Half Minute Hero: The Second Coming

I remember playing the first Half Minute Hero a decade and a half ago on the PSP. It was a good game. Weird, but good. It had unique ideas, a good soundtrack that I wound up getting, and managed to have a heart-wrenching moment using only a single word. I didn't [pays gold] learn about there ever being a sequel until several years later, and it was several years more until I actually got around to playing it. I had no idea what to expect, since I never looked anything up about it, so I only had vague but fond memories of the first game. It went [i]way[/i] deeper than I would've expected. The gameplay only uses the Hero 30 mode from the previous game, and [pays gold] builds on it. New features I was surprised to find include an overworld where you could gain permanent levels with which to start quests, a handful of small dungeons you can visit, and a mecha castle you need in order to fight giant enemies, among other things. The story was interesting, too. It worked a lot like the original game's did, only without any illusion of the different stories being unrelated to each other, which I feel was the right call. It also ran a [i]wide[/i] gamut of objectives, [pays gold] although most of them still boiled down to beating a boss to win, but I don't want to spoil any more about that. It's not perfect, though. Every quest has two achievements that [i]sometimes[/i] involve doing things outside the main objective, and you can see a single hint for each one after beating the quest, and some of those hints are less helpful than others. The biggest problem I had, though, was with its endgame, but it wasn't enough to be a deal breaker for me. [pays gold] I had some issue with certain questions never being answered, like [spoiler]why Yashu is a dead ringer for the Evil Lord from the first game, which is extra weird considering the Evil Lord [i]is in the game[/i] but just relegates himself to giving you achievement rewards[/spoiler]. The major problem, though, was a (probably) optional dungeon that is a few times larger than all of the other dungeons in the game combined with increasingly infuriating new challenges, and the frustration is [pays gold] multiplied by the fact that getting defeated in a dungeon causes you to lose all of the items you acquired, uniquely including a few items that are [i]invisible[/i] and require you to buy a radar that takes up your item slot and disappears when you leave if you want to be able to pick them up! Aside from a few stumbles at the finish line, I rather enjoyed this, and I feel it was well worth $10, plus another dollar if you want a little extra buffoonery! Now, I'm gonna go find this game's soundtrack. Edit: The soundtrack is actually in the game's folder.