Evolution - The World of Sacred Device Review

This game was really short, but I enjoyed it. Story-wise it did not impress me, but I thought the characters were charming and it was fun to read what the characters and the denizens of its world had to say. The gameplay was fun, if you enjoyed the battle system of Final Fantasy X, this one features a similar system where you can see all turns, and certain moves can delay monsters or reduce cooldown of your party members. Also, the game has a row system where you can place your party members on the front (best attack, worst defense), middle and back (worst attack, best defense).

The way character progression works is, besides level ups, party members earn points (I forgot what they're called) which you can spend on new moves during battles, and certain characters use a technology called Cyframe, having parts parts (each one has their own moves) that you can switch and upgrade. Non Cyframe-users have fixed moves. Despite all that was said here, the game felt simplistic.

This game only features a town that functions as a hub where you can talk to people, and their conversations change over the course of the game. The main dungeons feature floors with randomized chunks, if you've played Dark Cloud, it's almost the same thing, and it does get a bit tedious, the game lacks variety as it felt like I only fought the same 7 enemies with palette swaps for most of it. There are no random encounters, you have to approach the enemies. When descending to each floor, you can make a temporary save that quits the game, and it's erased the next time you load it. You can leave the dungeons by finding teleporters present in certain floors, and going back sends you 2 floors up from where you left, though the game was easy enough that I never felt the need to do that after the first time.

Anyways, that's really all I have to say about it. It's a charming, but deceptively basic game that I think is worth playing if you want to, it doesn't overstay its welcome as its length is like a cigarette butt for a JRPG. The characters are fun and the antagonist is a creep that you can't help but wish he'd go away everytime he shows up. The music is also good, here's my favorite track. It was composed by Masaharu Iwata, if you don't know him, he did music for Final Fantasy Tactics and others by the legend Yasumi Matsuno, as well as several Vanillaware games I want to play in the future.