EverGrace – Second Opinion

To be perfectly honest, there isn't much more to say about EverGrace that Brad hasn't already covered. Like him, my disappointment with EverGrace culminated in the realization that, after hours of play, the game was content to simply go through the motions and was never going to get any better.

I felt alienated by EverGrace from the moment I saw the introductory cutscenes, which were borderline-incomprehensible. From there, I was never able to totally shake the feeling of being set adrift in a game that was indifferent to my confusion. The story is hopelessly convoluted, non-player characters (NPCs) spout cryptic dialogue like "go northwest" (when there are two or three paths that branch in that direction), and the lack of a large-scale area map just exacerbates the situation.

The puzzles are almost maliciously ambiguous in many cases, which was the biggest point of frustration for me. Brad mentioned the trial-and-error wardrobe-switching as being a major annoyance; for my part, I also disliked the fact that key items are often held by random monsters that drop the item when killed, while others are scattered in obscure places and are easily missed (such as Sharline's white bow sitting on the white bed).

There's "open-ended," and then there's just confusing, and EverGrace falls into the latter category. Even though aimless wandering figures prominently in the game, there's nothing interesting about back-tracking through the barren environments hoping to trigger an event or find an item that was overlooked the first time around.

The aspect of alternating between two character quests was my favorite part of the game, but mainly because it let me work off my frustration with one character by taking a break and switching to the other much like trying to stave off a massive debt by juggling the balance back and forth between two maxed-out credit cards.

At least unlike Brad I had no optimistic expectations going into EverGrace, rather just curiosity in seeing whether a title I picked up cheap, used, and on a whim could actually deliver anything of substance. Predictably it didn't, which just goes to reinforce the old maxim of nothing ventured, nothing gained. Rating: 3.5/10