I beat Secret of Evermore most likely for the first time. I know I had gotten near the end as a kid, but don’t think I finished for some reason. I had been intrigued by the game as a kid, but only played it once briefly since until this time.
I beat the final boss quite easily with my characters at level 43 and frequent use of the formulas barrier and energize. They made us relatively invincible most of the time and able to do powerful attacks almost continuously. The attack formulas I had really weren’t that damaging, probably because I didn’t feel like leveling up the more powerful ones very much.
As with many of these RPG’s I’ve been playing through recently, I used a walkthrough, but, as much as I could, only to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I tend to have a “gotta catch ’em all” attitude in games, and also probably am not going to play through them again for quite a while.
And this game, more than most, needs a guide for missing things, because it’s the kind that has quite a few things that can be missed and never gotten again. There was at least on formula (speed) that I never got. Some things effectively require premonition, such as the traders in Gothica seemingly requiring items from the traders in the previous area, Antiqua.
This game also is trouble if you like to train up in everything. Each weapon and each alchemy formula is trained independently. The weapons aren’t too bad since there are only 12 and only 3 levels per, but there are like 30 some formulas and they each have 9 levels, which take forever after the first couple. It’s made worse by having to buy ingredients for them, which are at different sellers in different areas for some formulas.
I trained a couple spells up to level 5 but mostly gave up on putting much time into them as the game progressed.