Good evening /v/, welcome to the continuation of our screenshot LP of "4.6 Billion Year Story: The Theory of Evolution". If you weren't here for the impromptu launch of this let's play you can catch up here >>729409736>What is this game?A primitive, but soulful DQ-like JRPG from the PC-98 era with a strange, sometimes funny, sometimes depressing plot that spans billions of years. It was developed by Almanic Corporation and published by none other than Enix. You may be more familiar with the later SNES re-imagining of this game called E.V.O. Search For Eden. In both games, you play as la creatura and strive to evolve from a fish all the way up to a sapient humanoid, while also traveling the planet and helping your wife Gaia remove any obstacles to evolution's progress across the eons. Unlike the SNES version, where you build your creature by spending points to buy different body parts, the original PC version allows the player to distribute points to 4 main attributes which give you entirely new body plans once a threshold has been met.To download the translation patch yourself or view the translated manual, get it here - https://46okumen.com/projects/e-v-o-the-theory-of-evolution/We continue our quest to take Gaia's hand in marriage on disc 3, where we have entered the Triassic period and acquired the form of one of the earliest known dinosaurs. Our goal is to visit the Fountain of Evolution in order to enter the next stage of life, but we have been warned that the fountain is full of monsters. It is also buried deep inside a water maze that drains our HP every time we take step.If you see this thread and plan to stay don't forget to give a bump :)
The maze continues to torture me with the gelatinous cubes, which steal your chromosomes first, and then your health once your gene points hit 0.
As we are no longer amphibious, we have to stop on these lily pads to AVOID DROWNING
After a lot of walking back and forth (guides are for faggots), I discovered a hidden door behind this waterfall.
We emerge from a whirlpool on top of a cliff we were previously unable to reach. Our progress finally continues.
After descending the stairs, we manage to spot the next teleporter at the bottom of the screen, but a current prevents us from walking straight down. We will have to try another path.
We successfully dodge another row of cubes.
My instincts tell me this path leads to the whirlpool, but I don't see any lily pads ahead. We will have to hope our vitality is high enough to reach the end of the path before we drown, or else we will be forced to backtrack and grind...
Once our feet touch the water, the current drags us safely towards the whirlpool!
We emerge much deeper into the maze. The water has mostly dried up now.
You can't tell, but these slime looking things have a 2 frame idle animation.
These slimes are actually the dinosaurs we met in a cave last night, now mutated beyond recognition. Was their mutation caused by the Fountain of Evolution?
For some reason, two of them changed colors after I spoke to them.
Just a few steps beyond the point where we meet our unfortunate acquaintances, we are shown a gorgeous PC-98 slideshow. Look at that dithering.
Are these guys okay?
I have a bad feeling about this, but I can't NOT drink the water considering how hard it was to get this far.
It seems to be safe?
>>729485110based evoposter
Wait you can drink more than once? Surely a second sip won't have any consequences right?
>>729486167>Fountain of Evolution>FoE>Forced Evolutionary Virus>FEVYeah Fallout and Evo are on the same timeline. It just rhymes if you stretch the definition of rhyme to mean what I want it to mean
It doesn't taste as good anymore, and we gained half as many genes...
Will our hubris drive us to attempt THREE sipps?
Oh fuck I think someone's been dropping car batteries in the Fountain of Evolution...
I just KNOW my wife Gaia peed in this fountain at LEAST once. I must drink more until I taste the sweet nectar.
...
Pro computer gamersaurus is starting to evolve!
And this... IS TO GO EVEN FURTHER BEYOND!
Millions of years later, we lose all of our flesh and begin living our isekai slow life as a humble slime. Unless... we get killed by some adventurers first?
^_^
Sadly we are not hentai slimes and therefore cannot have intercourse.
...Slime...
As you might have already figured out, this was one of the game's many game overs. It's okay though, it will just start us at the point before we reached our evolutionary dead end.
Wait, it sent us all the way back to the start of the damn maze?Good thing I have a save around the halfway point. Let's return to the fountain and try again.
We say hello to our slimy friends one last time before approaching the fountain.
We sip the fountain's water exactly 3 times and attempt to leave to avoid the game over trigger.
Nothing seems to have changed. Unless a plot trigger occurs when I leave this maze, I may have to accept that this was a red herring and the real fountain is located elsewhere.
Nani?
Could this be a villain!?
Holy shit it's an evil ojou-sama. My dick is rock hard.
The voice disappears, but we are given no hint as to where to go next. We will have to wander around.
While surviving some TOUGH random encounters along the way. Our previous choice to pump wisdom has left us with weak defenses, so every enemy can potentially kill us.
>>729488292Are there cavemen in this one? At that point you'd be able to say your rock is dick hard
We just barely kill this guy after getting stunned for two turns in a row by his Stalk ability.
This is the biggest health bar I've seen so far. Our chances of making it out of this mountain range are looking slim.
Our stats are clearly not up to par for this area anymore. We will need to return to an earlier zone and level up before attempting to finish this chapter.
Sadly I forgot to save after our conversation with the mysterious ojou-sama, so I have to walk backwards again.
Turns out there is an oasis right outside the fountain maze, so we'll grinding here after all.
See all those bumps on the left? Those are all enemies. We can theoretically walk past them, but we need to get strong enough to kill at least half to make room for kiting.
Each individual battle actually has a decently high experience reward, but the battle speed is a bit slow.Our health bar has already begun to stretch out nicely.
If Stalk (our stun ability) had a 100% success rate we wouldn't have to be afraid of anything, but sadly it doesn't.
What's that? Sitting around waiting for me to level our creature up is boring? Well sorry bro, grinding comes with the territory. This is a retro JRPG.
Our defensive stats are in the thousands now. If Endurance or Vitality reach the value shown in parenthesis, we will move along the evolutionary tree. I expect we will only be able to evolve one more time in this era before our stats are capped until the next chapter.
bump cuz effort
The sound the oasis makes when you stand on it to heal is pure ear rape.
Our stats are pretty high now, maybe we can fight these dickheads.
He nearly one-turned us after stunning us for 3 turns with Intimidate, a superior version of Stalk. Only one evolution we've unlocked in this era possessed Intimidate as a special ability. We'll have to avoid Dimetrodons for just a bit longer.
BROTHER
We are cornered...
With no choice but to beat these things. Stalk rarely works on them, so our strategy will simply be to slowly reduce the incoming damage by repeating the Defend command.
Even with full defense stacks we are still in trouble, because Dimetrodons can still stun lock us. Victory will mostly be down to luck here.
Our strategy works, but is time consuming. It will take several IRL minutes just to leave this valley and explore another part of Pangea.
I don't remember what happened last time I checked this cave, but I think it was empty. Or maybe this was the cave I met those unlucky dinosaurs that got slimed.
In any case, it appears to be inhabited by even more slimes, as well as some creatures I haven't met before.
This "courageous slime" is hearing strange voices.
This anxious slime is also hearing voices.The last Lunarian we met said that the Venusians and Martians are extinct, leaving them as this era's last space faring civilization in the solar system. If they're in trouble, so are we...
A shrine to the southwest? Seems we know where to look next.
The three fellows to the north turned out to be dinosaurs like us, and as soon as I tried talking to them another cutscene started.
>>729490078Mirror fight, awesome.
The small object next to the sun is glowing black and blue.
I can hear Gaia's theme! It's my wife!!!
My attempt to auto post seems to have broken the screencap chain, so allow me to summarize the last 8 text boxes.Earth is under attack by an extraterrestrial god Gaia calls the Devil, who calls herself Lucifer, and she killed the Venusians and Martians by causing environmental disasters and nuclear war. Now it's our turn as well as the Lunarians.
Don't ask me why the snipping tool suddenly wants to cap my browser window, because I don't know. In any case, our journey continues to the west. Before we press on, I'm going to get up and stretch my legs. Take a piss, grab a snack, bump the thread if you're still following along so we can get more frens in here.
Since our Wisdom is currently maxed, our next evolution will be via the Endurance path. I hope we get to keep our bipedal form factor.
Unfortunately we are back to walking on all fours like a chimp, but speaking of chimps, we appear to be a mammal now. This is a new development. I hope our combat ability hasn't fallen with the loss of our scaly protection.
Aw heck yeah, good to see this is still going. I was half-reading it last night, but I'm always down for EVO threads even if I never got to play the original one.
While walking the coastline to reach the western shrine, we encounter a cutscene.I cannot stress enough how much I play old Japanese PC games for the soulful graphics, because it sure as hell isn't the numpad gaming.
Never stop mate
Since my wife's theme is currently playing, I think it's obvious who the words are coming from.
Gaia's theme ->https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7hzuh9fjsIAlso we appear to have reached the end of the chapter sooner than I thought. That just proves I haven't played ahead to prepare for this LP :)
Because the chapter is over we won't be able to check the combat abilities of the dog. Sorry fellas. There are over a dozen forms I haven't even been able to show you because of how the evolution system works.The question is, which primary attribute will dictate our form for the brave new era? When we were amphibians in the previous epoch, choosing Wisdom turned us into a race of gecko NEETs that gave up on evolution, giving us a game over. I think I'll try it again and see what happens.
Nice thread anon, I tried playing through this but stopped at around where you are now so it'll be fun to see what I was missing out on. This was the first PC-98 game I played and it's what inspired me to help translate more titles on the console.>>729492412Best music track in the game (the battle theme is quite catchy too), a while back I stumbled across an orchestral arrangement of the soundtrack that was pretty well done; not sure how hard it would be to find.
We have evolved into the ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex! Badass.
Gaia is speaking to us again.
IT'S NEMESIS!
After the dialogue box disappears we're kicked off the world map and sent straight to the final zone to enter the next era.
This NPC is running around in a panic and we can't talk to them. Moving NPCs are almost always hostile so my first instinct was to run into them.
Nice water.
>>729491084ur wife a cutie m8
After pushing past a lot more of these panicking NPCs we reach our safe haven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(hypothetical_star)
Press F to pay respects
DinoGODS, our era has arrived. That last million years was pussy shit.
Not a feather in sight. The way it's supposed to be.
Sorry for that bad screencap.
So the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was... aliens? Whoa... This game rules.
>>729493650Better invest in an umbrella.
Since we know how this era ends already, I assume the next chapter will allow us to start RATMAXXING. It's time to get our bearings and start looking for enemies to fight. We must grow.
I see prey, but first let's check this cave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tl2D7TtzAs
T-thanks...
>>729493694Yes, but also no. You can actually choose to stay a lizard and go down a completely different and obviously fictional evolutionary path to becoming a homonid.There's also a big Dragon Quest reference in that chapter. You don't have to worry about missing it.
"Melons"
>>729493902
This guy is afraid of us despite being the same species. Nogainz faggot.
This rude dude decided to show off his bravery by leaping to the bottom of this cliff.
rekt
>>729494101eat him
Can this elder of theirs unlock our potential?
Damn brat, don't interrupt adults while they're talking!
>what if you played chrono trigger as the dinosaurs and fought lavos?Guess we're headed west.
If I capped every text box this boomer just threw at me it would extend this section of the LP by at least ten minutes.
>>729494363Shit man, better find your ear.
FUCK YOU
We enter our first random battle on the world map and discover something horrifying. We have no fucking special abilities! Our fight command also does no more than 3 points of damage to this enemy. In the last era wisdom gave a massive boost to special attack damage, so we ignored raising attack for an entire chapter. Now we can experience the drawbacks of being a stat specialist.Thankfully if we wander around for a while without letting other creatures kill us, the game will give us random events that hurt but give lots of genes. It's a tedious way to level up but it might be our only choice.
After getting showered in lava twice we gained enough Attack for our fight command to actually damage this Moschops. I begin to wonder if trying to activate natural disasters is actually faster than grinding mobs right now.
These fucks don't give any more points than the enemies from the last era. That took a lot of fight commands too.
I actually wouldn't mind hunting to gain EXP, except that most of the world map encounters are mice. It may surprise you to know that mice have such a high defense stat that I do 0 damage to them right now.
While wandering around looking for a fair fight I encounter another cave. Maybe I'll pop in and check it out in a bit.
>>729495002Maybe it's a high agility
I'm going to raise our Attack stat all the way to 1968 and see what happens if we take an evolution in that direction. We're pretty weak right now.
>>729485110OP you are a rad dude
Once your basic attacks start piercing their defenses these guys are really easy. They have no special ability so your only threat is the occasional critical hit.
Time to go down the rabbit hole again.
I was hoping to become a t-rex, but this guy looks really strong. I'm getting excited.
Isn't the stuff with Nemesis also in Illusion of Gaia? They call it the Chaos Comet or something like that though.
Still no special attacks? I guess it's going to be fight city for a while. It seemed like every evolution had specials in the last chapter.
>>729495515It's a much bigger tree in this chapter.
We're able to banish the RATS from our halls once and for all, but at great cost to our own health bar.
Continuing further down the Attack path we become a... herbivore???Why do I feel like letting a faceless black foreigner fuck my wife while I watch them on camera?
Bite was common to all the previous eras, but this is our first time receiving the Horn ability.
>You rammed your horns into its belly!>625 damageYeah, I think we're strong enough to continue to the next plot trigger.
>>729495872>horn breaks>you get deevolved
>>729495828He has achieved peak form.But when do we learn Fire Breath?
Before entering the cave we found, we have spent our banked points on one last Attack evolution. We've encountered our first fakemon of this era.
>>729496035Whoa, no shit?
We've met a second clan of forest protectors.
Unless... it's the same clan we befriended when we were an amphibian? Let's meet the others and get to the bottom of this.
Of course we love the forest, don't you know who we are?
Is there ever a reason given for why (You) are the only organism that lives literally forever in this game?
>>729496276(You), along with some other special beings, are a mortal servant of Gaia created to protect the planet as it evolves. She is also my wife.
I skipped a text box but this guy claims to hear the voice of the forest. The forest is afraid.
We've definitely been to this lookout before.
You said you weren't coming back, you bastard.
We ascend a different cliff to get a whiff of some forest braps.
>>729496623Pretty sure you picked up your waifu's heart there an era or two ago
The forest wants to show us some gratitude for rescuing it from gay niggers from outer space. What a coincidence, we got some evo points again!
:)
As we continue onward, we encounter even harder enemies than before. Is the game trying to tell us that we should have grinded even harder before progressing the plot? Fucking retro games...
Our two new commands are Fangs and Play Dead.
>You pierced it's throat with sharp fangs!It does 100 less damage than Horn, which is extremely disappointing. You never know if a new attack command is going to be better or worse than your old one.
>You laid down and played dead. It came closer to check on you.Play Dead seems to lower the enemy's defense, but as we discussed before those types of abilities aren't very useful for grinding.Also this guy's basic attacks overpowered my recovery and I died. I hope I didn't lose too much progress.
Guess I'll need to take a moment to skip through this part.
>>729485229hmmm, gelatinous cubes...
All the easy rats from before have disappeared. This game gives you very small windows to grind before pumping up the difficulty to the next level. It's brutal. I wanted to keep the grinding to the bare minimum but we are severely handicapped with our current stat total.
With enough patience we are able to turn Barosaurus into a valid training target.
This is one of those stat check sections where the game kills you unless you have enough vitality to cross the water without drowning. We're going to be stuck here for a while.
Another new enemy appears.
Based OP playing vidya. I used to do one of these playblogs/let's play on /v/. IIRC I did while playing Shining Force for the first time. Good game. And /v/ gave me some useful hints.Enjoy your game, anon, I actually came to know about this game via some Swedish twitter user who's into dinosaurs and gaming.
The gene rewards are higher now, but these fights take forever because I have to stop and heal after two rounds of attacks from the other dinosaurs.
The enemy version of this guy can also use Horn, and it almost killed me. Gotta escape.
This is the ONLY enemy spawner that's active in this area right now. If I can't beat whatever is here I have to walk back to one of the caves and reload the zone.
While I continue to beef up our creature, let's take a moment to visualize how underleveled we are. See all those squares to the right? Those are possible evolutions. We're in the upper half of the chart. We'd have to hit these thresholds in parenthesis several times to get deeper into the tree, and look how many points we'd need just to do so once.
>>729497669And sometimes you don't move deeper, just sideways.
With so few enemies to fight these natural disasters are really handy for gaining EVO genes.
If the RNG favors us this guy doesn't use Horn and we can kill him in 3 turns.
With our newly extended health bar we can attempt to explore the shoreline at long last.
We've reached the western coast!
>>729485110it's awesome that youre doing this and I hope you're having fun, but you're laboring under a false pretense you wont be marrying Gaia. Remember that girl fish from the start of the game? She's on her own journey of evolution
A new location to explore. Before we continue, it's time for another intermission break.>>729498159You wound me, but Gaia will always be my wife in my heart.
I remember getting fucking infuriated trying to line my character up with doors and ramps when I played this. They move so fast that just a tiny tap of the key would make them overshoot it every single time.
>>729498273underclock the emulator
This area has the spooky music from the Martian ruins, but I can't find the track on Youtube.
It's less music and more like repetitive ambient noise, like the idling machinery of a UFO.
These red tiles are fire spouts or something. Standing in them for just a few seconds can drain our entire health bar.
AW THANKS BITCH
you what mate?
THE ONE PIECE IS REAL
In case you were curious, no this doesn't do anything.
>>729499108Oops
Golem? Did the SNES game have any inorganic enemies?
The water in this alien ruin is so free of microplastics that it heals us like the oases outside.
Thanks babe
>>729499238Nope.
By triggering an Endurance evolution, we begin to look more like our previous species, but a bit more menacing looking.
>intelligent social animal that cared for its youngImagine what they could have been if the meteor didn't hit.
Oh you're teasing me huh?
A row of spike traps drained all our health right before we meet Golem. Now we have to sit here and wait for our regen to slowly kick in.
This golem is a a chuuni.
F
>>729491546>the snipping toolObligatory ShareX shill post.
How much would we get paid to process this Lunarian signal?
;_;
>>729493847He's mirin'
This game isn't always funny.
>>729494101>Parachutes are for casuals!>This ground is too soft!
This story is wild man.
Now that I think about it, it's been millions of years since we met that Lunarian huh? I can't believe they're all dead now. We'll just have to build a new master race ourselves.
This reminds me of that time white people took a bunch of mud hut dwellers and dragged them kicking and screaming into the 21st century and expected them to adapt.
If the other Lunarians fled to interstellar space then maybe they're still alive somewhere.
If this was a shitty Marvel quipfest, a talking raccoon would accidentally spill a soda on the transmitter and cause it to short circuit right at this moment.
>>729495465"boi he thicc"
>>729496276Because you were the first.
Onwards.
>>729499979
Our current species is significantly weaker than our old one... Time to grind so we can mess around with our genes again.
>>729487504>>729487558kek this piqued my interest
Oh wait, I just figured out that this is a Fight species, not a Special species.
I'm stocking up a ton of points right now since this is a really good grind spot.
>>729500848OP is evolving his own wisdom.
After messing around a bit, I found a new species we can evolve into. Let's see what he can do before using him as a jump off point for new evolutions.
Just your average fight species. Not worth taking further. Time to explore our DNA.
>>729485110Excellent thread OP, that's a very nice christmas present. Thank you ! (I finally have a PC 98 emulator and a nice game for it thanks to you)
NOW we're getting into the more iconic dinosaur body plans.
i dont know whats going on but good luck anon
damn the dinosaur era is fucking long in this
Still not seeing any new special attacks come in sadly.
This game is fucking awesome thanks op
A few more points in Vitality and we get an updated sprite for our Protoceratops.
We ride the VIT train even further and we change into this guy.
I was told that if I keep doing this I'll trigger a bad end. Naturally I wanted to lose the game on purpose.
And yet instead of triggering a bad end, I accidentally found the breakthrough point to reach the lower rung of the evolutionary tree. Cool.
Here's how far down we are on the tree.
See this special called Crush? This attack is commonly used by the herbivores in this area. It HURTS.
So naturally it's the best special attack we've unlocked so far in this era.
>>729501804Long dinosaur is long.
Even FURTHER into Vitality and we become this awesome guy. Remember Diplodocus? These guys beat the fuck out of you with their tail if you approach them from behind.
On top of being as strong as Brachiosaurus, these guys regain an ability we haven't had since we were the size of a squirrel: INTIMIDATE. If it lands your prey is stunned for 2-3 turns.
After eating several dinosaurs the game decided to stop spawning new enemies. At least disasters still occur.
Our final push into Vitality takes us even further beyond...
I AINT GIVING YOU NO TREE FIDDY YOU GOT DAM LOCH NESS MONSTAH
lel
>>729485110I played through it yesterday thanks to the original thread. It's pretty neat even though the gameplay is sort of bad. It's funny running back and forth leveling from natural disasters and running from all predators is a viable strat. I also enjoyed how the encyclopedia entries changed in the last era... that'd be spoilers for OP if I explained.>>729501436The evolution chart for the dinosaur era has like 50 fucking entries. In the credits they list references and there's a bunch of dinosaur books so it was clearly a big inspiration for them
Afer reaching the future Horn of Africa we stop at an oasis to heal. Since Vitality is a dead end our future points will be used to round out our stats before doing another evolution sprint.
owo what's this?
If I hadn't smoked all my brain cells away I'd remember what this place was called.
None of the background effects (like this smoke) have more than two frames of animation. It's either an optimization choice or a limitation of the PC-98.
How DID we get up here?
Fucking captchaI'm taking a bathroom break.
Most jarpig NPCs really have nothing interesting to say huh?
I accidentally hit spacebar. His previous line was>Oh...? And who might you be?
Why is everyone always dead or dying when we meet them? Did Gaia give us the FOXDIE virus?
That's what happens when you blink gramps just finish the motion and open your eyes again.
*hACK*
The youngsters were just casually talking about this guy nearby while he laid here dying.
>>729503798welp, that's evolution
And so we say farewell to the crusty bird nigga.The wall of sleep hit me halfway through screencapping this whole cutscene, so I think it's time to make a save file and hit the hay. Thanks for keeping the thread alive so we could make this an official LP. I refuse to give a schedule because I know I won't follow it, so just wait for the next thread to float up from the bottom of this sea of piss. I'll try to do it again tomorrow.
>>729503920thread of the year OP, good night
