Hero’s Realm

To be short, I’d say this game is worth playing. The character class system is fun, there’s pretty minimal grinding (Though I found the grinding to be rather enjoyable in this game), and the story is pretty strightforward. It certainly won’t leave you scratching your head wondering, “why’d they write that?!” If you’ve played a lot of oldschool rpgs, you know they are not very story oriented. While I personally believe that to be outdated and no longer practiced for a reason, I can still appreciate decent gameplay when I see it.

Score 4/5

Play this game. If you’re a player, you will have fun playing this game. If you’re a creator, there are a lot of things to learn from it. The good outweighs the bad.

Here’s the breakdown

Story

Don’t expect much here. A writer kentona is not, but a great game maker he is. The story of this game is very simple. There is a great evil out there, and the world needs heroes to defeat it. That’s where you come in. Each chapter quickly introduces you to one of 4 heroes that will be answering the call. Each of these heroes recruits a small band of soldiers (3, that you will choose) to help them on their mission to prove themselves worthy. They eventually all come together to take on the quest to save the world.

Characters

Nothing terribly brilliant here either, but a quick back-story is given about each of the 4 heroes, and it’s pretty well implied that these characters are pretty well known among their respective communities. Certain NPCs will give you small interactions and comments that give you some very minor characterization. They seem to fit pretty well into typical hero archetypes, so a lot is said about them with very little. There’s just not much meat. Personally I’m a meat kind of guy, so this is where most of the points were lost.

Gameplay

This is where the game shines. The class system. Before our heroes begin their journeys, they are prompted to recruit their armies. You are then able to pick from a diverse list of character classes, similar to that of Final Fantasy Tactics. This system is very diverse, and you have a lot of options to create a pretty functional party. Each of the 4 heroes has their own unique class that determines their skillsets. Since all 4 of them have basic healing magic, you’re pretty free to pick a party of anything you want. There are a couple classes for anything you’d want, so if you want an extra healer (and I recommend that you do), you’re not stuck with having a White Mage in every party. It could have been SO much better if it didn’t punish you for being experimental. You reached the boss and found out they were undead. You don’t have a Paladin in your party, so maybe you should make one of your characters one, but you’re already lvl12. Too bad, because if you change your class, you’re right back to lvl1, and if you change back again, you’re still lvl1. Making it so you could keep your level would have been nice, and it kind of pissed me off. It would’ve been even nicer if you could multiclass by switching your class around to learn a variety of skills each individual level. But it is what it is, and it isn’t too bad. This was my favorite feature.

Once you reach the 5th chapter, all your teams will come together. From this point on, you can pretty much choose your strongest, most effective group to play as, since now everyone will be getting exp for any battles you fight. You have to collect several artifacts to reach the final battle, and the game leads you to believe these missions to be non-linear. They told you where all of them were, so you can do them in any order you want, right? Well apparently not, because you can’t go get one without getting the other first. In each dungeon, you will split up into the 4 individual groups to move about the dungeon. This allows for a few little “I step on a switch so you other guys can advance” type puzzles that are kind of no brainers. A lot more probably could have been done with this system.

*EDIT*: There's a few little things I forgot to mention, and they're both positives so listen up. The music is downright enjoyable in this game. You'll hear everything from Disney music to disco hits, all in midi form, and believe it or not, they all seem to fit rather perfectly. Pay close attention to the music in each of the first four chapters when you find the Funhouse in each area. They are golden.

This game also implements a rather snazzy Day/Night system. As time passes in real life, so does time pass in the game world, right? After a minute or two on the world map, it will switch between night and day. In most towns, there's not much going on at night because the shops are all closed and the people are all sleeping, but it's fun to find those nightowls that are sometimes lurking about, as well as an event here or there that requires the cover of darkness. There's even a town later on that is mostly closed down during the day, and springs to life at night, much like you'd expect to see in Las Vegas or something. It was occasionally annoying to have to wait on the world map for time to pass so I could access the shop, but I found this feature of the game to be overall quite charming.*END EDIT*

Battles

The battles in this game are very balanced. Standard turn based combat system, so this won’t be over anyone’s head. The monsters are beatable, and reward you pretty fairly for the amount of effort you put in. Weak monsters don’t give you much, stronger monsters give you a lot. The way it’s supposed to be, right? Boss fights are reasonable as well. You’ll have to grind a little bit if you didn’t pick the right characters, but it’s pretty doable. As I mentioned above, grinding is actually kind of fun in this game. You’ll like getting your characters up just one more level to see what skill they’ll learn next. Just know that you’re going to be staring at a lot of FF5 character sprites, and FF6 enemy sprites.