The final game in the series was released in 1993, exclusively in Japan, and only for the Mega CD. Annet Meiya, who was last playable in El Viento, is once again the star. Instead of it being a platform-orientated game, Annet Futatabi is a scrolling beat 'em up. Since it was released after excellent entries in the genre like Streets of Rage 2, and had the added advantage of being on the Mega CD, it should be really great then, right? Sadly not.
The first talk of an El Viento sequel happened in 1991, as this Wolf Team interview shows. One of the most interesting lines in this one:
"El Viento stars a woman, and the next game in the series, Earnest Evans, will feature a man… for the third game, we’re thinking maybe it will be a side story, with a different protagonist entirely?"
It seems that early on, Wolf Team had a completely different idea in mind for the sequel, as it would feature a new playable character and would be a spin-off from the main series. However this didn't happen, as the final game has Annet being the main character again, and the story is a direct sequel to El Viento.
It seems that this game didn't have much development time. It was first revealed in the November 1992 issue of Beep! Mega Drive, just a few months before its March 1993 release date. The Beep! preview features screenshots showing completely different graphics that was the final game has, including sprites for Annet that were re-drawn, scrapped levels and altered cutscenes. All of these things were changed for the final version, which would have taken Wolf Team some time to do. Unfortunately, it's likely these changes took up so much time that the gameplay suffered as a result.
Which leads us onto the final game. Annet Futatabi is a mess, with numerous issues. The most glaringly obvious is the enemy A.I. -there's a problem where enemies will stay off the screen for long periods of time, for no reason, and the only thing you can do is wait around until they either walk on screen, or have enough power to waste a magic attack to kill them whilst they can't be seen. Fighting normal opponents is totally lackluster, as Annet's standard combo rarely fully works against enemies, who can constantly knock Annet down without her being able to do a thing about it. The graphics are also bad with poorly animated sprites (particularly for the bosses) and the special effects for the magic attacks are atrocious.
Add to that the fact that it is only a single player game (if Wolf Team had any sense they would have made Earnest playable for a 2 player option) at a time when a multi-player option in a console scrolling beat 'em up was seen as standard and you have a very bad game. The Mega CD was capable of a lot more than this. The only positives for Annet Futatabi are the cutscenes -they have been improved over the ones seen in Earnest Evans, and have better animation. The game's music is also good, and was composed by Motoi Sakuraba, who did the music for the El Viento and Earnest Evans. He'd go on to do the music for other titles, such as the Star Ocean series.
The game is set around 3 years after El Viento. Annet and Earnest head to the (fictional) country of Renvrandt, as Earnest has been asked to appraise some treasure. However it's all a ruse and Annet soon finds herself a target of the Nexuses, an evil organization which Zigfried has allied himself with. But Zigfried has his own plan, and he wants Annet's pendant to do it. Annet has to keep herself alive long enough to find out what's going on, and prevent Zigfried from achieving his goal -the utter destruction of mankind!
Despite the ending suggesting that there could be another sequel, no more games in the series were ever made. The adventures of Annet and Earnest are over, and given at the time of writing this page, its been 25 years since these characters have been in a game. Will they ever return?