Loved Secret of Evermore as a kid

Evermore wasn't the only one. There were other really good attempts by westerners to make Jap-style RPGs in the 90s.

The main difference is that westerners didn't have things like RPG Maker back then.

u wot m8

...

You know I reckon one of the reasons Undertale got so popular was people played it either thinking it was an RPGmaker game, or expecting an RPGmaker level of quality and were surprised when it started doing shit you couldn't do in RPGmaker.

Isn't Undertale garbage though? I haven't played it

It's worth giving it a pirate.

Its pretty cool. A little too easy and the quirkiness isn't for everyone, but it has solid mechanics as a JRPG and the gameplay is plenty varied, meaning it never outstays its welcome in the 6 or so hours it takes you to complete it.

What said.

Has a kind of Illusion of Gaia feel to it, doesn't it?

Anachronox is great, but if taken seriously is only another example for OP to use. They were trying to ape FF7 with a fraction of the budget and it showed in the combat and grafix, even the cheaper ps1 jrpgs were not half as cheap.

Wish that fucker tom hall would round off the story in a book or something.

Are you telling me that I won't see the end of it ever?

You can tell that the North American team probably must have binge played all the RPG's available, at least in the States, at the time. As the game feels like it has some elements of Phantasy Star IV, Illusion of Gaia, FF6, Mana and Chrono Trigger all thrown together.

This right here probably answers OP's question about
They haven't immersed themselves in the genera of the game they're trying to create. In fact that can probably be expanded to explain why all modern retro indies and mainstream are shit at replecating the classic styles and feel.

My nigger!

Same reason japs never make WRPGs (inb4 fanboys try to pretend Demon Souls is a WRPG): they're just not wired that way. Cultural differences I assume, westerners or at least Americans idealize the individual whereas JRPGs are usually about the power of friendship and the collective. Can YOU think of any JRPGs with only one character?

Vagrant Story boyo.

Japs have been shitting out wizardry clones from the beginning of times
Dragon Warrior's main inspiration was fucking Ultima

It really apes earthbound's sense of humor and is easy as hell, but it's hardly as awful as some of the more autistic faggots here would have you believe

Demon souls?

Goddamn I can't believe anybody remembered that shit enough to post it. That said Vagrant Story was not at all a traditional RPG, it was a dungeon diver as I recall.

Then they're not very good at it. I've never played a Japanese RPG that even vaguely reminded me of a WRPG, those fuckers do not like branching paths except in the most binary possible fashion (join with one empire or another in the middle of the game, probably get the same outcome at the end) and they don't like multiple paths to solve a problem.

Actually you know what western game REALLY reminds of a JRPG? South Park Stick of Truth. That shit was basically an edgy Paper Mario.

Uhuh.

You haven't played many games then you fucking philistine
Do you even know what Wizardry is?

Are you seriously implying that Branching paths are somehow inherent to WRPGs?
Fucking Baldur's gate is linear as fuck with Resident Evil 3 having more endings and branches than that.
Almost every game in Ultima series has a single ending.
Also dungeon crawlers are fucking traditional RPGs you dullard

Yes.

The first Dragon Quest

Are there any classic RPGs with the same quality as Evermore? I feel like I've already played all the good ones and I've been in the mood for something classic.

I guess Baldur's gate, Wizardry, Goldenbox series, Ultima, Might and Magic, Morrowind, Gothic, Betrayal at Krondor, Deus Ex, Temple of elemental Evil, Diablo aren't WRPGs but Chaos seed, Seiken Densetsu 3, Star Ocean, Radiant Historia, Summon Night and Shiren The Wanderer are.

Evermore was a great game, but it wasn't Secret of Mana 2 (Seiken Densetsu 3). I'm still butthurt about it never getting an official na release.

Depends on what you liked from the game

Don't be because Seiken Densetsu 3 has really awful gameplay

I emulated it years ago and I remember liking it better than Evermore. Though Evermore's soundtrack is way better.

What.
Having little post credits spoiler scenes doesn't constitute 'branching paths' you fucking goof. As for the other WRPGs you mentioned, they feature multiple solutions to problems and plenty of player choice.

Evermore barely has any music. Most of it is atmospheric sounds and what little of it there is, its very subdued/low quality.

Gameplay wise Seiken densetsu 3 is bad because it essentially becomes a turn based game by the end with normal enemies which can one hit kill your party with you being unable to do anything about it and bosses are just trading hits until it does a fullscreen uninterruptable spell and spell casting is completely useless as it triggers even more instant spell counters which you can do nothing about. That and the companion AI is retarded with no multiplayer option like the first game makes it a serious step down in terms of gameplay.

Nigger please
Its extremely obvious you are legit retarded and haven't actually played a single game I've listed.

Oh and the game also has level scaling

Says the faggot that thought Deus Ex didn't have multiple endings?

Ah, I'm glad to see you've never actually played Deus Ex. Stop posting any time and go play it.

I have to respectfully disagree. Evermore's soundtrack is amazing.

They might explain a lot.

The whole agenda of Evermore was to test how well American developers could imitate JRPG's. This was in response to the success of many JRPG titles among gamers in the West and so Square assembled a team of people whom for many of them, Evermore was their first project. They were just as new to making video games as most of these indie developers.

I can imagine that the team must have either played many JRPG's or watched others play them and took notes and asked questions to consumers about what they liked. They probably also took notes on the differences between JRPG's and WRPG's at the time, and thus knew what to avoid that turned people away from WRPG's towards their Japanese developed counterparts. Evermore strays far away from the D&D framework for example. The whole thing with their being acts of the game's story taking place in lands based on prehistoric, ancient, and futuristic tropes and a plot involving a time-dimension machine is something they may have taken from Chrono Trigger, and I would even argue that Evermore replicated the feel of CT better than CT's own sequel in this respect. Some of the dark steampunk techno look of certain things also is clearly pulled from FF6.

But the game doesn't feel derivative, rather it can be kind of ambitious. Jeremy Soule, the composer, created a score that was very different from any of the JRPG's the game imitated, more atmospheric and spooky. The Alchemy system also was a bit more complex than the magic system in Secret of Mana from which the game largely took it's battle engine.

With other attempts by Western indie

When I was growing up, I remember my brother and I using Secret of Evermore along with Mana, CT and FF as examples of why Japanese made better RPG's, not knowing of course that it was by an American development team. Other attempts to imitate JRPG's are obviously just weeaboos imitating the last JRPG they played.

But it's also possible that the Western imitation of JRPG's being so vapid and forgettable may simply be a reflection of the quality of JRPG's today. I sometimes notice that the RPG maker kiddies put more effort into their character designs than anything else.

Back in 1995, JRPGs were popular with the gaming mainstream, and big publishers could afford to make a large-scale and polished game and release it with a fair amount of advertising.

Now, the only western studios that even care about the genre are indie studios made up of nostalgic 20-somethings who don't have to learn how to program, draw, or write well to make a profit off of tumblrfags and weeaboos on Steam.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star

I hated Secret of Evermore. Loved SoM/SD (though I felt the story was disjointed at times).

Illusion of Gaia, Lufia 2, and Terranigma were much better than SoE

Oh man, what a 90s commercial, looks like the intro to Mighty Max

That's because secret of mana was one of the very few games in development for the SNES CD, along with the 7th guest

If you aren't going to play it, at least watch / read a trusted review and/or watch a streamer or a friend play it and form your own opinion.

Indie games today are made by 1 to 5 people. Secret of Evermore (and for that matter most NES games) was made by 30+ people.

gamefaqs.com/snes/588645-secret-of-evermore/credit

except I don't have an opinion. I was just pointing out the general consensus I often see when the game is brought up. I didn't say I thought it was garbage.

Why didn't this faggot just hit Start to stop time whenever there was a fight?

Sounds like you either didn't upgrade your characters the right way, or you picked kevin, duran and hawk and went dark/dark without thinking about defense.

Yeah and that sucks; if they could do something awesome like evermore back then, imagine today, if they bothered. I imagine that, in another dimension, I'm playing Evermore 3 or 4 right now…and I hate that I'm not in that dimension, but in here, where all the hype is for games like Persona 5, which probably will be trash like 4 was.