Darius and Sharline, the two playable characters of Evergrace, each start the game from different points and have their own reasons for landing in this new, mysterious world. Darius is a top-class swordsman who has a taste for vengeance, and one day while investigating the Vilyana forests, he finds himself discovering an ancient life form, Forim. Sharline, on the other hand, is a happy young girl who is pulled into things when a tragedy strikes and she is rescued by a mysterious girl who transports her to another world entirely. When Sharline awakes from a dizzy haze, she has no idea where she has arrived, why she is there, or who is the mysterious girl who now haunts her visions of what happened the day before.

Unlike other games, Evergrace’s inclusion of two characters isn’t used to merely to provide another quest to work through after the player completes one of the character’s stories. Instead, when you access crystals that are littered throughout the land, it’s possible to not only save game data, but also switch characters. There will be times where there is a door or area that can’t be unlocked using one character, but can be using the other. Darius and Sharline each have unique fighting styles (Darius uses sword-based attacks, while Sharline’s are more long-ranged), and flipping between them keeps things interesting. This also manifests itself into a balancing act; both characters share the same items in the world. Picking up all the weapons and equipment that are littered around removes what the other character can obtain. Fortunately, you don’t have to be too careful, since there’s usually enough scattered around to suffice for both characters.

Gamers who are hoping for a tour de force to show off their shiny new PlayStation 2 will want to look elsewhere, since while Evergrace isn’t an ugly game, in all respects, it isn’t all that pretty, either. Evergrace’s 3D environments shape up nicely through the game, and there are times where the lighting effects help the mood of a level considerably. The characters and enemies animate decent enough, though it feels like the game uses the same sets of enemies a little too often. There’s also a nasty little problem with the game engine where, similar to what’s experienced in Eidos Interactive’s TimeSplitters and From Software’s own Armored Core 2, when too much action occurs onscreen, the resolution drops down, slowdown aplenty kicks in and the entire screen becomes filled with enough pixelation to make you feel like you’re playing on a PSOne. It’s a fairly infrequent occurrence, but it does pop up from time to time, and can throw off the timing of weapon strikes during a battle.

It’s somewhat hard to put into words, but even with the humorous costume rating system (characters react differently depending on what you where, such as a merchant giving you cheaper prices for having superior fashion sense), I could not help but feel entirely bored during my travels in Evergrace. The ultimate reason is that there is no feature of Evergrace that stands out from anything else that’s been introduced in the genre. The real-time battle system is decidedly generic, consisting of hitting the attack button, with the only differentiating factor being that each attack uses a certain amount of “energy” that is used up while running or fighting, and the amount of energy used determines how powerful the hit is. From Software tried to make players work with statistical management through stats that go down as abilities are used and time goes on, but the stats move down so slowly that there’s never a time to really worry about them.

Since you do a lot of battling in Evergrace, the moment that it becomes boring is when it all starts to head downhill. Some of the worst repetitiveness comes in the form of the boss battles; more often than not, the bosses follow a simple pattern that’s repeated over and over, and once you figure out that pattern, it’s merely a matter of chopping away at them until they die off. While AI patterns aren’t inherently a bad problem, it is when taking out a boss takes ten minutes of pattern following that it starts to hurt the game’s quality.

It might not be terrible, but there’s not much that stands out in From Software’s Evergrace. There are definitely some cool ideas in the game, and all it will take is for the designers to flesh them out for Evergrace to become much more than what it is now. There aren’t many games of its type on the PlayStation 2 at the moment, so Evergrace might serve as a decent rental for action RPG starved gamers, but most will want to look elsewhere.