I’ve had a copy of Secret of Evermore in my Super Nintendo collection for a long time, but really never put much time into it. I had played it, but I don’t think I made any meaningful progress in it. It’s a pretty similar game to Secret of Mana, a game I love a lot, so it’s a little weird that this one didn’t hold my attention. But from seeing reviews on the internet, it does seem like most people consider this to be the lesser “Secret of” SNES game. That being said, the random number generator decided that it was time for me to take a closer look at it.

The game opens with a surprisingly long cutscene. While this is pretty normal in modern games, you didn’t really see this that often on the SNES. It shows a town called “Podunk, USA” in 1965. It seems like a pretty normal town, but as the camera travels through it, it comes upon a mansion. A dialogue box appears saying that an experiment is about to be completed. But something goes wrong and a white flash fills the screen. Cut to thirty years later, and our main character and his dog exit Podunk’s movie theater. Suddenly, the dog notices a cat and chases it, our main character, who I named Ivan Ooze, runs after.

The dog runs into the mansion we saw at the beginning, and Ivan chases after. After some bumping around, the two find a strange machine. It suddenly zaps the dog (who I would later name Alfabork), who briefly turns into three other dogs and then disappears. Next, it zaps us. It transports us to what I guess is the past. There’s a butler who escorts us to another room, past the professor who’s working on whatever that machine is, and into a room where we find a bazooka.

This is our first time really getting to play. We find a bazooka, and two drones appear to fight us. Combat is pretty simple, and if you’ve played Secret of Mana, you know exactly what you’re doing. Hitting the B button is your attack, and after doing so, a meter at the bottom of the screen pretty quickly fills up. You can attack before the meter is filled, but if you do, it won’t be as effective. The drones only take one hit to kill, so you quickly move to the next room, where you find an escape pod and your dog waiting.

The escape pod crashes you to the ground. Apparently we were in the air? We find ourself in a prehistoric forest, and Alfabork has become a massive wolf. To prove that he’s really our dog, we throw a stick for him to fetch and he brings back a bone. I guess that’s good enough. The bazooka is broken, so we equip the bone as our weapon and begin to explore.

At this point, it’s pretty clear just how Secret of Mana this game is. Hitting the Y button brings up a menu that appears as a circle around your character, and hitting up and down on the D-pad cycles through different options, such as items to use or weapons to equip. Hitting the X button does the same, but for your dog. I believe your dog is your only party member, which is a bit of a step down from Mana’s two. The only thing really missing right now is magic.

We soon find a village. It’s full of cavemen and they tell you that one them has gone missing in the swamp to the East. They also have you meet their leader, Fire Eyes, who is actually a girl named Elizibeth who is definitely not a caveperson. She teaches you the games magic system, which is alchemy. Basically, instead of using MP, spells cost items that you find. The spell she gives you, Flash, uses water and wax that you find throughout the game. That’s kind of a cool idea. She asks us to find that guy who went missing, so we head off the East.

One thing that Secret of Evermore does much worse than Secret of Mana, at least in the early going, is level design. The next section is filled with sand whirlpools (?) that will suck you into them and then release you further back in the level. It’s extremely annoying and went on for way too long. But if you get past there, you get to the first real dungeon. You have to go to a specific path, and if you choose the wrong way, the path breaks behind you and you’re forced to take a slide back to the beginning. This is not fun at all. But eventually, I made it to the boss. He’s a big bug thing with a chest cavity that occasionally opens. He killed me. Unfortunately, I never saved, so this is as far as I got. I looked it up, and apparently there was a hut in the village that functions as a traditional JRPG inn, and staying there would save my game. That’s pretty normal, and completely my fault for not looking for it.

I’ve always heard that Evermore is the weaker of the two “Secret of” games. I think that’s probably true. But I did enjoy my time with it. It’s a little weird to be so similar to Secret of Mana while not actually being part of the Mana series, but whatever. It’s an interesting game and one that I might attempt again some time in the future.