Hey does anyone else remember that evolution themed game developed by Almanic and published by Enix in the 1990s? The one where you start the game is a weird little fish and evolve into different creatures through the various eras of Earth's history?
Wait no, I'm not talking about that one, I'm talking about the one they published two years earlier for the PC-98 and never released in North America: 46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinkaron (4.6 Billion Year Story: The Theory of Evolution)
I've been watching @wuest start to route a speedrun for this the last few days and this game is, technically speaking, absolutely fucking wild.
To give you an idea of how many places this game goes, you start the game as this weird little lumpy green fish in a tide pool and by the end of the game, you're fighting the planet-devouring space devil in space. A few things happen along the way.
The narrative is absolutely buck wild, your literal antagonist the whole way is literally Luficer trying to corrupt the earth's development.
There are aliens.
There's a Tyrannosaurus who's actually kind of a cool guy.
This happens..???
But maybe the coolest thing is the game has a bunch of really wild bad endings. Okay, so every time you evolve a stat beyond a threshold, your position on a little evolution grid moves around and you change to a different form, right?
If you move far enough to the very edge of the grid and then evolve in that direction again so you move off the grid entirely, you become so hyper-specialized within your ecological niche that you just kind of stay there and don't progress any further. That's a game over. Most of them that I've seen are kind of neat. Some of them are absolutely wild.
Yes, gnomes are a valid evolutionary path that happens.
Anyway, game is just this weird little bizarre artifact that can be directly traced to the better known E.V.O. game and I just think it's this weird, fascinating little thing, and can't wait to see a run develop for this thing.
