After Last Heroes 2 and 3 took the series to rock bottom with endless backtracking, pointless story, and game-breaking bugs, Last Heroes 4 is a return to form and is surpassed only by the original Last Heroes as the best installment of the series.
But that's not saying much. At all.
Give credit where credit is due: With Last Heroes 4 developer Warfare Studios seemed to have finally learned that padding a game's length by forcing the player to slog through every encounter and traverse every dungeon multiple times is a bad idea. Enemies aren't quite as slow-moving and paths not quite as spacious as they were in Last Heroes 1, but you can still make your way through without having to fight too many enemies if you take a little care. And while there is backtracking, it at least fits with the story and is not at the insane level seen in Last Heroes 2 and 3. My first playthrough clocked in at 3 hours and 45 minutes, making it the shortest game in the series by a hair. Which is a good thing, because Last Heroes is always at its best when it's fast-paced.
However, if you were hoping for a satisfying resolution to the series storyline, you're going to be disappointed. Amelia's long-awaited reunion with her mother is stiff and awkward, even by this series's low standard for writing, and the mystery of her mother's identity and reason for abandoning her has as cliche and uninteresting an answer as you could possibly imagine. The game doesn't even have a real villain; like in Last Heroes 2, the final boss is just a couple cultists who you meet five seconds before you fight.
Indeed, throughout it feels like Warfare Studios was bored and stopped caring about the series with this installment - and given that even the original Last Heroes showed minimal creative enthusiasm, that's saying a lot. They didn't even bother to give the final boss fight multiple phases; you just beat them once and that's it. More importantly, there's really nothing new with this installment. It's the same playable characters, the same enemies, the same dungeon design aesthetic, and the same canned town designs with four buildings: an inn, an item shop, an equipment shop, and a house where you get information on where the next dungeon is.
So Last Heroes 4 still doesn't come close to being as good as the original Last Heroes, and even that game felt like a perfunctory effort at RPG-making. If you've already played the first three installments, go ahead and get this one; it's at least short and well-balanced. Otherwise, don't bother.
