Fable of Heroes I: Legendary Edition

Hello!
Once again I'm going to play an old-style rpgmaker2000 game, because I like playing and re-playing these old classic. The game of the day is a 2010 rpg game made by Dustsoft, that's apparently inspired to the old SNES rpg games, in particular the Dragon Quest series.

Unsurprisingly the game features a classic party of four characters, starting from the protagonist Alec, the classic sword wielding hero whose appearance is identical to Alex (well the name is almost the same too), the classic rpgmaker hero. Our hero won't be alone for long since, like in the long tradion of rpgmaker games, he will be soon joined by other adventurers (with just few lines of dialogues and little reason to do that but it's ok).


Oh sure. But remember that we're two against one, and many other enemies made the mistake to challenge us!

As you can probably expect the world was beautiful and everyone lived in peace until a great evil arrive, but it was defeated by a great hero. Anyway as usual history repeats and the world is now in danger, because the demons are back. Anyway our heroes have all the time to get stronger, find powerful weapons and vehicles, and also take part in battle tournament, but do not forget to explore dungeons, fight monsters in random encounters and stronger enemy bosses.
All classic isn't it?

Clearly everything start easy, with some dungeons that are just a couple of screens long, and you can finish in less than ten minutes (including those classic random battles) despite the really slooooow speed of our heroes. Another "classic feature" I guess.
Later dungeons becomes bigger but thankfully the developer provided some warp points, so it's unlikely you will spend more than 30 minutes, moreover no backtracking, on the contrary dungeons are well designed and also present secret passages and lots of loots and treasures including the some special seeds that gives some permanent stat increase (that are special items you cannot buy anywhere but just find).


OUCH! This is what I call a "finger gun"!!!

Combat is ok, maybe a bit challenging and very frequent, I mean that this is the classic Rpgmaker2000 combat (without battlers and front view of the enemies), every character has a favored elemental attack (lightning for Alec, Fire for Mika, Ice for Ariel and... well Tac has no element!). Combat, like in many other rpgmaker games, can be easy if you're lucky or difficult if you're unlucky: there are enemies that can paralize your party members or attack them all with a single strike, but it depends if the enemies will effectively use these powerful attacks or not. IF they immediately uses them before you can even act... well that's bad news, of course! Not to mention that in the beginning you've little to do expect mashing the standard attack. Anyway remember that you can always ran away from random battles. Unfortunately some optional bosses are really unfair and unbalanced, it's true that there are some battles that you need to face only if you want to get the best ending, but these, including the ultimate boss, are nearly impossible. Or really impossible.

Visually the game is absolutely generic with a use of RTPs and edits only, some recoloured facesets and charsets that in some cases do not even match, but it's not something that never happened before. As written before dungeons are well designed except for a couple of little passability errors, but that's not really a problem, the other maps are bland but sometimes a bit better. I liked the enemy battlers that in some cases aren't Rtps but I guess are taken from Dragon Quest, judging from the colorful and particular (Toriyama) style. I liked them, a bit less how combat turned out of course.


Whohooooooo... time to fly! Well do not expect a fancy airship, we'll just get a hot-air balloon!

Final Verdict
Fable of Heroes I: Legendary Edition is a solid classic game without many flaws, unfortunately its main problem is being a bit too "old classic" (four heroes against demons, that's all the plot, at least there are three different possible endings), giving some sense of deja vu: everyting starting from the story is generic, characters do not really stand out (except maybe for Tac, that's really the best one, better than the protagonist) and there isn't nothing new or particular that can really make this game stand out (unlike other old rmk2000 games I've reviewed in the past) even if the dungeons are actually more interesting than I expected, but that's not really a lot!
In the end this is still an ok game, probably players that are really fond of old-styled jrpgs and Final Fantasy inspired generic rpgmaker games can really appreciate this adventure, all the others will probably prefer something shorter and/or more original.