It's always interesting to go back into From's catalogue and just see they have always been iterating and never stopped. Evergrace is kind of like them transitioning their first person action titles into third person, with somewhat success(?). The game feels underdeveloped I guess?, or maybe it was design just the amount they wanted. Definitely feels like they just popped out a PS2 game and thats it.

However, it has cool ideas that don';t really get super extrapolated on. Weapons/Armour can have spells attached to them, and they all cost durability (much like DS1 weapons with special attacks). There is a pair of shoes that can hover slightly, but its literally only useful in one spot of the game.

I also really like the stamina system in this game. It is a power bar like Minecraft or From's older titles. Wait for it to be full to do 100% damage with your weapon. It is tied to your health however, so the lower your health is, the quicker it actually takes to recharge your bar. This doesnt affect weapon damage, just makes your swing rate higher basically. Trade off having low healthy, for fast recharging stamina dps.

The main problem this game has is the camera though. Fromsoft had not yet learned what to do with the right thumbstick and made it so that flicking it any direction swaps your weapons. I admit it is better than pressing Circle then Triangle really fast, but man, this game really needs Lock On or better camera control. The secret boss of The Shadow Tower (Oh yes, its also in the game) is in this fucking arena with zero depth perception (Hello 4 king) with this fucker who flies and if your camera gets fucked up, oh well! Most of the time the camera is fine but sometimes it is really really ass.

The story is whatever, not much to it I think. The music of course is wonderful and beautiful and other wordly and godlike. So over this game is kind of not a fully developed game I feel, but its still pretty cool for what it is.

aos que clamam, que se divertem e postam fotos de diferentes looks quando jogam fashion souls, eis que aqui reside a semente que deu origem a todos vocês: o jogo onde toda mecânica tem a ver com usar roupas, para abrir portas, para avançar na história, para ganhar desconto no shop.

esteticamente maravilhoso, super experimental e criativo, além da parte das roupas dá pra ver que o pessoal lá na from gosta de um tipo especifico de jogo e Evergrace é um dos melhores nisso - os ambientes misteriosos, que te pedem pra que você decore tudo, as armadilhas, os diálogos (direção das cenas é linda, pelo amor de deus), tudo o que há de escondido e as respostas pra quebra-cabeças vem de um ímpeto de criar conversa e experimentação com as mecânicas. recém joguei Armored Core 3 e pensei que eles tavam com tudo já na época do ps2, mas não esperava que estivessem com tudo assim.

this game is incredibly cruel and unkind to the player. it's full of stupid bullshit, cryptic bullshit, annoying bullshit, and the controls are weird to get used to, but damn if i didn't come out enjoying myself. the music is great, the story is pretty interesting, and the whole aesthetic just speaks to me. the ending credit roll cutscene goes stupid hard for some reason too, i think they intentionally transferred it to VHS and back just for the aesthetic like holy shit??? yo??? based???

good game/10 but you might hate it if you can't handle the garbage it throws at you

also play it in japanese if possible!! idk how well the english version holds up, but probably not very well given that it's published by agetec

Update:

Actually after posting that review I went and did Yuterald's route up to the point it was the same as Shaluami's. I thought Yuterald's (Darius) route suffered from similar problems to Shaluami's - simple yet tedious puzzles (the mirror cave - once you knew how to make colors from the mirrors, execution was easy, but you had to run a lot.) I enjoyed the above-ground areas, actually, the whole opening sequence up to entering the castle was cool and really felt like proto-Souls.

After learning more about the story - it's kind of funny how similar FromSoft games are story-wise? Is the same person just writing the same story about some dude with a sign being trapped in some weird world? Anyways, that's kind of funny. While minimal and rushed, I did like Yuterald and Shaluami... kind of sad to find out Evergrace 2 is a prequel, but that should also be interesting, I hope...

Original review:

Reviewed here: https://melodicambient.neocities.org/posts/2022-02-13-Evergrace-Thoughts.html

Overall, unique opening vibes (for sharline, idk about darius). Interesting ideas in the combat system but not executed that interestingly. Felt rushed

Evergrace is everything I want out of the medium of video games.

Is this game "good" in a traditional sense? Obviously not. The game's tumultuous development from PS1 to PS2 resulted in the game's scope being both cut back, while awkwardly lurching onto new hardware. This game feels like a strange in-between of a 5th and 6th generation more than any Dreamcast release. The plot is borderline incomprehensible, with key elements of the plot being inaccessible to western players due to a translation error with the bestiary. There are sections of the game that drag on for entirely way too long. There's an eclectic collection of stats that are incrementally increased through random drops from specific enemies, and even then, you won't notice a ton of difference. Combat is slow and lurching. Instant death from the environment is a constant. This game isn't polished in the least bit.

You'll never play anything like it though. Not even the sequel. I got this game at launch, and it's stuck with me throughout my adolescence as this alien, haunting action RPG.

Noriko Meguro's character designs and art direction are in full display here. I love how each of the game's disparate cast are instantly recognizable, even translated in game as clunky as they were. The world design is phenomenal. The skies have this pale, sick green color to it. The "trees" are bare spikes that have more in common with nuclear waste disposal barriers than foliage. There aren't any stock enemy designs in the game, the closest thing to "recognizable" is a boss halfway through one of the routes that looks like a demon. It feels like all the best parts of Morrowind's art direction, without ever feeling the comfort of a more mundane space. The entire game feels like you're in this hostile, foreign land and any respite you manage to get is something you carved out.

Kota Hoshino's soundtrack supersedes the game's own popularity at this point. The in game tracks differ from the original compositions, but not in a way that detracts from the overall experience (if anything, having a more subdued version of Buying Goods at Palmyra is a good thing). Nothing else, outside of Forever Kingdom, sounds close to this game. The highlight track for me would be Omen, the track that plays during the final cutscene/credits track. There's an assumption that this game has a very amateurish, ill fitting soundtrack (partially due to the fact that, as of the time of creating the OST, Hoshino didn't know how to read sheet music). I think the soundtrack fits the game's atmosphere perfectly, and I have a ton of respect for Hoshino for pulling off what he did.

The voice acting, at least in the english version, is terrible. It's never boring, and it instantly careens into "so bad it's good" territory. Don't play with an undub, it's part of the fun.

The large collection of equipment (that you can and HAVE to visually customize!) is admirable. Some players might have reservations with the fact that none of it is going to look like you're walking around in a traditional western suit of armor, I find that to be a selling point. Each piece of equipment also comes with abilities that have either use in combat, or exploration utility that you can only come across through experimentation. While a lot of my runs do devolve into "hit everything with the piko-piko hammer that's inexplicably the second best weapon in the game" (no prizes for guessing the first, check the dev), you are rewarded for exploiting elemental weaknesses and dressing for success.

The story requires external reading to fully understand, due to the game being the car crash that it is. That being said, fully understanding what this game's story isn't impossible and was rewarding to piece together, and unique enough to where I don't want to talk much more about it here. The main "antagonist" never shows up in the game at all and is mentioned only a few times.

All of this adds up to a game that's resonated with me since I picked up a copy back in 2001. A lot of this review just devolved into me saying "damn this game is weird" twenty different times, but I've played so many games and very few of them have such a distinct personality like Evergrace does. It's a challenging work of art to stumble through, one that requires patience. Having 100 percented the game, despite its glaring issues, it's a challenge that's rewarded me enough to call this a game I would put in my top ten. You want something different? This game will give you something different.

Evergrace é um jogo que me deixa conflituoso, de um lado ele de fato é cheio de falhas, combate é de ruim para mediano, puzzles meio frustantes mas porem contudo ele é tão unico e cativante. A musica do Kota Hoshino no seu maximo de experimentalismo, estilo artistico tão ludico que parecer ser algo de fato de outro mundo.
Evergrace talvez não seja o melhor jogo do mundo mas é com toda certeza uma peça artistica muito bonita que pela fama da from software e seus jogos souls acaba sendo esquecido de forma triste e injusta.

Evergrace is pretty disappointing. Almost everything about it feels unfinished or simply bad. I believe this game was initially being created for the PS1 and shifted to be a PS2 launch title late in development -- it definitely shows.

The combat is chunky and measured, like a 3rd person version of King's Field, but enemy movement is much faster and controlling your character's facing is much more awkward. Enemy windup is usually instantaneous and many enemies instantly and infinitely block attacks from the front, so you end up just running around them waiting for an opening. You can see From reaching towards Demon's Souls here, but with none of the precision or responsiveness. Additionally, no lock-on, bad character control, and camera control that only consists of swinging the camera (sort of, unreliably) behind you makes the game an extreme chore to play throughout.
Evergrace indexes hard on enemy resistances, to the point that enemies heal when struck with many of your weapons. You end up swapping weapons around to try to find a weakness, which is more tedious than fun. There also isn't super good UX to support the system -- I didn't have a clear idea of how to read my character and weapon stats until the very end of the game.
One interesting system is how stamina works in Evergrace. As in King's Field, your weapon does more damage if you let your stamina build to 100%. The difference is that your stamina bar is also your health bar, so as you take damage and the bar gets smaller, it takes less time for it to fill to max (though the maximum damage you do remains the same). If you are very low on health you can attack much more quickly at maximum power, creating a risk/reward sort of play that makes you feel a bit like a berserker in a very unique way even though it isn't very thematically relevant to the game.
Weapons and armor also grant you magic abilities (more as you level up your equipment), but they require and use a full stamina bar and usually delay stamina regeneration when you use them, so they usually end up just being a liability in combat, despite some interesting options and flashy effects.

Visuals here are very rough. You can see some inspired designs and concept art for the game reveals some truly unique characters and beautiful environments, but none of that is visible in game. Models are low poly, animations are stiff and often broken, and environments are often repetitive and uninteresting.
One cool aspect is a fully realized paper doll system, where the two characters you can play as will change their models for each of the pieces of armor you equip. The creativity here is obvious, with strange helmets and unique weapons and armor.
The dress-up system feeds directly into the other aspect of the gameplay, which is the puzzles. Most of these involve putting on a specific piece or specific color of gear in order to get through a door, activate an elevator, or trigger some switch. Rough translations and obscure requirements make these puzzles harder than they should be and nothing about them is actually very interesting or fun, unfortunately.

Nothing in this game makes any sense narratively. Events and characters seem arbitrary and are unexplained in a way that feels simply unwritten or unconsidered rather than mysterious and intriguing. This feels like a jumble of stuff thrown together at random, with no identifiable throughline or understandable consequences.
It isn't even that Evergrace is purposefully obscure (a technique From utilizes expertly in future games) -- it has so much to say in character dialog and cinematic events. Characters talk about events and each other without explaining or illuminating any of it or giving the player any way to understand how they are connected or what is going on. A lot of what happens seems to hint at an interesting world and place, but there is just nothing here to deliver any of it.
Doing some research into the story can give you an idea of what is going on in the game, but none of that exists for you to find while playing.

You can see some Souls DNA in the gameplay here and there are whispers of an interesting world, but none of the systems really come together. Evergrace is simply a mess to play or try to understand.
There isn't much reason to revisit this one, unfortunately.

Among the Fromsoft titles of the early 2000s, Evergrace holds a special place in my heart. The feverish atmosphere, the unique character designs, the unorthodox but soulful soundtrack by Kota Hoshino, it all comes together for the one of the most unique experiences in the Pre-souls Fromsoft catalogue. Of course the game is far FAR from perfect, the gameplay is more or less average, and the story fails to tell itself, requiring the player to 100% to even understand it. Clearly this title was a rushed launch title for the PS2, but it's still quite enjoyable in the way it came out. It's pretty amazing how the director of Evergrace Yuzo Kojima would go on to produce Elden Ring, and honestly playing through Evergrace you can see its influence not only in ER's imagery but also in gameplay mechanics found throughout the souls games. If you're a Fromsoft fan interested in their pre-Souls era, I recommend Evergrace as a place to start!

Nesse fatídico porém clássico RPG da hoje em dia consagrada FromSoftware, controlamos dois personagens, Darius e Sharline, mesmo separados ambos seguem o mesmo caminho em busca de saber o que aconteceu com eles, e apesar de divididos, seguem o mesmo objetivo: tentar entender o que aconteceu com eles e voltarem para seu mundo original. Por já ter uma certa bagagem com os jogos da From, sinto que pude aproveitar bem mais esse jogo, com claramente vários elementos que seriam utilizados posteriormente pela empresa, principalmente em Dark Souls. É fácil pegar as nuances e sutilezas que seriam polidas e trabalhadas nos títulos posteriores da mesma. Incrivelmente difícil e cansativo, mas com um twist interessante, extremamente divertido e com um mistério um tanto quanto convidativo na trama. Não consigo recomendar pra todos, mas é com certeza um ponto gigante fora da curva dos clássicos do PS2.

There's so much to say about this game that I feel like cannot properly capture the magic and ethereality that is Evergrace. It is an awkward, clunky, jank of a mess video game with the most atrocious dialogue and questionable story, BUT MAN does it FEEL so good to play. I'm not saying in the "oh this kinetically plays well," but in a "this game is so weird and unusual but I cannot find myself to stop playing and exploring its world" sense. The environmental design of this game is really unlike ANY game I've played, and I feel confident to say there really is no game LIKE Evergrace in terms of environmental design.

If I HAD to describe Evergrace though it would have to be a fever dream high fantasy type of game where the monsters are confusing to look at, the world doesn't make sense, and the people are just as confusing. Everything just looks desolate and macabre. I know with the limitations of the PS2 console there's only so many objects and NPCs FromSoftware could place without crashing the game (lord knows I've had some terrible frame drops just from more than one enemy spamming attacks at me as well), but something about that emptiness really brings out the macabre and desolate vibes that I want to say is more coincidental than intentional. The game just oozes atmosphere and surreality for days.

The gameplay is okay though. Aside from the dialogue and story which I will touch on in a moment, the gameplay while clunky and awkward functions well enough in the bare minimum aspect. It is not your usual hack and slash type of game. While you CAN hack and slash, it's more than just about how fast can you pull off combos, but being diligent and precise with your attacks because attacking is contextualized through pressure. Meaning, the harder you press the square button the harder you hit. So you can't just hit willy-nilly whenever you want and how often you want. It's weird, but I actually don't mind that as much. Seeing how FromSoftware went with their SoulsBorne games, I'd say its on brand with their programming and design. Just don't expect anything high paced like Devil May Cry.

I will say that this game is definitely not a "proto-souls" game as Kingsfield is probably more appropriate for that, but I will say that this game is probably more ideal for getting beginners into the Souls type games. The game feels like a "SoulsBorne for kids" type of game with its fun literal character customization where you can dress your character up in anything you want and the "grinding" aspect of the game isn't that tedious at all. You don't really need to grind to beat the game unlike most other games.

The story and dialogue is probably the worst aspect of the game, mainly the story as I don't know WHAT the hell went on, but it's not worse as in its not redeemable, but more as in its so bad its hard not to just laugh at it and say "well, they tried!" People speak so out of context and the dialogue often does not match what is subtitled so I found myself chuckling at how clumsy it is. I know some games you'd need to play through them more than once to understand the story, but I genuinely don't think this game is one of those stories because MAN I seriously do not know what the hell went on during this playthrough. I'm not hating though, I went in knowing that this game wouldn't be great story-telling wise. It very much is an A for effort kind of ordeal for me though.

One thing about this game that I think helps add to its "what the hell am I playing" appeal is the music. I don't think the environment alone would make this game stand out so much as it does as the music is just absolutely wild. It's a fusion of many different genres, mostly just some different styles of indigenous folk and rock music, but the compositions feel very calculated and intentional. I know the composer Kota Hoshino is a making music by ear individual rather than using theory, and I think this game GREATLY benefited from that.

Overall, I'd say this game is DEFINITELY an acquired taste to beat, but I think should be experienced by almost everyone who is into JRPGs/obscure video games as it feels like such a unique and unusual game that is lost in the sands of time, but hopefully with ThorHighHeel's YouTube video on FromSoftware video games this game will have garnered more attention!

I'd recommend this game to the following:
-Fans of FromSoftware SoulsBorne games
-Fans of JRPGs who are looking for something new and weird
-Into games with really weird visuals/music
-Video game preservation enthusiast
-oddly enough, if you like Zelda you might like this game as it does capture that same dungeon design but more unforgiving.

Excellent game, much better than I expected. Really wish I played this before now, but that's the point of going through our backlogs right?

Atmosphere is top notch, which I expect from From Software. The music was so chill, and often crazy in interesting ways. The weapon/armor/art system was cool, interesting seeing a game like this not involve leveling.

It's definitely an interesting adventure full of way different environments from each other, lot of cool 'puzzles' and a story that had me scratching my head, in a good way.

Hated most of the bosses, and often the gameplay was too simple, even for 2000 era From Software. Nothing debilitating but definitely why I might take a break before trying the sequel.

Worth a look if you enjoy video games.

So I'm just going based off of my memory here from playing this 20+ years ago... my pre-teen self despised this game with every fiber of his being. All I remember is the gameplay being atrocious, and the game being unbelievably ugly. I especially HATED the stamina/power meter going down as you ran which tied into your attack strength output... I never did get very far in this game though as I opted to play almost any other game I owned instead of this.

Color me shocked as I look and see this was one of From Software's early games... that is a crazy revelation to me. Since now when I think back on it... I see very early pre-Souls like design here. How far From Software has come since these days is honestly incredible...