Yeah, which is another fantastic, well, not another fantastic RPG. It is a fantastic action RPG, and we've talked about it on Blug God and the panthe of the

bug God. Yeah. Go ahead and check that out. But for now, go ahead. Sorry, one second. We've named drop Soulblazer once. We've named drop Teranigma once. I have to name drop illusion of Gaia because it's one of my favorite games of all time.

I actually said it. I just had to make sure we said it. I was actually going to say, um, this game, there are parts of it that remind me some of the settings and environments, a lot of Illusion of Gaia. And then the conversation moved on and I forgot to say it. But yes, I agree. No, you're right. Like the historic sort of like, of course, illusion of Gaia, you were going to actual

landmarks like Ancorwaat and stuff. Yeah. And you go to different like periods of time that would have like those kinds of ruins and whatnot. So I can definitely see the why you would make that connection. And I agree, Ash, that illusion of Gaia is a fantastic game. I could talk about it for 24 hours, solid. And I will do it if you dare me.

Same. I can talk about that game forever. Maybe we should sometime. We absolutely sure. Future episode. That is a threat. And I very much mean to act on it sometime in the future. Looking forward to it.

But for now, that's it for this dog morphing episode of Retronauts. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to Parrish, Jared, and Ash for joining me. If you think this episode is cool, we have tons more content like it. Just visit the Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com for it. Retronauts for access to media that is both fun and educational. If you support us at the $3 level, you will receive early access to weekly episodes. Support the $5 level gets you episodes a week early and two exclusive episodes a month.

Now, support us at the Magic Number 64 for the opportunity to set the topic of a Retronauts episode once every six months. But as of this recording, there's one spot left. So it might not be there anymore by the time this goes up. Or it might be there. If it's there, snap it up while you can. So, Jeremy, as usual, I've kind of promoted a lot of your stuff. here, but go ahead and just kind of patch in where I missed. Sure.

I will say I have to correct myself, this was not a patron request episode. I thought it was, but I just looked through the records, and actually I've had it on the list of topics we should cover for several years. So I would explain why I can't find the request for this topic because it was my request. Thank you for fulfilling my request, Nadia. I feel like that was money well spent. I hope you were happy with it. I was.

was really enjoyable. Thank you for putting the episode together. But yeah, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite on Retronauts as Jeremy Parrish. That's this podcast. Yeah. On YouTube is Jeremy Parrish and at Limited Run Games as Jeremy Parrish. That's a lot of Jeremy Parishes. How about you, Jared? Good branding. Well, I share an office with four named Jeremy Parrish and I get to see all the Jeremy Parish. I could stomach and then some. But you can find me on Twitter at Pettycoma Jared. I make a little show called the Top 100 Games podcast. It's fun.

We have a different guest every week or months or whenever we record the thing. That guest comes on, Pixo, one of their favorite games of all time, and we riff on it. That's about all theirs to it. It's fun. It's sweet. I like it. You can listen to it if you like to. And, of course, go to Limited Run games and see the neat things we're making.

We're getting ready to open a physical retail store. I'm pretty excited. That's so cool. That's right. Yeah. That's amazing. Good luck with that. awesome. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to it. And how about you, Ash? So once again,

I'm Ash Paulson. You can find me on Twitter at my name, ASH, P-A-U-L-S-E-N. I mainly tweet about video games, video game music, dogs, and food. So if you like that stuff, definitely follow me on Twitter. And again, I'm the creator and co-founder of Good Vives Gaming. You can find us on YouTube at YouTube.com slash GVG official and on Patreon at patreon.com slash GV-V-Gaming. And it is basically me and Derek, Steve, and John from the old game exclaimed crew, reunited under a new umbrella, doing our own thing. So if you like what we did to GX, definitely follow us over at GVG. And Nadia, thank you so much again for inviting me. This has been a blast. Oh, anytime. Glad to have you on. You're always great to have on. And I owe you so much. I have like a million guest spots on good fights gaming. That's for sure. No, fair enough. Yeah. I am at Nadia Oxford on Twitter. That is all one word. And as I said, I am part of the Axel of the Block God RPG podcast, who talk about RPGs, old and new, eastern and western.

You can support us at patreon.com forward slash blood god pod. We have lots of tears for you to kind of hang out with us and watch us record our episodes live and usually a cat knocks something over and it's hilarious. So how can you say no to that? Also, I also do the Charlene Dropouts podcast, which is a Final Fantasy 14 podcast. That goes up every month, again, under the Blood God umbrella. Plus, I have written things. My husband and I wrote the Mega Man X, oh, crap, what the hell is it called?

The Mega Man X Maverick Hunter's Field Guide, which I edited. You guys did such a great job writing, and I got to edit it. It was so fun. That was a fun thing to write, and we also wrote the Robot Masters Field Guide, and hopefully more in the future. Who knows? It was great. So, yeah, thanks for editing at Ash. It was a good job. Dude, it was completely my pleasure. You and your husband absolutely killed it. It was a lot of fun. Plus, we're all just such big Mega Man nerds. It was fun to come together on that project. I agree. Yeah, it showed. So thanks again for listening. Now, go make some chemical explosions with fire eyes.

Secret of Evermore, I am the danger. Thank you.