My favorite takes place in a time anomaly where physics are broken. Near the end, you trek through some cool, creative dungeons. Puzzles start out simply, but by the end of the game, there are some surprisingly in-depth ones. The game has lots of dungeons, and many of them have legitimately fun puzzles that make good use of the tools available to you. One of the best dungeons in the game has you constantly switching between all three eras to take advantage of the changing sprites and differences in time. It's pretty gated, you don't have a ton of opportunity to "trick" the system, but it still feels pretty cool when you do it. You can go to the future to steal a house key to enter a house in the past, create a paradoxical airship by giving a completed prototype to its inventor, alter history by changing the tide of a war, and a lot of other neat uses of what seems like a simple concept.
While a good chunk of the game has you doing what the plot demands, the final segment is a semi free-form exploration quest that has you constantly swapping back and forth between the eras to take advantage of the differences. The use of time travel is quite cool, if heavily borrowed from Chrono Trigger. You might encounter descendents of people you've helped or go back in time to twist up the future. More importantly, there are hundreds of years between each era, so the same area becomes drastically different if you go to the past or future. An object may be bigger in the fully realized 3-D era and a simple one-block sprite in another. The different eras have different physics as well as different linear time. The past is 8-bit, present is 16-bit, and future is Dreamcast-style 3-D graphics, but the visual changes aren't just for show. It's a minor issue, but I'd much rather have seen each puzzle-solving tool as its own independent thing instead.Įvoland 2 is mostly set in three different time periods - past, present and future - which are represented by different art styles. That means if you use Menos to attack, you have to wait before you can solve a puzzle, or if you use his attack in the wrong place, then you must wait before using it again. Every attack has a cooldown to prevent it from being spammed, and the cooldown is global across all characters. These are the primary tools you'll use for dungeon exploration, but tying your tools to your attacks is a little annoying. Velvet uses an ice gun that can also freeze objects and create paths across ice. Menos performs a ground smash that can also destroy objects. Fina provides a powerful line-attack that also knocks over objects and activates switches. All three effectively become charge attacks for Kuro. There are three party members who join your party, though occasionally, you recruit a temporary fourth member. Rather than getting tools, you get partners. The dungeons may have different gimmicks, but once you've learned to move and swing your sword, you've pretty much learned all of the basic mechanics. Kuro doesn't get much in the way of new upgrades or powers. Early in the game, you unlock 2-D dungeons, where Kuro can jump and shoot a beam from his sword. You've got a sword slash and … that's about it. You control Kuro as you adventure through the various dungeons. Some are subtle and genuinely amusing, and others are incredibly overt and feel tacked on the contrast between the two can be jarring.Įvoland 2's main genre is a Zelda-style action-RPG, but it has more in comparison with something like Illusion of Gaia. Most of the jokes are video game references. The plot is amusing enough, but when it descends into parody, that actually works against it.
The story wouldn't do well as a serious plot, but the jokes and lightheartedness help to get around some of the awkward writing. You can point to quite a few plot points that pay homage to different games - Chrono Trigger in particular - and they're remixed enough that they do a good job of selling the idea. The game feels very much like an old-school RPG in a lot of the right ways. Before long, the paradoxes mount and history is changing, and the pair must figure out a way to set things right before time itself is destroyed.Įvoland 2 is a grab bag of various JRPG clichés, but it actually works. While attempting to stop him, Kuro and his new friend Fina are sent hurling through space and time. Along the way, he learns that a young demon boy is harnessing an ancient power to destroy humanity to avenge the destruction of his people. As with all good JRPG protagonists, he wakes up with amnesia and is promptly set on a quest to discover who he is. It's all time travel by a young boy named Kuro. The title Evoland 2: A Slight Case of Space Time Continuum Disorder tells you almost everything you need to know about the game.
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