EVO: Search for Eden (Super NES, 1992)

Time to look at a true classic from Enix. ...and by classic I mean a stiff, difficult grind-fest that is definitely an acquired taste. Despite that, there's something appealing and cool about this game that made it a lot of fun back in the day, and back in 1997 or so this was actually my rental of choice for a little while.

I pretty much permanently associate this game with New Year's Day, since I spent Jan 1st 1997 playing it and sipping egg nog.

Originally posted March 2015, revised for 2026

The translation of this game is one of its weaker aspects. It gives us some gibberish about how the sun gave birth to a solar system and gave them names. It's weird because on one hand, the game seems to go for authenticity with the various historical eras and the various evolutionary paths. On the other hand, it throws in things that'd be more rooted in Greek mythology.

Also, way to have all the planets spinning around the sun in close proximity. They're not that close in real life, and if they were, Earth would be CONSUMED BY HELLFIRE.

You're confusing kids, Enix!

It gets worse. Earth has some sort of guardian goddess that watches over it, named Gaia. She pops up to lecture on about... I'm not exactly sure what, but it sounds like life needs to develop on the planet.

Okay, now go away. Ah said git!

And that life... is YOU. Yes, YOU. She starts you out as a fish.

...I thought I told you to scram, Gaia!

We begin in a pre-prehistoric world where nearly everything is underwater. This is the first of five chapters, and all of them are very distinct from one another (aside from perhaps chapter four and five, which sorta blend together).

The overworld. Each chapter has a different overworld. This one is all underwater, but you can see the point of a land mass. That land mass intrigues the player.

The game itself is a side-scroller...and a very slow-moving one. You go around biting other creatures until they die, then eating their meat for experience points. Sorta a side-scrolling RPG. Playing as a fish (and having that full-screen mobility) is fun, and this chapter is the high point of the whole game.

Too bad it's so short compared to the rest. Do yourself a favor and at least play through the first chapter of this game just to have checked it out. The overpowered boss-fish at the end might obliterate you, but so it goes.

These jellyfish are dicks!

Basically, everything in this undersea world is operating under "RPG rules" as well as "prison rules". Everyone is trying to level up, either by defeating lots of smaller foes or getting the better of a larger foe to boost their EXP / street cred.

After quickly murdering all the jellyfish, I take a look at the evolution menu. Here you spend your experience points on a variety of upgrades... and downgrades!

Jaws are almost always the most important thing to evolve. They directly affect your biting power and are worth evolving incrementally. In other words, get the 200 point one and then the 800 point one as you can afford them, and the same goes for the jaw upgrades in other chapters.

For all the other body parts, it's good to save experience for a while and go for top-of-the-line upgrades rather than getting mid-line upgrades in the meantime that sap your exp for marginal improvements. Jaws are the only thing that I'd say should be upgraded incrementally.

You always want better attack power so you can get experience quicker for everything else. In this case, they make it very simple for you by giving you a significant attack upgrade for a mere 200 exp. This can be attained very quickly with some grinding. The 800 upgrade is something you want by the time you fight the boss of the chapter.

Wait, did I mention "downgrades" before? Yep, there are downgrades hidden in here. Not yet, but in later chapters, some of the evolutions make you worse off. The game doesn't give you any real insight as to the stats of any particular evolutions, so you never really know what you're getting until you take the leap and evolve a part.

My fish leaps out of the water, YEARNING to fly. Leap, you magnificent bastard! LEAP!

There are certainly some odd evolutions you can undertake in this game, which is a huge - probably the biggest - part of the appeal. You can create some pretty cool creatures by mixing and matching parts.

If this sort of pick-and-choose-your-parts evolution was a thing in real life, I would transform into Seth Rollins.

Meanwhile, Japanese schoolchildren the world over would give themselves cat tails, while American schoolchildren the world over would turn themselves into Japanese schoolchildren.

Behold! We have the same jaws! That's right, a lot of the parts you can evolve are on the very creatures you're fighting.

The world boss is this bastardly shark, who has probably ended more playthroughs than Margit the Fell Omen.

This thing is REALLY hard to beat if playing this game for the first time. He's extremely overpowered and can kill you in a couple of bites, even if you're fully-evolved for the chapter. And you can't just out-level it either, once you're maxed, you're maxed.

The way to win is to dodge his charge in a way that causes him to crash into a wall, then BITE 'EM ON THE ASS. Then run for your life. Then repeat.

After winning...nay...SURVIVING that struggle, our hero flops out onto land. Instead of simply dying as expected, he magically evolves into an amphibian right there on the spot. This is, of course, the work of Gaia.

You're playing God, Gaia! I've seen Nazi scientists with more respect for nature than you!

Chapter 2 takes us to the land of Pangaea, a time before continents. This is where the game takes a steep nosedive into not-as-fun, because let's just say playing as a land creature is like playing as a boulder.

I miss being a fish already. The starting amphibian form has no upgrades and slowly crawls along.

This is as high as he can jump, too. At least he's trying.

To say this is a jarring transition from the water stages would be an understatement.

The overdramatic first boss here is probably the easiest boss in the game, but you're fighting it with a severely-underpowered character at this juncture.

DEBUSTEGA attacks with a huge belly flop. Get outta the way, dammit! Get...out...of...the...and he's squashed. Man, this character is slow-moving. I can't even dodge a foe with a huge wind-up attack like this. Time to grind out some upgrades.

The upgrades take a turn for the wildly expensive at this point...and the grinding begins. Increasing body size makes you an easier target, but it also gives you more HP and attack power. Armor Body is the best defensive upgrade to work towards...and it takes a while. There are other evolvable parts, like hands/feet/tail; these make you move quicker and jump higher which is also crucial now.

After evolving quite a bit, I manage to slay Debustega. Moving on, I encounter a family of lizards who beg my mighty chimera for help.

............

That's right, I ATE THEM TOO.

Moving on, I devour roaches as the battle for evolutionary primacy continues! Give me the exp!

Our hero finds a dying amphibian who has been impaled by some sort of stinger. The game makes sure to let me know that he had a family... HE HAD A FAMILY, DAMN IT.

The perpetrator? King Bee. This bastard has been killing amphibians in an effort to deliver the world to the insects.

King Bee procedes to absolutely murder our hero. Let me just say that it's pretty awful to pit my super-slow, unwieldy character against a super-mobile flying opponent like this.

I barely manage to win by luring him into striking the wrong spot (i.e. get out of the way at the last second), much like the shark. Jump and attack, then flee.

Out in the desert, I encounter... his wife. Uh oh.

Queen Bee is even worse. This is probably the hardest fight in the entire game. She soars much higher than the King Bee, so you can't even reach her most of the time as she pummels you with stingers. Being able to jump super high is a must, and saving up a bunch of EXP for evolution-heals is a good way to get past this. Yeah, it's basically cheesing the game. You do what you have to.

After surviving that one, our hero gets transformed into a reptile and leaps onward to the next epoch. Gaia throws down a time-door to advance me forward. And yes, this means it's back to being a pathetic level 1 creature again.

Chapter 3 looks a bit different. This is the era of dinosaurs, which is kinda cool. All in all, this might be the most memorable chapter aside from the first. However, it shares all of chapter 2's problems.

...namely, you start out insanely weak, and tons of grinding is required to gain any kind of power or agility. Starting out with zero exp or power at the beginning of every chapter is probably the weakest aspect of this game, but I'm not sure how I'd do it differently.

Letting the player bring over unused exp from the previous chapter would encourage players who grind heavily at the end of chapters while screwing over players who played normally. Maybe I'd just give the player a thousand exp to get started at the beginning of a chapter.

The first thing to go for here, as usual...jaws. Brosaurus Jaws are a significant upgrade to the toothless starter. Wait... Brosaurus? I know they mean Brontosaurus, but that's hilarious. Once you have Brosaurus Jaws you can one-shot all the weaker enemies and quickly work towards Tyrasaurus Jaws. That's right, dropping the "incremental upgrade" strategy for jaws at this point. Get the first upgrade, then go straight for the max upgrade.

Tons and tons of grinding later, I get Tyrasaurus Jaws. With these, I can defeat Brontosauri before they go into attack mode (they give you three free hits before they notice you're there and smash you). These things are basically exp-pinatas, and let you quickly farm exp for all the other upgrades. It's amazing how fast the exp goes by at this point. The only really tedious part is that early point where you need to farm for jaw upgrades.

The weeks go by as the grinding continues. Enemies often go to sleep at night, letting you get the drop on them. It's cheap, but By God nature pulls no punches!

The next boss is the nefarious Prime Frog.

He unleashes HELL by sending his tiny frog minions to jump all over you while he prepares his Five Star Frog Splash.

One of the things you can evolve is a Horn. I tend to not fool with this very much, though, since it's usually a mistake. For instance, the Swordfish Horn in chapter 1 actually reduces your biting power. At this point, horns do a fair amount of damage (when charging), but they can randomly break. Here, I lost the best horn available after THREE uses. That...was not worth thousands of exp.

There's a high mountain to climb in the middle of chapter three, and I painstakingly flop my giant reptile to the top. Why? Because if you leap off the left side of the cliff to certain death...

...you evolve in mid-air. Unlike the chapter transformations, this is completely optional; it means Chapter 3 is basically the era of reptiles AND birds. Optional or not, it's advised. Bird is a lot better than reptile. Unfortunately, this also means...

...I'm back at level zero! NO! NOOOOOO!!!

That said, bird is probably the coolest form in the game overall, and the one part of the game that's probably better than the fish chapter.

It also leads to a side-stage that you don't want to miss; your beast flies through a thundercloud maze.

Emerging above the clouds into...some kind of asteroid belt, I get a temporary shot of Ultimate Bird Evolution. This form is super-formidable.

In a UFO, our hero finds an alien shooting a lizard with some kind of ray. What in the blue hell is this?

Returning to Earth, he becomes less reptillian and more bird as the evolutions go by. It seems to share a lot of parts with reptile. I will say that farming Tyrasaurus Jaws AGAIN was not my favorite. Again, though, bird is far superior to reptile.

Why build up reptile at all then? Because you have to get through Prime Frog to get to bird, unfortunately. And Prime Frog demolishes un-upgraded reptiles.

The boss of Chapter 3 is actually a bunch of foes: A squad of Tyrasaurus. Yes, it means Tyranosaurus. Why did they change all of these names? Were they afraid the dinosaurs would sue?

After defeating eight of them, meteors begin to fall on cue. Flee! FLEE!

After our hero gets warped out by Gaia, the meteors fall, killing everything in Chapter 3. Well, this is depressing.

My...My God.

This...is dark. Incredibly depressing, especially for a SNES game.

The meteor has fallen, wiping out the dinosaurs. Now, Chapter 4 takes us to an eastern hemisphere that looks pretty modern. We're leaping through eras like a champ now, and the Ice Age is fully underway. But why is there a flying castle over Mt. Kilimanjaro, and why is Mt. Kilimanjaro in completely the wrong spot?

Two chapters left, more tomorrow.