Every Early JRPG in One! A Review of Evoland (Game’s Over Reviews)
The credits are rolling on Evoland, a unique JRPG so heavily inspired by early The Legend of Zelda Games, early Final Fantasy games, and Diablo that if I owned any of those properties I’d have an urge to sue.
Watch the rest of the Game’s Over Video Game Reviews here at this YouTube playlist.
This is game’s over, the video game review series where I talk about a game immediately after playing it. I take no notes during the playthrough with the logic being that what I remember about the game is probably what I should talk about. What you’re listening to now is my post-game word vomit and what does that say about me that I care enough about video games to almost put in some effort to talking about them? Put your answers in the comments below. What does that say about me?
So, yeah, I’d be all fired up on sue-juice if I was Nintendo, Square Enix, or Activision Blizzard, but then I’d play Evoland and be so absolutely charmed by its approach that I’d forget all about that nasty legal business and I’d instead be honored that I owned something that a small team of developers loved so much that they decided to create essentially a playable love letter to those games. But being honored doesn’t pay the bills does it? So quickly I’d be back into courtroom mode, and that would last a few months as I prepared documents and gaveled cases and foreclosed presidents, you know, lawyer stuff, but then one day, just as a my screenshot button (which I now call the evidence clicker), just as it was about to shuffle loose its mortal conductive rubber button pad my kid, whose name I had forgotten at this point, what with all the late nights of lawyering, would approach me, cautiously, of course, because by this point in our relationship I’m more of a stranger than the housekeeper, whose been handling all the homework and bedtime story-reading lately, and this child I barely remember would say “dad, I played that game you’ve been throwing darts at. You know, it’s actually pretty good. It makes me want to grow up to be a successful video game developer,” and at that moment I’d pause. My defenses would fall. I’d look to my piles of documents and all of the Evoland recordings I’d for some reason burned to DVD, probably for the dramatic majesty of it, towers of them barely upright, and even those audio recordings I have of the developers, Shiro Games, talking about loving video games like loving those games counts for exoneration, and I’d juxtapose that chaos on my desk with my kid’s growing smile and I’d realize…my kid’s an idiot.
Not really. Evoland is actually quite fun and never approaches thievery as far as I’m concerned. This is a game whose primary purpose feels almost educational, and in the way a historically relevant company couldn’t sue a history textbook publisher for including applicable historical notes about the company, I can’t imagine the inspiration sources here, Nintendo, Square Enix, and Activision Blizzard, would dare threaten legal action against Shiro Games. Except Activision Blizzard, they, they kinda suck these days.
Evoland is both a visual and a mechanics history lesson of JRPGs dating back to the Gameboy era. Throughout the game, the player unlocks new visual and gameplay elements, and each time I’m reminded just how amazing each generational jump was. And not just in terms of graphics. When Evoland granted me the ability to walk in more than just the four cardinal directions, I immediately wondered how the hell we put up with such a limitation for so long. The obvious answer is, of course, it was all we knew. Ignorance is bliss, and all that. But giving the player such restriction and such freedom in such a short time is probably going to make it very hard for me to ever go back and play an NES era top-down JRPG. That’s an unfortunate side effect of this game, as I’m sure the developers would prefer that the players develop a greater affinity for the games that inspired them to create Evoland. But give someone diarrhea immediately followed by solid stool and they aren’t going to want to go back to diarrhea no matter how much you praise diarrhea for the good times it brought you in your formative years.
Music Credits
- Pump Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
