E.V.O.: In Search of Eden (SNES)

Here's your invitation
Dirty rags and body bags
Evilution

Another SNES classic and another 16-bit Gem recommended game. This game comes from Enix with music from the same creator that made all the Dragon Quest music until he died, Koichi Sugiyama. So that at least is good. Honestly, not that impressed by the game after playing through it, but the music was good.

So it starts with the sun tasking Gaia to... I don't really know. She tasks you, the player, to help her with the evolution of the species of the earth. So you start of as an eel at the beginning of life on earth in the sea, and from there you gotta eat other animals in order to get EVO-point in order to evolve different parts of your body. I assume if I had an instruction manual I might have gotten a better idea out of this system, but I didn't get one. 

But evolution is tied up by bosses at each section that you have to defeat to get through. I got to the shark boss and got trounced. It's not easy. I might think that me not understanding the evolution system is the thing that made me loose the fight. I got the most expensive upgrades and I don't know if I should have gone for high damage and speed instead of the slower but more robust fish. But guess what? I got this for my Retron-5 and you know what that means? Yes, cheats. Infinity HP. Still, the boss takes forever to get through and that's when I understood that I won't enjoy this if I play it as intended.

The game doesn't have that much to offer actually since it's basically eat for EVO-points, upgrade your character to an appropriate creature and defeat the enemies and in reality, the only enemies you have to defeat is the bosses, you can skip every enemy in the normal stages, but you need the EVO-points since every evolution change needs it, meaning it's a real grind to get enough points to upgrade. Doesn't help that you loose half of your points if you are defeated. So to avoid the grind what do you do? Infinite EVO-points! Evolve how ever you want trying to get optimal creatures... doesn't help me since the stats still seems to be very low compared to what you have to accomplish in later part of the game.

So after crawling out of the sea you begin walking with amphibians and dinosaurs until the asteroid hits. Defeat some mammoths in the ice age and suddenly you have a flying fortress with sky people that evolved with the help of some crystals they got. The insects in prior age also mentioned having been given crystals so Gaia believes someone is tampering with Earths evolution... like we are doing I assume? You enter the final age right before mankind and fights several crystal bearing enemies, like the Rogan in the sea that are killing of the whales and the lizard people... beside the conspiracy theories, I get flashbacks to Ys VIII and the different extinction events they showed.

Right before Eden, the final area where the lizard people live you gotta defeat Cro-Maine which I believe is a pun on Cro-Magnon, the name for the early human race. Glad my biology and history knowledge from school still recall these facts. You fight through the lizard people and face of against the big boss, a one-cell abomination called Bolbox that have taken every crystal and evolved to the thing it is.

Kill it with fire!

After a very long fight (I had evolved into a human at this point, and that had somehow locked me into continue being a human for the rest of the game) trying to fight of Bolbox and the harder minions he spit out I stand triumphant looking out over Eden as Sol, the sun, grants me intelligence and the start of human civilisation. And then we see the ones handling out crystals to try to speed up the evolution of Earth.... martians. Damn aliens. Overall, it's an interesting game, but the grind and difficulty over a, in reality, very shallow game makes it to much to stomach for my taste.