Thatguy62

(I apologize for the first journal in what's probably months being a repost from my Tumblr, but I find the topic of it fascinating as while it's not the only issue with Evolution Worlds (i.e Evolutia, in Japan), it represents a pretty significant part of the game being axed from it.)

In a 1999 interview alongside Toshihiro Nagoshi, Shigeru Miyamoto spoke about Dragon Quest. Being the Gameplay-Forward thinker he is, Miyamoto had this interesting bit to say:

Another example would be Dragon Quest… the media talked a lot about how good the story and scenario were in Dragon Quest, and ever since then, I think there’s been a tendency to equate “good story” with “good game.” It’s not really Yuji Horii’s fault. Dragon Quest took all these numbers and expressed them via language. What I really like about it is the rhythm and how the story is paced. It’s extremely well-done. No matter how good your story is, if the rhythm of the game feels bad, no one will play it. But this is an aspect that the media never writes about.


One could argue about that quote, but it allows me to make my point about Evolutia.

The original Evolution games have a clear Ebb and Flow to their gameplay structure and overall gameplay loop. In regards to the structure, the game interchanges story and gameplay, with story segments preceding gameplay which, until the endgame of each, is usually uninterrupted by plot. Then, after completing the dungeon, you get more story scenes. It’s a simple back and forth, but Evolutia breaks it in the first half.

Evolutia’s first half only has three dungeons (and that’s being generous and calling the cut-down Kronprinz a “dungeon”). However, the game retains most of the cutscenes from the Dreamcast original. So four dungeons’ worth of storyline needs to be given to the player by the time they finish the second dungeon (thus triggering the finale of the first part), in-turn meaning that the player gets hit with quite a few cutscenes at once.

For example: In the original game, the player could go to the Society and get an assignment after Gre finished his initial lecture to Mag. In Evolutia, this scene immediately goes to Pepper Box’s intro, despite Pepper being introduced in Chapter 2 of the original game. While Pepper is available “earlier”, the player still needs to sit through more cutscenes before they can get to gameplay.

This already wrecks havoc on the game’s rhythm and pacing, but it goes even further when you factor in the gameplay loop.

Evolution is a dungeon crawler with roguelike elements. If I were to summarize the gameplay loop, I’d say that each floor in World of Sacred Device and the bonus dungeon of Far Off Promise has two-three considerations to take into account:

1. Where is the Exit?
2. Where is the Treasure?
3. Am I strong enough to beat the boss at the end?

The first question is self-evident: You need to find the exit to go to the next floor. This is actually something that the first game does better than the second, as the exit is denoted on the map (I suppose this is because the exits in the first game could only spawn in certain room types whereas the second game could, theoretically, put them in any room). You can just memorize whichever room the exit is in, but when you start getting into the more sprawling dungeon floors (especially in 2’s new game plus mode)…)

The second question is the more pressing matter. In Evolution, you have various different money sinks to keep in mind throughout the game: The Cyframe users can have their parts powered up, can have slots added to their cyframes, Mag’s debt (which, in total, I believe comes out to 300,000 dinale in both games) looms over the player and if a player chooses to bring Chain or Pepper (or Carcano, in the case of the Tower of Despair/bonus dungeon) to a boss fight, they lose a chunk of their reward (in the case of the aforementioned tower, you can lose even more if one of those characters isn’t Gre).

The main treasure that players want to find are Appraisal Items. Mag can take these to the Society where he can exchange them for cash or potential items. Some Appraisal Items even need to be combined with 2-3 other components to create another item worth much more money. Removing Appraisal from the game weakens the gameplay because the only real reason to bother with treasure is on the off-chance that you can stumble upon new Cyframe parts (which is relatively rare).

Guess what Worlds/Evolutia does!

You can’t trade in Appraisal Items in the first half of the game. I don’t think Appraisal items even spawn in the early dungeons and even if they could, there’s nothing to do with them until you get to Museville. So unless you want to gamble on the Cyframe parts mentioned earlier, the gameplay loop becomes “find exit” and “make sure you’re strong enough to beat the boss”. And then two dungeons later, it’s off the Kronprinz.

Evolution isn’t exactly a perfect game series, but I feel like the Gamecube port hurts it in various ways. The changes made to the first half do not result in a good first impression and that negative impression can easily spill over into the second half. It’d be like playing the GBA port of Sonic The Hedgehog without having played a Sonic game before, then going into Sonic 2.

So yeah, I can see what Miyamoto meant by a game’s “rhythm” needing to be good.

(Again, my apologizes for what is basically a repost, but I've been in an Evolution mood lately, so expect more of that. Or more of whatever I end up doing).