Beyond Eden Soundtrack Download For Pc [PC]
Riley Boylan
This column is \u201CRe-release this,\u201D which will focus on games that aren\u2019t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Sometimes, we focus a little too much on every single bit of a game working in order to praise it. This quest for frictionless experiences can get in the way of playing some good and worthwhile ideas contained within games that aren\u2019t up to par in one way or another. E.V.O.: Search for Eden is far from a frictionless experience: collision detection is often a mess, the story and themes aren\u2019t quite as put together as you\u2019d like, and the music veers between good and grating. Its main draw, though, is its central conceit: messing around with what is called evolution in-game, but is in reality more like contextual evolution in conjunction with user-controlled intelligent design.
There are elements of evolution in E.V.O., yes, but you\u2019re also searching for literally Eden in order to live in harmony with the daughter of the sun, Gaia, forever, so of course there\u2019s a bit of religion baked in here, too, and not all of it necessarily from the creationism/intelligent design pipeline of Christianity, either. \u201CMysterious\u201D powers can rapidly change your appearance and species instantaneously, while a higher power also has control over your ability to return from death. Some of that is just for the sake of speeding things up \u2014 you don\u2019t need to be a fish anymore and do need some legs once you make landfall \u2014 but other times, it\u2019s Gaia just going, \u201Chey it\u2019d be much more convenient if you were a dinosaur now for this next part.\u201D
Now, you don\u2019t need to be a proponent of intelligent design \u2014 the vibes-based counter-theory to evolution \u2014 to think that the gameplay system of E.V.O. is worth checking out. It\u2019s undeniably fun to experiment with changing the body or jaws or legs of a fish, amphibian, reptile, whatever, in order to set yourself up to survive the ordeal in front of you. Which, per Gaia, is a real survival of the fittest test throughout hundreds of millions of years of pre-history. She wants you to live in Eden with her forever \u2014 a decision she makes when you\u2019re a fish. But before you get there, you\u2019ll have to survive the waters, the land before plant life could change it for a wider variety of species, against dinosaurs, an ice age, and among early man. I\u2019m not sure whether to make a joke about age gaps or The Shape of Water here, so I\u2019ll just leave that up to you.
E.V.O. was completely new to North American audiences, but developer Almanic\u2019s most memorable SNES output wasn\u2019t the studio\u2019s first foray into this world. In Japan, the game is actually known as 46 Okunen Monogatari: Harukanaru Eden, and is part of a series that began with 46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinkaron. Translated, that comes to 4.6 Billion Year Story: The Theory of Evolution. One key difference for the Japan-exclusive PC-88 release that proceeded E.V.O. is that it was a turn-based RPG that was heavy on the text and story elements: its followup is lighter on both, with action and platforming the emphasis instead. As it\u2019s a PC-88 game, it\u2019s not one I can speak of in detail beyond this \u2014 someday, when I get both an emulator working well and more unofficial translations appear \u2014 but for the curious among you, Hardcore Gaming 101 has you covered.
The most significant change between the two other than the genre switch is that, in the original, you fed your experience points (known as Evo. Points in Search for Eden) into specific categories, similar to so many other role-playing games: strength, stamina, resistance, and intelligence. In E.V.O., though, you use those points on specific body parts not only to make them stronger, but with plenty of customization to consider, too. You can evolve your creature\u2019s jaws, but which jaws? Are you selecting a moderately effective set of teeth and jaws with which to use them so that you can have plenty of points leftover for a tougher, more resilient body? Or so you can focus on adding in horns to ram enemies with? Maybe you\u2019re looking to jump higher so you can attack enemies from above, so there\u2019s a need to balance your spending in order to be able to both jump and bite before foes can react to your attacks.
Not every body part is available to evolve in each time period \u2014 your hands and feet are your hands and feet in the era of the amphibians, for example \u2014 but you\u2019ve got plenty to work with each time out as is. Jaws, horns, neck, body, hands and feet, dorsal fin, tail, back of the head. Within each is a list of changes you can make, often based on characteristics of existing creatures, allowing you to Dr. Moreau your way through history with less mess than on the island. There aren\u2019t many amphibians out there in nature who were armor-plated with powerful jaws and an ability to leap high into the air with what look like dragon wings attached, but you can make it happen in E.V.O. with the right evolutions. And in the same game in which you eventually get to mess around with mammalian physiology! Don Bluth rejoice, you don\u2019t even need to be a human in order to get into heaven in E.V.O.
The one thing is that, regardless of what you focus your evolutions on, you need to make sure you\u2019re also focusing on being as strong as possible in that arena. Otherwise, good luck defeating any of the game\u2019s bosses, as they all hit exponentially harder than any standard enemies you find throughout the game\u2019s many (short) stages. It\u2019s pretty easy to tell what\u2019s stronger, at least \u2014 if the names don\u2019t give it away, the price in Evo. Points will. You can make some basic upgrades to your amphibian creature, for instance, for a few hundred points each, but to get the strongest body armor that\u2019ll help you defeat the King and Queen Bees that are ruling over the land with iron\u2026 stingers? It\u2019s going to run you 5,000 of the things. You can also increase your size or decrease it, depending on your needs.
All of these changes feed into stats that you can review, of your max hit points, attack power (Biting, Strength, Kick, Strike, Horn), defensive power, agility, and jumping ability. Mixing and matching to get a good balance is key \u2014 being powerful but too slow to do anything with that power is bad, and being nimble but too weak to make a dent in your foes is its own problem. It\u2019s important to realize, though, that some things are going to be incompatible with each other, and new additions will override the old, causing you to have essentially wasted your Evo. Points. Maybe you can\u2019t have a specific body while also having a specific set of hands or feet, or you\u2019re in the age of the dinosaurs and need to choose what kind of dinosaur you\u2019re going to be, and therefore what you\u2019re going to have an advantage in. Fish might be fish, for the most part, but you\u2019ve got dinosaurs walking on two legs and others on four legs, and they are going to have very different strengths and weaknesses to consider.
All of this customization and experimentation is both the meat and the draw of E.V.O., and also the reason to persist through its issues. Collision detection really is a mess: enemy attacks and contact take priority over your own while it\u2019s very easy to be stunned, which means you can basically pinball back and forth between two enemies who aren\u2019t even attacking you but are making contact with you until your health drains away, if you aren\u2019t careful. The threat remains even if you are careful, of course, and persists thanks to decisions like allowing you to bounce on multiple enemies, but only once per jump: so you can successfully sneak up on a foe by jumping on them, then bounce to another, but you\u2019re now open to their attacks while in the air until you land. And if you happen to land on them as you come down from that first jump, it\u2019ll be you taking damage and getting stunned.
There\u2019s also that you are sometimes going to need to grind due to the sheer power and health of the bosses you\u2019ll face, and that\u2019s a pain since there are some regions where enemies just aren\u2019t giving you much for defeating them. Even the mid-world bosses are rough if you don\u2019t take the time to both armor yourself up and find a way to excel in at least one kind of attack. Which results in you getting tons of Evo. Points from these bosses that you don\u2019t really have a use for, since you already had to gear up, as it were, to face them in the first place. At least there is one potential use for these \u201Cextra\u201D points, which is to change something unimportant about your creature\u2019s body mid-fight in order to regain your hit points: it\u2019s that or lose half of your current Evo. Points if you happen to die in battle, so you might as well make the occasional inexpensive aesthetic change just to refill your health.
There also isn\u2019t as a tight of a narrative or as cohesive of a world as there is in something like Lack of Love, which also features evolution but does so in a very thoughtful way with both gameplay and narrative tied around the idea of working symbiotically with and within your environment. E.V.O. isn\u2019t concerned with that sort of thing \u2014 again, your goal is to show up in Eden to hang with god\u2019s daughter forever \u2014 so you spend a lot of time murdering anything you can gain experience from in order to achieve said goal. It doesn\u2019t make it a worse game, necessarily, it\u2019s just something to point out if what you\u2019re looking for is different than what\u2019s on offer here.
The soundtrack is good, except for when it is not. It was composed by Koichi Sugiyama, who you know better from, oh, all of Dragon Quest: the best tracks are apparently arrangements of songs found in E.V.O.\u2019s predecessor, and the others are\u2026 worse. The songs themselves are decent in a vacuum, in the sense the sounds are not bad sounds, and there are catchy hooks to some of them. The problem is that they\u2019re very short, like someone decided that, because the SNES\u2019 sound chip was designed with very small and short samples in mind, that those short, 64 kilobyte music samples were themselves entire songs. Instead of stringing together a whole bunch of 64KB samples like Yuzo Koshiro did for ActRaiser, for instance, to create these layered, impressive compositions that went beyond the basic abilities of the tech, E.V.O.\u2019s soundtrack mostly satisfied itself with the same little clip playing again and again and again on a loop until you finish the level or lose your mind.
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