New Games on The Great Games Experiment http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/css/logo.jpg en-us Secret of Evermore, released in North America on September 18, 1995, is a role playing video game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System video game console. The game was created by Square Co., Ltd.'s new development house, Square USA.

The story of Secret of Evermore revolves around an anonymous teenage boy and his dog, whom the player may assign names of up to fifteen characters each (a tremendous amount at the time, when names were typically six characters or shorter). In the beginning of the game, the boy, who has a penchant for B-movies, is leaving with his dog from a matinee in a small town called Podunk, USA. Upon leaving the theatre, the dog begins to chase after a cat in the street. The boy hurriedly follows his best friend, finally reaching a large, abandoned mansion. When the dog begins to chew on some wires in a hidden laboratory, the pair soon find themselves transported to the mysterious world of Evermore.

Throughout the course of the game, the player explores Evermore's main areas, many corresponding to different epochs of Earth's history: Prehistoria is an area with dense jungle and primitive men; Crustacia is a land of pirates; Nobilia remembers the Roman Empire and Ancient Egypt; Gothica draws on the Middle Ages; and Omnitopia is a futuristic space station.

In each of the four areas, the boy will encounter a citizen of Podunk involved in the original experiment gone awry 30 years ago in the same mansion where the boy and his dog were transported to Evermore. The player will learn that the regions are manifestations of those citizens' personal Utopias. The boy's ultimate goal is to escape from this fantasy world and return to his hometown of Podunk.

The game shares two major surface similarities with Secret of Mana: It uses a freshly coded interpretation of that game's ring-based menu system, and it requires the player to control multiple characters one-at-a-time. The player guides both the boy and his apparently shapeshifting dog through Evermore, free to switch between characters and sometimes forced to do so to solve various puzzles.

A unique element to Secret of Evermore is its system of magic. Rather than using a traditional system of collecting magic points and using them to cast learned spells, the boy must, with the help of his trusty dog's nose, find various ingredients that may be used to perform alchemic formulas which the alchemists across Evermore teach him; the rarer the ingredient, the fewer times a particular spell may be cast.

The boy wields four different styles of weapons throughout the game: sword, spear, axe, and bazooka. His Bone Crusher is roughly categorized as the first sword. Each type of weapon has different characteristics; for instance, the spears at a high enough level may be thrown at an enemy across the screen, while the swords and axes can cut swaths of destruction around the boy's vicinity. With the exception of the Bone Crusher, all swords, axes, and spears may cut through vegetation. The boy operates the bazooka for the first battle of the game, but abruptly loses it and only receives it again at Ebon Keep to utilize against the deadliest monsters near the end of the game. Each category of weapon has four versions (one for each world the boy visits), and repeated use of them can increase their levels to a maximum of three, unlocking a new charged attack move with each level. The bazooka has three types of ammunition, each more destructive than the last; no charged attacks are possible, and when ammo runs dry, the bazooka can be swung as a weak club.

Although both the boy and his dog are playable characters for the majority of the game, Secret of Evermore is a single-player game.

]]> 02 Mar 2007 06:32:08 Secert of Mana was a game modeled more after the Legend of Zelda than the typical Square RPG. It was also one of the first action RPGs to allow for multi-player simultaneous play with two or three players.

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