I rather like Warfare Studios's RPG offerings Shining Plume 1 and 2 and Valiant: Resurrection; though they are RPGMaker games riddled with balance issues, they have deep and memorable stories and distinct character borne of obvious enthusiasm on the part of the developer.
Perplexingly, Last Heroes is the reverse of that. Almost everything about the game is not just generic, but so perfunctory that it feels like the developer hated RPGs and was pressured into making one. It's not just that the assets are all from the RPGMaker library. The town and dungeon designs are so bare bones that it's like the developer is saying to you, "Okay, there are your towns and your dungeons. Happy?" Your party members get character development, but just the minimum needed to make them actual characters rather than just names and stats and a profile picture from the RPGMaker library, and the NPCs get no development at all. The plot is a linear "chase the MacGuffin, beat the evil lord". The one real curve in the formula is the way the player characters are each introduced with their own individual adventure.
Yet Last Heroes is much more well-balanced than Shining Plume 1 and 2 (I wonder why, since Warfare made Plume later). Spells are effective (both your party's and the enemies'), item usage is necessary, and there's a genuine challenge. Little that would make an RPG veteran blink, mind you, but simply selecting "attack" every turn won't cut it in this game, and the three-phase final boss sequence is satisfyingly epic.
Moreover, the pace is so fast that things seem to move along at the blink of an eye compared to today's filler-loaded RPGs. The touch-based encounters are a big part of it; most enemies move slowly, so you can easily avoid most encounters and finish the final boss without even getting your characters past level 20. It took me four hours to finish Last Heroes on both my playthroughs, which in my experience is not long enough for the game's generic style to get dull.
So I'm recommending the game, but with the caveat that there are better offerings in the turn-based RPG field. Try Shining Plume, Valiant: Resurrection, Girlfriend Rescue, and too many more to list before turning to this one to satisfy your appetite. And whatever you do, don't get the Last Heroes bundle. The series took a huge dive in quality with Last Heroes 2 and never fully recovered. At the same time, the series recycles the formula of the first game to such an extent that you get nothing new out of 2-4. There's no cliffhanger at the end of Last Heroes 1 like the end of Shining Plume 1, just a dangling subplot which is not very intriguing (yet still manages to disappoint when it is resolved in Last Heroes 4). So Last Heroes 1 offers a complete experience, modest though that experience is.
