Awesome / Secret of Evermore

Secret of Evermore is about a pre-teen modern boy and his dog finding himself in the perilous world called Evermore. Whether by necessity or by intuition, there are times when clear effort is shown to cool effect.

• The Raptor Attack at the start of the game shows how the developers aren't afraid to not pull punches in general. The threat jumps from appropriately named "Wimpy Flowers" straight to the erratic dinosaurs, with 4 in total to overcome. The player is allowed to be defeated in this one fight where they will be taken to the local inn if that happens, but it's very much possible to win, through the hero and dog having little more than wits to work with.
  • This in turn grants a moment to a recent blind Let's Play for actually winning the whole fight, as can be witnessed here.
• The boss battle with Thraxx lives up to its advertisement, both as the game's cover and as the first showing in the Attract Mode. Say what you will about its difficulty relative to the player's resources, but Thraxx is both the biggest enemy the hero and dog have fought so far and unmatched in size by most Secret of Mana bosses, and his threat lives up to as much, between his swarm of maggots, his unavoidable attacks that will wear down the duo slowly but surely, and the defenses for his heart to make sure the battle is not short on length. Just to further prove that the developers put their hearts and souls into this battle, they have added mechanics exclusively to this battle and the one with Thraxx's much later palette swap Coleoptera, with the mechanics having only been fully deciphered 25 years after the game's release, after active game hacking efforts at that.
  • The underlying result of Thraxx being an Early-Bird Boss is the Catharsis Factor. The hero and dog have overcome the above dangers without all that much to work with, and the player can equally find some satisfaction in managing the same with a boss who has turned some first-timers off.
  • The 25th Anniversary Balance Patch (found here) even maintains the intensity within the overall revamp. While Thraxx's Acid Rain has its damage reduced, the balance patch's creator, using his real life issues to provide a patchwork of creativity, has the maggot enemies capable of inflicting Poison, turning them into an obstacle to be more actively outmaneuvered. As a result of this, improved coherence with the mechanics exclusive to the battle, and an added option to the player via the faster weapon experience, the battle replicates the feeling that the player is the one who is overcoming dangerous odds, while encouraging the finesse of movement and innovations over the force of level up grinding and item usage.
• Salabog earns his reputation as That One Boss by being a Damage-Sponge Boss who additionally stays out of reach of melee weapons to the point where he would be a Tactical Suicide Boss if the player doesn't already have the option to use the Horn Spear's range attack, and if they don't, he's a TSB regardless because his fireball minions are also potential fodder for weapon experience. It's remarkable enough to have him be the first boss to get the Major Boss theme, even if the length of the fight is such that the 25th Anniverary balance patch, which saw fit to increase most bosses' HP values, had opted to decrease Salabog's HP instead, only keeping the expected length with the Horn Spear's usage by having the player's range attacks deal less damage.
  • Designing For's video on Secret of Evermore gets its own moment as a result of this, as although they don't show a full run of the fight, they do imply here that the dog can be maneuvered to catch Salabog with his attacks. Yes, you read right: Designing For was able to maneuver a Mighty Glacier AI into busting That One Boss, and it gets to the point to where the Patron, who mentions having used the Spider's Claw for his own playthrough, becomes impressed.
• The Volcano Slopes, as would be indicated by the video in the last entry, is the first sign of Secret of Evermore holding up after a full quarter of a century, such that the points here would be why during the Self-Imposed Challenge the aforementioned Patron, a textbook Deadpan Snarker who is disillusioned by the handling of gaming (note how he takes a potshot at Wargroove for encouraging a We Have Reserves attitude towards dogs; also note with that that a later part has the Patron mention his fear of dogs pulling behaviors on his electronic devices), would become impressed and outright inspired by a game with obvious flaws left and right. What makes the Volcano Slopes manage as much? Enemy design and placement that, among other things, encourages the hero and dog to be Back-to-Back Badasses with subtly yet clearly defined roles. This is is still in the first quarter of the game, well before all the Developer's Foresight moments would come up and when the game is still generally using ambience instead of its Awesome Music, and it cements Secret of Evermore as good beyond doubt.
• Magmar closes off the Prehistoria region as a Climax Boss, and although he is remarkably fragile for the Elizabeth twin's pet rock, he can deal terrifying damage fast if given the chance to run around. His attacks other than Heat Wave are dodgeable but not without active effort, encouraging the player to stay around the center where they would be at most threat against the monster, but if they try to play possum, Magmar can jump back into the lava to heal himself. Suffice to say that Magmar ensures that the boy and dog have to work for their victory, and by golly they do.
• Early into the Antiqua region, the hero manages on his own to travel through a scorching desert in search of his dog. His options:
  • Traveling by foot, which would gradually wear him down. Speaks for itself, naturally.
  • Taking the offer from the skeleton boatman, at the cost of an Amulet of Annihilation, which at the time is only available from a local Mad Monk offering one. The catch with the Mad Monk's offer? The boy would have to shell out 10,000 Jewels, which would be equivalent to 20,000 Talons, and either option would require killing plenty of monsters to accumulate the funds, so achieving this with what would inevitably be deliberate grinding would shock the Mad Monk into remorse where he gives the boy a unique gift that softens or possibly even eliminates the "scam" portion of the deal about the "piece of cr...a...ss jewelry."
• The hero has only a femur, a stick, and a claw for available weaponry. He goes up against a chariot rider in a coliseum fight where the peanut gallery crowd also participates to throw fruit at the hero. The hero wins.
• Horace Highwater gets a moment in his (intended) introduction: he deduces the hero to have come from Podunk, citing the hero's appearance for as much. Befitting of an archaeologist.
• What do Horace and Madronius do about ne'er-do-wells wanting to threaten the treasures of Antiqua, the very things that they would want to study? Dig pit trenches to block them off and limit the involved sites' entry to invisible bridges.
• Hall of Collosia's initial theme is the game's signature song for a reason.
• Crossing with Funny, here is the hero tearing down 2 Rogues in record time in what is meant to be a miniboss battle, keeping in mind that Rogues are the same hulking enemies who the hero had to fight on his own.
• After Aegis is defeated, the Energy Core is revealed and is about to explode, which would destroy the entirety of Nobilia with it. Horace (the real one) calls in Tiny, who uses his Super-Strength to throw the Energy Core literally to the other side of Antiqua, which is either the biggest or the second biggest of Evermore's 4 regions. "That felt good" indeed.
• Although fraudulent, the hero does make use of the inadvertently disguised dog's abrupt "victory" in the pig race to get into a castle where only important people were allowed entry.
• When the dog makes a mess of White Queen's banquet (White Queen being the evil twin of Camellia Bluegarden), how does the hero respond to White Queen screeching for the owner of "this filthy beast"? "Uh, th...that would be me." THIS displays the hero's loyalty to his dog beyond doubt.
• The developers encourage the player to achieve one one by defeating the monsters in the Ivor Tower dungeon with just the dog, one of which is a Guardbot capable of dealing quite a bit of damage to the dog. If the player does this, they are suddenly rewarded with a Defender Collar.
• White Queen and her vassal get one: despite being Neat Freaks, they predicted the hero's escape route through the castle's sewers, which it should be noted have Grimy Water, and intercepted him as a result. If White Queen didn't have plans to manipulate the hero into letting her "clean up" Ebon Keep, it is quite possible that the game would have been ended right there by tightened security.
• Defeating the 3 Bad Boys on the Shapelifters' Bridge. Sure the hero has the assistance of his dog, and the Bad Boys also subscribe to Mook Chivalry, but the Bad Boys still cast attack spells up to and including Nitro, the most powerful spell in the game.
• While Timberdrake is an Anti-Climax Boss, that can have its implication that the hero and dog are such badasses to be transcendant enough that dragons are barely a standard threat to them.
  • This in turn makes Sterling's status as That One Boss even more of a standout. Although there are still methods of cheesing him, the fact that the one that doesn't require range attacks (setting the dog to attack him using the Targeting command) still requires significant management for its efficiency. Game hacking also reveals that Sterling is WEAKER in certain stats than Timberdrake, in a manner indicating Sterling to be a Stone Wall, showing the developers' TLC, especially when after the battle, Sterling not only lives, he's still well within capable of air-delivering the hero, the dog, and Gomi to the cliffside of Ivor Tower without issue. (Granted, Gomi might have healed Sterling since he healed the hero and dog, but still...)
• Speaking of Sterling, Gomi is able to break up the fight between Sterling (again, a dragon) and the hero. Enough said.
• Verminator has been all too happy to be a run-ender, what with having 3425 HPs (more than the surrounding bosses) as a target never reachable by melee attacks and being happy to throw about spells, even having a nasty trick of double-cast. This already gets him a significant HP reduction in the 25th Anniversary Balance Patch, but not content with attrition abuse, Verminator was able to be a Luck-Based Mission by potentially casting Explosion twice in succesion both times on the hero, which would immediately spell Game Over without question, if he wasn't dealt with immediately by chaincasting, to the point where the 25th Anniversary Balance Patch also reduced the chance of Verminator casting Explosion in the first place. Yes, Verminator is such a threat that Speedruns have "No Verminator Skip" as a category where RNG can become significant.
• As for Mungola and his two puppets Old Nick and Mephista, White Queen sends them out to keep the hero and dog from more easily confronting her about her mad plans. Do they get the Major Boss theme like Magmar and Aegis did? Nope. They only get the Minor Boss theme, a show of how the hero and dog, who have overcome dragons, aren't caring about the feeble blockading attempts that a coward like White Queen would make. To further punctuate this, when the hero "stupidly" moves forward for his "reward" from White Queen, the hero just casually steps back to evade White Queen's attempt to pancake him.
• You do have to hand it to the Horace and Camellia evil twins for capitalizing upon the hero's homesickness, with the former leading the hero into a idiotic moment and the latter directing him into nearly enabling genocide. Their plans are still halted by fundamental factors, but points for trying.
• Gothica, as the arc most involved with story and even having Dark Is Not Evil in a 90s plot, has a good chunk of the game's already catchy soundtrack, and its usage is on point, knowing when to represent the involved feelings, whether it be happiness, dissonance, sadness, or hope.
• A further point of credit to the game's soundtrack is how it had been noted that the Major Boss theme has all of its instruments each on a loop of a limited number of notes that would be individually repetitive, but the whole result somehow manages to be quite catchy. It goes to show what can be done with MacGyvering.
• The point where the hero and dog get the Windwalker to traverse Evermore for a backtracking Fetch Quest is a display of how they have become so well-adjusted against Evermore's dangers. Not only can they fly around now, but enemies that once gave the heroes grief have become little more than gnats for the heroes to swat at leisure. Even Coleoptera, the palette swap of Thraxx, has her updated stats do little more than emphasize the heroes' immense growth.
• When finally meeting again with Fire Eyes after having explored Evermore, the boy brings up his (eventually proven correct) deduction that somebody must have been behind the evil twins and was likely involved with the experiment that created Evermore. Give him credit for being proactive about addressing the whole evil twin issue and smart enough to make educated guesses on what is going on.
• Let's not forget that Tinker Tinderbox, the local inventor of the medieval region, was able to make a space travel rocket in the first place.
• The dog's mobile toaster form in Omnitopia. Not only is this form sturdy, but it includes quick lasers and a mounted mini-artillery turret capable of shelling enemies into submission. Suffice to say that few enemies stand a chance against him now.
• The developers had reported about testing Omnitopia the least out of any area in the game. They were still able to sneak in moments like a case of deliberate Hitbox Dissonance that is shown here.
• Despite being blunt enough as a case of The Butler Did It that Fire Eyes' dismissal of the idea of Carltron being the culprit as Carltron being a robot only brings up A.I. Is a Crapshoot, the mystery surrounding the identity of the Big Bad is surprisingly well done. The focus on the heroes' survival story had it pushed into the background to where most players wouldn't even think about it, and the foreshadowing works decently, with a few statues of Carltron in a toga within Evermore, only one of which is commented on by a random NPC as "pretentious." It's guaranteed that you're either laughing with the parody, too busy with bigger concerns to get invested, or recognizing the hiliarity that a mere butler would be behind all the Lovecraftian threats that the heroes have had to deal with.
• The Energize alchemy formula has the hero and dog charge up their attacks fully in an instant for as long as it lasts, which most notably allows for the hero to throw his spear supercharged and the dog to shower enemies with artillery fire, both at insanely fast rates. Suffice to say why this is an 11th-Hour Superpower.
• The showdown at Carltron's Lair lives up to the standard of being the final battle. It starts off with the Major Boss theme being played for some loudspeakers, windfans, and bomb pipes putting the hero and dog under siege. Once the hero and dog disarm this line of defense, the final battle theme, a single song, plays for the rest of the entire fight as they have to contend with a series of stat-spiked threats, those being a series of upgraded raptor mooks whose individual HP matches are what you'd expect from 'Gothica bosses' and refuse to bother with Mook Chivalry; duplicate Eyes of Rimsala with even more HP and spastic spinning attacking; a clone of the dog's Omnitopia form called the Dark Toaster, as an answer to the hero/player having an excess of reliance on the dog; a far stronger version of Magmar without even the fragility that the original had; and finally, Carltron's Robot, which boasts a machine gun rocket launcher. The epicness of this has to be experienced to be believed. (Assuming you don't cheese it with Barrier, of course.)
  • The hero gets an additional medal for being the most seemingly innocuous factor in all of this and not just surviving within the risk of getting lost in the inevitable chaos, but being, if perhaps subtly, the leading factor to his and the dog's victory.
• Professor Sidney Ruffleberg achieves his own moment right after the fight: Carltron attempts to personally attack the hero in his Last Stand, but Sidney pops in, sneaks up on Carltron, deactivates him immediately, and warps him out. Yep, an old scientist gets one on the guy who blackmailed him exploiting a potential kill switch on an entire planet.
• The whole automated escape sequence. Yes, automated; the developers recognized how simplistic the navigation would have been for picking up Elizabeth, Horace, and Camellia, and so gave control to the game as one last demonstration of the hero's own intuition, a reminder of who the the player has been playing as the entire game, with the added bonus of the hero not referencing any B-movies. And at the end, the hero and dog escape last, Just in Time, to be finally home.
• In general, the hero is walking awesome. The nightmare that Evermore was had plagued 4 people all his senior for 3 decades straight. When the hero had it thrust upon him, in the timespan covering the gameplay (which has no sign of a Time Skip), he not only takes all its crud thrown in his direction well, he overcomes it, cuts it down at the source, and liberates those same 4 people as well as their created civilizations in the process.
  • Special mention to the hero's Idle Animation. It shows that he is clearly exhausted by the dangers within Evermore and wants to rest but knows that he can't do that or those same dangers will get to him. What he does is keep standing in place even when yawning. Iron Woobie this guy is.
• You have to hand it to the developers for their work: giving every NPC unique responses to the dog talking to them, plentiful cases of Developer's Foresight that go as far as to correct simple grammar for context (reference to the hero talking to Blimp whenever he falls into the nearby Nonlethal Bottomless Pit, the grammar being based on the dog being around), a swear filter that punishes a potty mouth player with more difficulty in taking the skeleton boatman's ride, and sneaking in Easter Eggs up to and including one of Carltron at Crustacia that took 25 years to even find and required game hacking to do so. Imagine what they could have accomplished if they didn't have to worry about strict deadlines and limited data space.