Thanks to Limited Run Games for the review code
Title: Earnest Evans Collection
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $39.99
Release Date: 01/16/2026
Prelude
In this compilation of the three games related to Earnest Evans, Edia decided to partner with an outside company this time, working with Limited Run and their Carbon Engine, along with a new Dev team in the form of Headless Chicken. Being a Genesis heavy set from a company known for not great Genesis reissues, is LRG the one who can turn Edia’s Genesis track record around?
Presentation
The Carbon Engine reissues have generally stuck to a usual formula, and this Edia set follows more in that vein rather than the one Edia-published compilations usually do. You still have manual and art scans present, along with a cutscene viewer and music player, but they don’t work the same as in the Edia made sets. Despite 2/3 of the set having US versions of their manuals available, they aren’t included here, and the JP Manuals aren’t given translated pages like in the Edia sets. (They’re also heavily redacted, per the LRG norm)
The music player works fine enough, but the movie player is pretty weird here. First off on Switch 2, this is the one area where the collection will throw a fit; play one video, then try going immediately to another and it won’t play. Going to the menu and hovering over a game, which plays a background video will sometimes undo this, and sometimes it won’t. Either way, these all work flawlessly on Switch 1, so this is just a BC quirk, and even then the actual game cutscenes don’t have any back compat issues in-game.
However you manage to view the videos, you’ll immediately notice the sheer amount of bitrate compression present in them; sure, the Edia-made sets had a slight blur filter applied to the cutscene replays, but this goes far beyond that and makes it so fast action can lead to the videos turning into a low resolution mess.
Thankfully, the in-game visuals when you’re actually playing the games are crisp and there’s a very basic CRT filter and a couple of screen size options to pick from. My only complaints with the general emulation quality is that the game audio is awfully quiet compared to the stuff in the menus, and the Mega CD games can desync their voice clips the longer you play them, leading to voices kicking in seconds after they’re meant to play, making the cutscenes rather awkward, and yes, this applies to both Switch 1 and 2. The versions in the Cutscene Viewer won’t have this issue.
Being that these are all Genesis games and Edia’s own track record with Genesis emulation isn’t great, I am happy to say that desynced voices aside, the audio emulation is pretty much spot-on. El Viento and Cartridge Earnest Evans sound as they should, and the CD games sound fine too. Some of the music in these games are pretty excellent, so I’m thrilled to hear them represented properly and not in the messy way the Shooting Collection handled them.
Gameplay
We’ve just gone through the extra features on offer via the presentational side of things, leaving just the games. This includes English Dubbed Sega CD versions of Earnest Evans and Annet Returns, which are exclusive to the western versions of this compilation specifically, and will not be on the Japanese equivalents of it, so keep that in mind if you aim to import a copy. Otherwise you have your typical save state/rewind features present here, and they work fine.
El Viento– The first to come out in the trilogy, although the one that takes place after Earnest Evans. This is an action platformer by Wolf Team, who essentially made their own Valis-like with a bigger focus on projectile attacks and speed. As much as I like the Valis series, even most of the Genesis ports, I can’t deny that of the action platformers Telenet put out on the console, this is near the top of the list in terms of quality.
You take control of Annet, who has boomerangs she can use to take out enemies, along with a magic meter that can be charged up to unleash a variety of magic attacks you unlock over the course of the adventure. She’s swift, agile, and can even be made to dash by holding down + right and jumping, allowing you to travel through the stages really darn fast if you know how to manage it, making El Viento quite the entertaining speed game. The levels are all a fairly reasonable length, and most importantly I never found myself getting too frustrated here, even if there were a few silly moments where enemies could bump you around like a pinball. You have limited continues to make use of here, but save states can help mitigate that entirely if you so choose.
The boss fights in particular are pretty solid as well, and I find it particularly amusing how using specific magic types on some will shred through them like tissue paper. A few of the later ones got on my nerves a little bit, but that wasn’t anything trial and error wouldn’t remedy after a bit. All in all, this is a very good action platformer, and while its story is pretty much forgettable, (to the point you could play this first, as in release order, and miss out on hardly anything) it still has that Telenet charm in all the right ways.
Earnest Evans– This one is both on Sega CD and Genesis here, and there’s more differences than just voices and a CD soundtrack. The level design even changes between the two versions, and I found the slight differences in the Genesis one to be more manageable and less frustrating, though you lose all traces of a story if you go down that route. The story in the Sega CD version is more notable than the one El Viento got, and sets the events of that game in motion fairly well, but the complete removal of plot in the Genesis version isn’t a tragedy or anything.
This time around, Wolf Team decides rather than a fast place platform with good play control and fun level design, you end up with a weirdly animated main character that can crouch down multiple levels like a cinematic platformer, armed with a whip that flails around to hit enemies until they die. Earnest is much slower than Annet in the last game, which definitely led to me getting bounced around way more than in El Viento, to the point of sheer frustration. Of all games that benefit from the Rewind feature, this is the one you’ll need it for the most, and eventually I was able to get the grips with the weird quirks of this game.
Each level usually has a simple path for you to go through in order to reach the end of the stage and trigger a boss fight, and sometimes you might need to collect an item first before they’ll show up. You have a health bar like last time, only this one drains akin to Turrican instead of Annet, so if you happen to fall into spikes or get pinned against a hazard that’ll drain quick until you’re done for, and yet again you have limited continues here. On the bright side, using a continue will raise Earnest from the dead in the very spot he died, so you don’t have to repeat the stage.
What started out as a pretty annoying platformer with a weird main character slowly grew on me, since I’d go through this by first playing the Sega CD version for a few stages, then bouncing to the Genesis stages with my newfound knowledge and trying to beat that one faster while noticing any subtle stage differences along the way. Another nice part about both versions is that their OSTs are completely different, so you don’t just get Genesis versions of the CD tunes as you switch between the two. By far the most amusing surprise for me however, was how Earnest Evans also worked as a speedgame, despite how slow the main character was. If you mess around just right, you can get yourself knocked around to your advantage, and memorizing a stage layout can just help you zip through some stages in only a couple of minutes with barely any enemy contact. There’s even a hilarious exploit on a waterfall stage where you just jump in a corner and it triggers the end of the level!
Unfortunately, the bosses are worse this time around. Find the safe space, curl up and hit with your weapon until it dies, and sometimes you get a stronger subweapon to use on them to make them die faster. Rinse and repeat until the game ends rather anticlimactically, especially on the Genesis. (where you don’t even get an ending cutscene) Worse than El Viento, but it has some speedgame quirks that make make it hook into you more than you initially expect, and of the two versions here I’d give the slight edge to the Genesis one, just because it tweaked levels to make them slightly more enjoyable.
Annet Returns– Right away this game caught me a little off guard; it also has an english dub like Ernest Evans, but boot the game up as you’ll load into the intro cutscene, midway through the Japanese vocal song. It wasn’t dubbed or subbed, nor was any of the Japanese text that shows up in the cutscenes subtitled or altered into english. Interestingly even if you wait on the title screen for the Wolf Team Logo to show up, it jump cuts to the middle of the song. Is it trying to load a save state to avoid some copyrighted trademark, or is this just a bug? Either way, you won’t get the full song in-game and will have to settle for the movie player, and the weirdness of that is just an omen for what’s to come.
So in this belt scroller, you take control of Annet again as she sets out to investigate a mysterious princess swapping incident, going through multiple locations and beating up enemies with her magical sword and powerful spells. The cutscenes are dubbed as they were in CD Evans, and dubbed fairly well with high quality voice acting and pretty accurate scripts, so if you were somehow hoping for thirty years that these cutscenes would get a high quality english dub, here you go, and that’s as much quality as you’ll get out of the game next to some aggressively OK music, since Annet Returns might just be one of the worst belt scrollers I’ve ever played.
Let’s start with the basics. You have a normal attack combo, a jump attack, and a magic attack that automatically charges up as you walk around the level. You come across your first set of enemies fairly quickly, beat them up and find you don’t have much of a moveset; you can do those combos, throw the foes, and not much else. Not a great look when the first Streets of Rage gave you a back attack and a few other things you don’t get with Annet here.
Beating up the enemies, as you hear Japanese grunts and Inuyasha’s scream over and over again (because none of the in-game combat sounds got dubbed), you’ll almost certainly run into the scenario where an enemy is tossed off the screen, they barely have any health remaining, you wait for them to return to finish them off… And they never do.
You run around in circles. You act like me and use this to try a bathroom break, and come back to the enemy still off screen, needing to be defeated for progression, and having no way to lure them back on or even hit them, outside of your magic. This is your typical screen clearing special move in these type of games, except none of them look cool at all and are blink and you miss it, barely animated trash. Now your enemy takes the last bit of damage it needed to die, and you can finally progress to the next set of stages.
Nearly every single level in the game is like this, ending in a boss fight where the boss just suddenly appears and you lose access to your magic, meaning every single fight is just jump attacking them to death since that’s your strongest move. The enemies are incredibly generic, some of them hardly fitting the theme of the level established in the cutscene preceding it, and almost nothing of interest happens in this game at all outside of solid music and the aforementioned high quality english dub. You could probably predict most of the tropes in the story based off the last game and knowing almost anything about similar fiction from the past thirty years, making the story beyond uninteresting.
I didn’t think it was possible to make a belt scroller that felt this unfinished and barely a game at all, but here we are. Yes, you can still beat it, and yes, it’s shockingly easy to exploit the game in order to cheese the stages by doing the same jump attack over and over again. Mercifully, the stages are all rather short and don’t take forever, and despite you only having one life you have infinite continues this time around, although you have to restart the stage again. Still, unless you absolutely want to see the end of all three of these games, I can absolutely recommend skipping this one entirely, it barely has anything to offer whatsoever, was made in only a few months roughly a year before Telenet’s massive decline, and it shows.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the Earnest Evans collection is as comprehensive of a collection as this trilogy of games will ever get, for better or worse. While El Viento still remains as excellent of a hidden gem as it always was, the other two games are quite annoying to deal with. Earnest Evans is fine, with the CD version having the slightly better presentation, but it definitely is the one you’ll either find yourself really loving or loathing its quirks.
Annet Returns on the other hand, is just abysmal and easily marks itself as one of the worst Genesis-adjacent games I have ever played, and barely feels like it was finished. The fact they even bothered to dub that game is a miracle all by itself, and that dub being as accurate and solid as was might just be the best part about that game. I don’t know why the intro in Annet Returns is a bit weird, but otherwise I’m struggling to think of much else they could have added to make this set any better, since there’s not much more to this IP; English manuals would have been nice, fixing the voice desync would be especially helpful, and maybe dubbing the song and action sounds in Annet Returns would have been fine extra touches, but realistically you’ll probably come here just to enjoy the gem that is El Viento, and that’s OK!
Bizarrely, this set doubled in MSRP price since it launched in January, meaning you’ll be paying double for something with Annet Returns in it than you previously would have. I’d find this a solid recommendation at its old $20 MSRP since El Viento is excellent and Earnest Evans can be a fun acquired taste for retro platformer fans, but at its current going rate, this one might be worth waiting for a sale on unless somehow you really, really love the terribleness that is Annet Returns and don’t mind such a trainwreck weighing this entire package down. What a sad way to end a trilogy!
I give Earnest Evans Collection a 5 out of 10.