Welcome back to our ongoing screenshop LP of "4.6 Billion Year Story: The Theory of Evolution".Previous thread: >>729552896>What is this game?The original JRPG predecessor of E.V.O. Search For Eden for the SNES, released on the PC-98, developed by Almanic and published by the JRPG gods themselves Enix. The game follows the perspective of a mortal creature chosen by Gaia, (You), to shepherd Earth through the entirety of its evolutionary history over the course of billions of years. You must save innocent wildlife from danger and clear obstacles to the world's continued evolution, while at the same time thwarting the machinations of a sadistic alien ojou-sama from outer space. >What's the gameplay?Battle other creatures, spam the Fight command in repetitive JRPG encounters, gain EVO (exp), and transform yourself into new species, doing your best to climb to the end of the evolutionary chain and avoiding the trap of genetic dead ends.>can I play it too?Just look up the ROM on MyAbandonware, then download the patch (along with the translated manual full of lore) here: https://46okumen.com/projects/e-v-o-the-theory-of-evolution/>where is tonight's thread starting?As you may remember, our last session stopped right after we witnessed the extinction of the dinosaurs. After taking shelter in Gaia's cave (no mammals allowed), we emerged from hibernation to find the planet frozen after the asteroid's impact debris blocked out the sun.That is where we left off, and we'll get to that tonight (hopefully), but before we actually continue that save file, I think we need to take a detour for some of the folks that find themselves confused about portions of the plot.
Remember chapter 1? When we first started this LP I wasn't using ShareX and I skipped large portions of the in-game dialogue. A lot of questions went unanswered and some anons are understandably confused. So before we get back to being a dinosaur, let's do a playthrough of the first disc on a separate save file, just until we reach chapter 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tl2D7TtzAs
I love that funky water effect that looks like your screen tearing after you disable v-sync.
Spoiler alert: he doesn't
Grandma didn't even hesitate to adopt us.
Now I can show you all the cool background effects we missed in the underwater era.
I didn't mention it before but the jellyfish is right, going too high causes you to take damage.
she cute
After we dick around for a bit a green light flashes across the screen (which I failed to capture), after which our neighbors start acting like assholes.
Joke's on you gramps we always get the first attack, and your health bar is small enough to break with one Fight.
Take this much needed bump
I think you just need to mature a little old timer.
Imagine kicking someone out just because they happened to stroll in right before a (un)natural disaster occurs.Rude.
And so the game truly begins.
At the start of the game, the only thing we're strong enough to hunt is the humble jellyfish. I've never looked at the entire evo chart for this game so I don't know if you can even become these pathetic evolutionary dead ends yourself.
Those thousands of points we had in every attribute? A thing of the past. Our genome is as basic as it gets.Naturally the plan is to sharkmaxx our way through this chapter revisit.
>>729625231Each chapter has a (very) small handful of creatures that you cannot evolve into and only appear as enemies. Jellyfish are one of those, in fact they're the only one for Chapter 1. The Allosaurus from yesterday are another example.
See our EVO counter? Jellyfish reward ONE point per kill. I hope a natural disaster hits us soon.
Evolution time.
Since the first chapter lets you move in all directions to simulate the depth of the ocean, the game's way of gatekeeping you is by activating underwater volcanoes at specific checkpoints.
The jellyfish are all gone, leaving nothing but enemies that can kill us in a few turns, so let's search this cave for Gaia's heart.
thank you my love
With no regard to our future reliance on special attacks, we can completely ignore Wisdom for this chapter until everything else is maxed out.
Once you go deep enough into the cave, this becomes a point of no return. Not that there's much to go back to of course, since we already collected our heart.
From here we can go left back into the open ocean, or down to confront this fellow who is blocking our path forward. Let's go left first in case we find something to eat.
The natural disasters have begun to roll, giving us a needed early game EVO boost.
You can't get too close to underwater vents because they're blocked by an invisible wall.
>>729626328I'm pretty sure that's just a strong current.
Just a dead end... in fact, I think this is the exact same ocean. Which is weird, why would I want to go back if you still won't respawn the fish for me to eat?
I guess I lied about the point of no return, but it was irrelevant so let's fight this guy.I don't write a script for this shit ok?
Thankfully our stats aren't screwed up so we win this fight handily.
This is a hint I missed before, not that it's needed now.
There's a heart of Gaia placed here to guide you along the path, but it's been so long that I forgot which fork to take through the cave.
Oh right, through here.
I'm going to leave the cave before we spend these because this is a no-save area.
After squeezing past another narrow tunnel we find the secret entrance to the eastern ocean.
You ever just swim for 3 fucking days without eating or sleeping?
>>729627061Well you're not Gaia's chosen for nothing
Hunting for food to get the VIT and END we need to enter the deep ocean...
Let's not forget to stop by this cave and grab our free genes.
I'd become a NEET too if I was as strong as the shark boss. Even at our max stats for this chapter I don't think we could kill him judging by his health bar
>reproduced wellYep, that's me, the sex haver who has a lot of sex.
The deep ocean is no longer a threat to us now that we've pumped our stats up, but the random events continue to harass us on our way down.
I forgot that Wisdom increases the amount of health you regain in combat. This would be a good time to hunt some more so we don't get soft locked by the fact that we're a fucking brainlet.
Further down we meet our previous evolution. He's pretty easy though.
When I was a beginner to this game I didn't realize the ocean chapter had health spots like this one.
Of course they put all the creepy fuckers in the deep water section.
>>729628159>air heals you when you have no lungs>water heals you when you do
>Devonian to the Cretaceous and...?When did we rediscover these shits again? Were dead Coelecanths already washing up in nets in the late 80s?
Could this be a wife?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7hzuh9fjsI
And there you have it. If you need MORE context for this game's plot, refer to the manual. I haven't fully read it myself to be honest.
>>729628545If some woman brighter than the sun walked up to me and said she hadn't seen me in 3 billion years I'd be a little wary.
Before we can end the chapter and record our evolution onto land, we must battle through more hostile waters.
The fishe part in this and the other Evo are my favorite parts. They're comfy. They could have made a whole game like that.
>>729628617For a game where Lucifer is a character, you'd think "mysterious 3-billion-year-old beautiful woman glowing like the morning star who grants you secret knowledge to evolve you unnaturally fast" would be the prime candidate
Thanks to our revisiting we also get to see the full cutscenes this time. This event triggers after you speak to Gaia and move around the surface. You then get kicked to the other side of a volcano that blocks access to the previous area.
>>729628775Whenever I beat the cell stage in spore I wanted it to keep going. I think they had an aquatic stage in development but it got cut (many such cases)
Although we did considerable grinding in the previous ocean, the enemies here are still equal to us in strength. We'll need to play conservatively until we gain more EVO.
Because it is located in the final tier of fish evolution, the overpowered Coelacanth has access to Intimidate, allowing us to attack enemies or heal ourselves for two to three free turns.
Without the stats to back it up though, Intimidate can only carry us so far against such beefy foes, especially when it stops working after a couple of uses on the same enemy.
Plenty of bubbles to keep us alive down here thankfully.
>>729628937Not only was there an aquatic stage, they had plans to allow you to build a fully aquatic civilization rather than climb onto land.
>>729629271underwater civilization stage... the great war of land and sea... developing WMDs to vaporize the oceans... VGH, what could have been...
So yeah, that final evolution on the chart is end of chapter only. You guys finally managed to beat that into my head last night. We're basically just rounding out END and VIT so we don't die to random crits.
There is a part on the dino age where you have to travel on the left side of the map on a path on the water that left me stuck for so long. The hint was low tide.I kept thinking I needed to go through the grotto area but it's from the overworld map. Don't make the same mistake as me.
>>729629434OP finished that chapter yesterday.
>0 fucking dmgI think we're ready to move on.
>>729629434There's actually a hint in the manual specifically explaining how to do this and I STILL couldn't figure it out for like a half hour.
i thought OP was already a dino, what happened
This is supposed to be another END/VIT check (saltwater to freshwater) but we're way past the threshold at this point so the warning doesn't pop up.
If we take one more VIT evolution we can become this guy, but there's no point in going for sidegrades when we're about to finish the chapter.
>>729629612This is the HD remake of the original thread. OP has resorted to nostalgia baiting, we're supposed to see fishe and make this face
After crushing the final gauntlet of infinitely respawning enemies we arrive at our final destination. >>729629761You can react however you want as long as you complain about me here to keep the thread bumped
Before we record the actual ending cutscene, here's a bad end we missed last time. You get this by choosing Attack as your final evolution point.
Coelacanth end
Coelacanth is actually a trap, as your true jump to land begins from the fella we mentioned before.
And with that we end our detailed playthrough of chapter 1.I will now swap discs, load our dinosaur save, and take a short break as we have passed our 2 hour mark.
Let's all go to the lobby!Let's all go to the lobby!Let's all go to the lobby, and get ourselves a treat!
And we're back. Let's not delay any further, time to explore.
The game's not fucking around with us anymore. Endgame evolutions from the last epoch are now common roamers out here. Our T-rex did 1.5k-2k damage per turn.
Despite our already impressive appearance, we are actually at the bottom of a much greater evo tree, and so we start with NO special attacks once again. This is a WORLD OF STRENGTH.
Awright, time to go to Atlantis!
>>729631098It's also a world with the coolest possible evolutions
Like a cheating faggy isekai protagonist, our [System] has allowed us to pump our core stats so high that we can kill t-rexes with our most basic attack.
I was surprised that each fight is worth 100 points, and then I saw how high our thresholds are now.
>>729631237We are a VERY complex organism now
The t-rexes respawn, so let's get within range of all four thresholds and give ourselves a solid foundation for when we find a ton of hearts.
Not gonna read this thread since I got inspired to play it myself the other day, but good on you OP. It took me a while to give up on Dosbox-X and use Nekoproject instead, then I had to figure out how to open the damn menu with spacebar since the manual doesn't mention it anywhere.Are you supposed to move around that fast? It feels too fast like the game is overcranking, but then I hit lagspikes after a while.
Who's this homo?
>>729631415Nekoproject has a built in underclock feature that'll fix that for you
>>729631481No, no. You'll meet Homos later.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3141250/Rapax/Japanese dev making an EVO spiritual successor
Man this is cool but I'm jumping in the middle so I'm lost
Sorry for the posting delay, I had a phone call to answer + these guys take a lot more time to kill than the t rexes.
Our Endurance should be high enough to tank the rest of this area so we'll hunt while moving forwards. There's an oasis to the east.
I've been playing along and it seems like it's very hard to spec into mammals in Chapter 4. Not too proud to admit I had to savescum and just keep trying different things until I finally got down to the green hyperwolf on the bottom left of the chart. It's really easy to evolve Endurance too far and get a bad end. You get to start Chapter 5 as a squirrel instead of another dinosaur.
>I'm you but better
>>729624868>female npc being useful in argumentswew
Without special attacks to scale their damage, most of these guys are weaker than they look.>>729631997For transparency's sake I'll say that I savescum just enough to keep us moving to the bottom of the evo chart, but as you can see I didn't completely cheat to reach our original goal of becoming a human.
>>729631832Here's the previous threads>>729409736>>729485110>>729552896Might wanna start with the first half of this thread before moving onto the actual first thread. OP didn't cover much of the first chapter when he started out.
All that fighting just to reach a dead end? Thanks.
>>729632267You know what they say:>It's not the destination that matters, but the EXP you gain along the way.
With no clues to guide us, all we can do is slowly retrace our steps and find a different fork in the road.
Seems shallow enough.
Any EVO brainiacs know if your evolution choices affect random encounters?
:0
YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND M'LADY
Past here we meet more new friends. We're pretty close to evolving in all four directions, so let's eat pork.
>>729632730Man, the Devil is gonna be so mad if she figures out Gaia didn't die
If we don't evolve here we'll be in trouble, becaause Tyrannodon doesn't have the Defend command, which is necessary for fighting past hordes late game enemies.
Gaia wants us to grow wise, so let's find that tiny bit of EVO we need to level Wisdom.
DIGIBROS GONNA FREAK
No new attacks, but we regain our Defend command.
>WyrmWe can no longer ignore the fact that we're in alt-history territory from this point on. Buckle up fellas.
HE BREATHES FIRE AND IT DOES 1K DAMAGE
>>729633159The various Lunarian shit didn't already convince you of that?
>>729631787>https://store.steampowered.com/app/3141250/Rapax/The graphics are looking good>>729633159Can you become a dragon?
>>729633228Dragon specifically isn't available, but there's some very close alternatives, like that Wyrm. That's available to the player.
Wow he was strong as fuck.>>729633217lol you're right
I just noticed there's a suspiciously bipedal fellow to the east that isn't moving, which suggests he's friendly.
The northeast you say?
>>729633371>You can't just punch a saber-toothed tiger to death!Watch us.
But first let's torture ourselves with some more wyrms, because if we don't grind when the enemies are this hard it will only get worse later.
>>729633371Oho, it's time.Time for something very good.
>the enemy took a defensive stance>the enemy took a defensive stance>the enemy took a defensive stance
Do these guys taste more like elephant or pig?
>>729633731They're the distant ancestor to elephants, so probably pigs.
I found out that these guys have a new special attack that we haven't used ourselves, so I don't know the name of it.
>>729633909Or wait, isn't that the description of Crush? I'm so forgetful about the little things.
Our current progress.
These guys are still a pain, but we beat them fairly enough that I think we can start walking to the right.
Cold is the new wet in this era, and walking through this shit hurts.
The truly fucked up thing about this place is you can miss the oasis while approaching it, forcing you to overcorrect and hurt yourself even more on the ice.
What awaits us in the northeast? We'll find out after I take a piss.
We find ourselves in an icy valley full of strange looking 'rexes.
Not everyone had the 4chan pass to get into the emergency janny cave.
Hypothetical evolution is one thing, but have we lizards already reached the baseline intelligence necessary to compose music?
>>729634591wat
wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww what was I supposed to dofuck this we need to go back outside and eat until we evolve again
>>729634591Can you evolve into a singing dragon?
This should only take a few more minutes at our current Attack level.
