Ace Heroes is a short game created by TheRealDMac for the RM Venture game-making event. The main requirements of this event were to make a game with any of the RPG Maker Engines, using the RTP or RTP-like graphics and characters, and that the game must be beatable in under an hour. One particular quality that I love about short events like this is that they are the true breeding grounds of creativity. Because the developer had limitations, he chose to work around those limitations with a clever, almost tongue-in-cheek solution to follow the event guidelines, and any solution that happens to be clever is awesome. It makes Orson Welles sound amazing.

Sadly, this is all I can praise TheRealDMac for with this game. Ace Heroes comes with a slightly different idea for an RPG, but executes it in a way that makes it one of the most half-assed efforts I’ve ever seen with an RPG Maker game.



The gist of Ace Heroes is that you are Erick (a.k.a. Airick, a.k.a. whatever you want to call him in your game), a soldier who helplessly attempts to pick up chicks at the pub, yet fails miserably. Then, your village gets attacked by demons, forcing you and a handful of comrades out of town. Shortly afterwards, you figure out that the generic RTP demon overlord is plotting to take over your continent, and you only have an hour to stop him.

That’s the main gimmick of this game. You literally have one hour to go through several preparatory tasks and defeat the overlord. The game starts timing you right in the middle of the cutscene. Did you get that? Right in the middle of the cutscene!

That, my readers, is the primary reason why this game ends up punching itself in the groin. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad idea in my point of view. I was even going to make an RPG that revolved around a limited amount of time with the RM Venture event, but ultimately I never got around to finishing. Part of the reason is because I realized that if you are going to add a time element to something as methodical as RPGs, you need be able to design your game around it, so that any obstacle the player encounters doesn’t waste their time in an unfair or uncontrollable manner. Suffice it to say, Ace Heroes doesn’t do this at all, and while you may think an hour is more than enough time to complete a game that was made within a week, you’ll actually be thankful that this game doesn’t require you to beat it in any less time than what’s given to you.

First, any Role-Playing Game, as a genre, centers on critical thinking and careful preparation. With a timer that ticks every single second, you cannot do this, because every second you spend trying to think is a second that goes down on the clock.

I’d say the creator was aware of this to an extent, since most monster encounters in this game can be beaten simply by mashing the “Attack” command. At the same time, however, you are also challenged to much stronger enemies with more complex patterns and gimmicks, which actually force you to play strategically… But doing so means you have to spend more time thinking about what you are going to do, and every second counts! You have to be kidding me!

Second, if you are going to add an element of time to an RPG, you can’t add the typical random encounter system, and instead opt for more on-map or touch encounters. This way, the player can choose whether to sacrifice time to beat an enemy, or avoid it and save time. This method can also be used as an obstacle to challenge players to avoiding battles or not. Guess what Ace Heroes does…

With every step of a dungeon or on the world map, you have a chance of fighting a monster. Why is this bad? Because you have that timer counting off every moment you spend with this game, and every action you perform needs to be vital, but because (a majority of) encounters in this game are random, there is absolutely no way you can legitimately avoid a battle that does nothing but waste your time.

On that note, this game loves, and I mean loves to waste your time! Every map in this game is designed like that of typical RPG, complete with long corridors that lead to dead ends, stair warps that send you all over the place, and huge environments with poor indication of direction and that encourage exploration, which is really impractical for a game like this. Top that with the random encounters, and the fact that this timer still ticks during the middle of the game's cutscenes, means that Ace Heroes has little to no challenging factors to it. The solutions to all obstacles within the game are found through trial-and-error or sheer guesswork, and the whole system just works against itself.

Honestly, this game would have been much more enjoyable without the timer, because aside from the other issues with this game I could still go at my own pace. This game does absolutely nothing to integrate the timer feature properly with the gameplay, and as a result, the whole timer mechanic feels tacked on for no other reason other than that the creator could; something that is just there for the sake of making things “difficult.”

Speaking of which, the game’s overall difficulty curve starts relatively low, and then spikes right around the last four or so boss battles in the game. While I completely understand that the last chapter/level of a game should be tough, this game never taught me to do anything else besides button-mash mindlessly. Thus, especially when you get to the part I’ve screen capped below, you actually feel like the game is cheating you as oppose to challenging you, as if it hasn't done so enough with the horrific timer mechanic.



About this battle scene above, this is the only time you face these set of enemies with your party (the other was with a completely different cast of characters that you are never able to play with again). The succubus constantly heals the entire squadron, the two casters dish multi-hit magic attacks that hit hard, and the knight just finishes off what damage they do. Unlike any other boss or enemy in the game, these guys will not be thwarted by simply mashing basic attacks or spamming one or two skills. They will kill you over, over, and over again until you actually slow down and figure out the right way to approach them… But slowing down is exactly what you are not supposed to do in this game because of that stupid timer! It ticks just like any other battle in the game. You better thank me later for not rage-quitting at this very point, because the battle was utterly frustrating and clearly demonstrates everything wrong with this game.

Aside from all the flaws with the gameplay, everything else about the game is hardly worth mentioning. The story has both humorous and interesting points, but otherwise it’s pretty forgettable. The cutscenes in this are also heavily unpolished. There is a scene when one of my characters dies because of… Something? I had to take a closer look to find that a reaper snuck behind him, but there was no flash, shake, camera move or anything that drew my attention to it. Why does he die to one monster like that when I’ve killed so many of them with my party as a whole, anyway? Every action that goes on in the cutscenes just look confusing because nothing is well indicated; I don’t even understand how that girl the main character has a crush on dies at the end, either, not with those random spell effects.

The graphics are all RMVX RTP, and while most of the game is relatively inoffensive, some maps use the tiles in the most ridiculous ways possible. Overall, It’s not bad, but it’s not quite good either. There is a general lack of design or thought in the placement of some of these tiles. For instance, I got to a point in the game where I used an airship to fly to the demon’s stronghold. In the meanwhile, I passed over several towns, environments, and castles scattered about and attempted to enter them out curiosity. Turns out that I couldn’t enter these spots at all, even when the game showed me that every cave, castle, village squares and whatnot lead to a new map! Just another way the game loves to waste your time, I guess (Hell, this game even gave you an item called "The Ocarina of Wasted Time" at the start. Now that was a knee-slapper).



Ace Heroes started off well by introducing an atypical game element and somewhat light-hearted story, but with the absolutely lousy implementation of game mechanics, bad design (or lack thereof), and confusing cutscenes, this game was far from an enjoyable experience to play. This entry won no badges during the outcome of the RM Venture event, and it is easy to see why. I recommend the creator either remake this into a more streamline RPG, or give this a complete overhaul to make the time aspect work. While the timer aspect was the only thing I found to be completely wrong, it only takes one badly implemented gimmick to ruin an entire game.

*skips off into the distance with his Ocarina of Wasted Time*

The Verdict:
2/5
Subpar