Looking at this, you’re pretty excited, right? Slow down there, bucko: time to get educated.

Have you ever had a chance to listen to “Flyswatter”? It’s an album created by Blink-182, in the years back when they were still known as Blink. Exclusively sold on cassette tapes, this piece of musical history is very difficult to come by in physical format, but it has, in more recent years, been distributed digitally by fans. People who love the band, be it in their early days or current incarnation, seek it out to listen and hear how the sound has changed from the very beginning to today. And, in a word, it’s pretty bad. It’s poorly engineered, choppy, lyrics are thin and the entire project feels like a rushed joke. But it’s worth a listen because you need to know a bit of the history to appreciate where we are today. With that, we set the table for Limited Run’s release of the Earnest Evans Collection.

This is a bizarre one, as only one of the three titles ever made it to the Western shores previously, the titular Earnest Evans. Evans is the middle of the trilogy, preceded by El Viento and succeeded by Annet Futabi, aka Annet Returns. Evans, however, is chronologically the first in the game, where our protagonist, Earnest Evans, goes treasure hunting, finds Annet and also uncovers a sinister plot from a cult and their leader, Ziegfried. El Viento takes place next, with Annet firmly in the driver’s seat, seeking to stop the cult from spreading through New York, which means she also has to fight Al Capone, because why not. Annet Returns lets you finally finish the fight with Ziegfried as Annet enters into some real brawling combat, and the secrets of the cult, the mysterious artifacts and the fate of the world are revealed.

“This is how New York looked in the 1920s, probably.”

As a trilogy, the consistency is only through the plot itself, which is both straightforward and confusing. This is entitled Earnest Evans Collection, though Evans is, inarguably, a minor character for both El Viento and Annet Returns. Moreover, each game attempts a different stylization in play. El Viento is a side scroller, straight 2D, with up and down exploration hard wired to only right movement: once you progress, there’s no going back. Annet has a seemingly unlimited number of boomerangs to throw, and a MP gauge limited magic attack that changes as the game progresses.  You enter and exit buildings, beat up roughly half the population of Manhattan, and occasionally do boss battles. The game will chug once the screen is full, but mostly moves forward at a standard pace. The Nintendo Switch should be able to handle Genesis emulation at this point, so the process is fairly smooth.

El Viento is…fine. That’s really all I can say about it. It’s not janky enough to complain, but there’s also nothing there that makes me sit up and play attention. The difficulty is exceedingly high due to an irregular amount of damage taken and no clear way to heal, and, when you get knocked out, you actually get sent back to the title screen before being asked if you want to continue, which is certainly a choice. The explosions on the screen can obfuscate hitboxes, making damage seem much worse than it actually is. It’s a weird and wild game, and it’s over fairly quickly: as long as you remember to duck frequently, you’re good to go.

THE BULLET IS THE SIZE OF HER ABDOMEN, OF COURSE SHE’S GOING TO DIE.

Moving on from there, you get Earnest Evans, where the himbo turned treasure hunter gives you a chance to see how this Indiana Jones meets Castlevania clone operates. Evans will go from deep forest caverns to runaway trains and then spooky cult manors to discover Annet and also swing around his whip. This title is more exciting and indepth than El Viento, allowing you to move left and right as well as plenty of vertical ideas. Evans has a main weapon of a whip that whips, and you can pick up limited additional weapons, like rocks, to give you variety. Please trust me when I say: don’t ever bother picking these up. Their strike zones are different from the whip and I never had anything but pain from trying to utilize them.

While Earnest Evans is the most recognizable title, it’s also the one that falls prey to being the weakest in terms of playability. While El Viento has some hiccups, the weird model work for Earnest Evans often leaves you stuck in the ceiling or in walls, trying to move forward. There are seemingly arbitrary times where Evans can climb up the walls like a spider monkey, and others where he can’t. He moves like the developers watched a speedrun of QWOP and thought that’s how human beings should move. More than once, I defeated a boss by being stuck behind it and flailing until the boss was dead because it couldn’t reach me to actually hit me, but the whip could. The actual bitmapping of Evans leads to missed jumps, touched spikes and wild physical reactions to getting damaged that cannot be understood.

Earnest Evans, so bored with his own game he fell asleep.

Giving up on this style of adventure entirely, Annet Returns decides the only way through is a Streets of Rage cloning attempt with a vague mystical undertone. Annet is back in a world of only right scrolling, but depth lets her move up and down to take on enemies coming from different angles. She punches and kicks with the best of them, and has an odd but powerful magical attack that just slowly charges and changes form as time goes on. If you let it charge fully twice, it’s a sort of maelstrom that does minor damage to everything, but letting it charge three times summons a dragon that also does minor damage to everything. It’s not a super complex mechanic, but it’s different, and I liked it.

Annet Returns could have been the best of the three, if not for two massive issues. First, the enemies don’t always move or progress at a standard rate. There was more than once where I had to simply stand, on an empty screen, and wait for an enemy who had spawned impossibly far left to finally meander over to where I was. I’m not exaggerating when I say I stood there for three minutes, and then I made the mistake of punching him as soon as a bit of him was visible. This caused him to go flying back, offscreen, not dead, and then take another full minute to come back into sightline. This was a wild choice to make in terms of spawning and movement, and that alone should be the reason why the series died with this final entry.

Stop, stop! She’s already dead!

But the more glaring problem is that there’s no invincibility window when knocked down. Annet doesn’t spring back up on her feet, but lies, prone, for a couple seconds before getting back up and immediately getting smacked back down. In certain circumstances, you can create a loop of pain and loss that freezes you to the spot and ends in your death even with minor enemies. Both of these issues can be circumvented thanks to the built in rewind function, but, spoiler, those weren’t available for the initial releases, so I cannot fathom the frustration Japanese players felt when you were softlocked into doom by choosing not to allocate a couple of moments of invulnerable retreat.

Picking up the Earnest Evans Collection as either physical or digital has its perks with multiple version, with Earnest Evans as the most varied of the three titles. Whereas both El Viento and Annet Returns have the Japanese or English versions, Earnest Evans offers English or Japanese CD titles as well as the English cartridge release (Evans was published for both). This gives you a chance to experience the soundtrack and audio as it differs. Not to mention that there’s actually a difference in the games. Earnest Evans’ Genesis version was only intended for outside Japan, hence why there’s not a Japanese version made available in the collection. When you factor in that the cart version has a slightly different plot (it’s more encapsulated as the trilogy was never planned for the West), this is a fairly comprehensive look at something that should, by all accounts, be an exciting notion. 

I have no idea if there was this much near nudity in the Western release initially, but I can’t imagine so.

One thing that has made people clamor for the re-release of these titles is that the animated cutscenes, which get full movement for Earnest Evans and Annet Returns, are done by anime overlords Madhouse. This was a couple years before Yu-Yu Hakusho, so Madhouse is still finding their groove, and it’s rough but recognizable. The soundtrack, incidentally, are all made by Motoi Sakuraba, whom you probably know as the fantastic composer behind all the music of the Tales series, not to mention being a prominent figure in the Dark Souls score. However, the interesting connection with Tales doesn’t end there.

The team behind the Earnest Evans games, Wolf Team, made a couple other great titles previously, including my personal favorite Valis: The Phantasm Soldier and the classic Cobra Command. But it feels like the missteps that came from the Earnest Evans trilogy is what made Wolf Team pivot and go into something new. Ditching everything, they moved forward into a brand new type of JRPG, creating Tales of Phantasia for the SNES, the very first in the acclaimed Tales titles, and setting Wolf Team down the road that would eventually birth their new name, Namco Tales. None of this happens if Annet Returns had been a huge success, and it’s the faceplant of these oddball series that leads to the tipping point that births some of the most memorable characters and worlds of the last thirty years.

This boss looks so much better on the cart version. Make it make sense.

But these are not those games. Despite their best efforts, Limited Run has packaged together some very forgettable, sometimes miserable titles in the Earnest Evans Collection. This is, without a doubt, the best representation for historic touchstone in gaming without actually being a good or fun return down memory lane. Adults who enjoyed Earnest Evans as kids will be disappointed to find out how truly janky it was, and those intrigued by the companion titles will be let down. It’s a coffee table book where anyone reading it will immediately set it back down. The digital edition holds curiosity and little else. Pick up a copy if you must, especially for preservation’s sake, but don’t expect this to do anything but collect dust.

Earnest Evans Collection is available now on Steam, PlayStation 4/5 and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on NIntendo Switch.

A copy of Earnest Evans Collection was provided by the publisher.