Half-Minute Hero

 
Developer: Opus
Steam Release: Sep 2012
Hours Played: 6.4
Similar To: Half-Minute Hero: The Second Coming
Rating: 2/5 Parsnips




GAMEPLAY
This peculiar one-of-a-kind game with the peculiar one-of-a-kind name (full title: Half Minute Hero: Super Mega Hero Climax Ultimate Boy) defies anyone to categorise it and although you won't know what's going on at first, thankfully much is revealed through the dialogue boxes. After matching the displayed keyboard default keys with your Xbox controller buttons - which the game actually recommends (!?), the crux of the gameplay is gradually revealed. In short, for each quest, you are warned at the beginning that you only have 30 seconds to complete it; then, you get your hero to the castle at the end of the map and kill the evil lord who resides within. The gameplay itself, due to the fact that you're under regular time-pressure, is very zippy and very quick.

BALANCE & PACE
The main game is fundamentally divided into three sections: (1) The outside world is a map you travel on to get to caves, villages and castles; (2) villages - where time is paused - are where you spend gold to heal, buy items, or pray to a statue to turn back time; (3) the battle area is what you enter into while roaming. This is where you'll either be randomly plunged into a fray, or battle that final boss which occurs when you enter the castle at the end. Battles are essentially seconds-long cut-scenes that you have no direct control over. You'll generally be asking yourself these basic questions: Have I got time to get to X? Am I at a high enough level to get to X? How am I going to afford to get that item to get me to point X? After I've roamed around battling and levelling up, shall I buy items, health or time?


PRESENTATION & DESIGN
Presentation and design is peculiar to say the least. After some confusion at first as to if the game is launching and when the game is launching you get to begin. Then you have the baffling Change Graphics path in the title screen where Retro immediately unlocks the first two other modes in the game while NEO does not. The map itself is top-down but characters and objects are in side-view. It's all a bit kooky. Other than the main game, there are six modes to play. There is: Hero 30, Evil Lord 30, Princess 30 and Knight 30 featuring RTS and shoot 'em up elements (among other things) that all come packaged with 30 missions each. You also get a Hero 300 and Hero 3 game with missions involving 300 and 3 second time limits! In other words there's plenty to explore. 

PROGRESS SYSTEM
Hitting Single Player (using NEO graphics) takes you to a list of the six game modes but you can only play Hero 30 at the beginning. From here you view the map screen which plots a path using a dotted line with yellow and red dots signifying quests. You may move along this line with your avatar to view the stats on these missions or select and dive back into earlier ones. The purpose being not to level up or get gold (this is reset) but to either attempt a faster time, get awarded achievements or to find items you missed first time round. Before starting a quest you also get an inventory screen to equip items but you're always given (and automatically equip) the most efficient item on finishing a quest anyway. 

CONCLUSION
The timer stops when you enter a village so you do have time to pause for breath and mull things over but it's the choices you make and the weighing up of pros and cons along with the mad dashing that makes Half-Minute Hero such an interesting game. Although you can't really compare Half-Minute Hero directly to other games it does have a similar feel to Rogue Legacy in that there is a Groundhog Day quality about it; doing the same thing over again is the norm. However, you relish this process because of the layers that get peeled away and the promise of the opening up of exciting new quests and areas to explore. The weaknesses? Well, it certainly has its fair share of lengthy dialogue trees but at least they can be sped up. This, along with a few lengthy load screens was all that really bothered me about the game.