The Hero of Destiny was killed by the final boss

This game is simple and lacking polish. It feels likes a side project that was done for fun. The UI is intrusive blocking the left 4th of the screen. The game world is too big, making the back tracking required for puzzle solving painful and the world can look fairly bland at times. That all being said, this game is charming, filled with little bits of humor in the dialogue and the combat is chaotic fun. If you think you would like a short, quirky, unpolished rpg, this game is might be for you. If you like checklists in your games it has a long list of badges that you can earn. That isn't me but that might be you.

A surprising amount of depth packed into a simple concept. Battles are frantic requiring you to find the right combination of villagers. I'll get checking out the stats of all the characters but my favorite so far is definitely "man"!

Let me start off by saying that this was a game I was looking forward to before it even came out, as the concept itself was pitched very well by the developer. There's something very investing about someone who is clearly very familiar with the genre working on a JRPG style game, and even more so when it uses the conventions to create something very unique and its subversive deconstruction. This game stands shoulder to shoulder with Breath of Death VII in how it proves that beyond the laughs you can get out of pointing out the absurdity of game systems and writing conventions, that there can also be a very deep heart and understanding to it. Mechanically it's quite interesting, as it has a pretty great hook in that you can recruit somewhere in the realm of 50 different NPCs to make a max of an 8-man party, all of them with weapons and skills specific to them. These are just regular people, at the end of the day, and are definitely not the hero of legend that was going to smite the evil sorcerer. You have to get pretty creative in how you utilize these abilities, as the cooldown system makes you think strategically about how long you're willing to wait-out certain abilities in the heat of combat. It's no joke, either, as the real-time battles mean that you are going to be taking a lot of damage if you're not being very careful with how you strategize with your party. That party can also be inclusive of tons of different classes, from a delivery man, to bartender, to an astrologist, none of whom are particularly combat ready, but all of them willing. The writing is also a high point, which is common for Sungrand games, as every character has different insights on the situation, and different priorities as well. There's also that tinge of existential sadness and fear that many of the creator's characters will sometimes slip into the world. It does make a compelling case for attempting to beat the game with every single potential class just to hear all of the comments they have to make, and it's not a daunting task to do so, as you can complete the game fairly quickly once you get a handle on the mechanics you wish to experiment with in each playthrough. If I am to criticize anything it will probably be that there are still a handful of bugs that can surprise you, and that the route to the ending is probably going to go along the same steps, regardless of who you have in the party, it will just change how you attempt to handle those same challenges. Additionally the battle arena the game provides you is a little obtuse at first, but you could start to figure out the best way to rack up your score the more you explore. I genuinely do recommend the game, as it's very unique, has a great sense of art direction and fun writing. Worth your time, especially if you can sit someone down to play in co-op with you. My first playthrough was with one other person, we both stuck to a single class, and we strong armed all the way to the end. Afterwards all of the exploration and testing made it fun to revisit even to this day. If you love JRPGs or classic Japanese adventure titles then there’s so much in this game that’ll keep you smiling as you rescue the princess with increasingly more bizarre mixtures of professionals, animal tamers and signposts.

I like this game, sort of. There's a kernel of a good game in here, but it's in dire need of qol features. For some people, that's a dealbreaker, for others, they'll power through it. The premise of the game is in the title: The hero's dead, you need to be the hero. You can assemble a group of up to 8 people. When one character attacks, all of them attack. You can turn off permadeath (I did immediately). You can talk to anyone in town and choose to recruit them. Everyone has two skills that can't be changed and you need to BYOP (build your own party) of whatever you want. The game is pretty straightforward: My first run was, I think, about 3 hours, and some of that was spent goofing off. Around town you'll find pillars that increase the max hp of the people currently in your party, and temples have loot in them too. You'll need certain people to get into the temples (not spoiling that). My issues with this game are: When recruiting someone, you cannot see what their skills are. There is also no way to remove a single person from the group. You have to disband and then chat with everyone, again, to recruit them back. If you die in non-permadeath mode, you have to, again, recruit everyone you had before by talking to them all again. There's clothing that your people can wear that grants useful bonuses. However, you don't know what the stat diff is when you go to put something on. Additionally, and more frustratingly, equipment is per-person. To equip an 8 person party, every single one of them needs to talk to the statue. Enemies will drop items you can use to upgrade characters. Each person has two weapons they can use and their armor. To upgrade armor, you have to walk to the armor place, talk to the person, be told that they normally enchant stuff for the hero but the hero is dead so they'll do their bestest and oh you have the things, do you want to have the stuff upgraded? Oh great, here is your one upgrade. Another one, okay normally I enchant stuff for the hero but... . This is one of my gripes: The whole bit about oh, hero dead, but I will try to help, that bit I feel I should only see once for every character I come across. Once I talk to the upgrader once, for subsequent discussions, buddy, I'm just here to get stronger. PLEASE just make me stronger. This also goes for the save point. Hearing the same conversation instead of it being occasional makes it a little more frustrating. The experience you gain from enemies **isn't** balanced. If you want levels, the safest and best option is to knock out slimes. You want to make sure you really like the party you have before you touch the max hp pillars, because those are one-time use and only for the party members who you currently have. The actual game only has one biome. The other biomes in the trailer are single rooms from the arena (really disappointed there). I didn't bother with the arena, since there didn't seem to be prizes and, more importantly, enemies inside only give 1exp despite being tougher than the 20exp slimes. For me, the humor and my rpg craving won out over the qol papercuts, but ymmv.

DIALOGUE Could use an overhaul. Many typos, some grammarly messups. MECHANICAL GAMEPLAY Well executed: Game is simple and easy to pick up at any time. Character Movement control is awesome, buttery smooth. Good Animations. Questionable: The first time my character levelled and the game slowed down I failed to understand, that the window with the character stats that popped up was just for information and I tried to somehow see a cursor move around so I could level up specific attributes, the controls were giving sounds like I was going through a menu but nothing happened or moved until I must've pressed B (on XBox Controller), closed the window and wondered if I now have unattributed stat points. Only through further gameplay I came to the conclusion that the popup is strictly for information. Enemies constantly run into the center of the party even without using bull rush through the party (which makes sense and is a cool mechanic), making it simply annoying having to reposition constantly to hit them effectively. Too many of the villagers abilities are useless, not because the villagers abilities are useless but because the effects are too hard to apply because of hit coordination. The game could really shine as a sort of Vampire Slayer type game. Remove the function to rotate the camera from the right stick. It is 100% unnecessary in this game and replace it with an aim cursor. Put your villagers abilities on a re-occuring auto-use mode at the cursors target location. Tinker with enemy density/behaviour and balancing and make the game more fun, even though you are playing as useless non hero villagers. The player still wants to have fun and not be forced into a position where everything feels useless/pointless. Why do enemies sometimes explode (multiple) times without dying. It's not intuitive why it happens but it looks and sounds cool. Resting is unnecessary 95% of the time. Just stay in the field, don't waste time with a long journey to the beds, fight monsters and keep using heal cooldowns. QUALITY OF LIFE Pressed Menu button on my Xbox controller (when i was trying to figure stuff out) and got immediately booted into the game menu at the beginning of the game without having a save file so I had to redo the whole intro. Maybe dialogue option that you have to confirm to return to starting screen would be nice. The resting is a tad bit long. Could be a third or a quarter of the time and not hurt anyone. Would really appreciate XP share between villagers and a overhaul of the spheres of hardiness so they count for future villagers as well. The game would benefit of a XP share because when you levelled a bunch of villagers already and you find out you need a different one for a temple trial you have to relevel that dude(tte) and apparently only the villagers actually damaging an enemy gain XP so that becomes really tedious and unfun really quickly and if you don't do it you just get chased down in some temple or on the way there and the villager you needed to do the trial just gets murdered and you sit there heavily sighing, eyes rolling with a dead villager on the ground asking if you really wanna reload the save and try again. It would be amazing to have a village armory or you could turn part of the Inn into an armory where you have clothes that you collected on the map before to quickly refit villagers with what you might think would be useful on them without keeping tabs of what might be where. You could convince the Blacksmith and Armorer to set up shop in there as well, especially now that they are looking for a new purpose anyway and streamline the whole process of levelling weapons and armors of characters one by one. It is really tedious, unfun and feels unrewarding. The puzzle aspect is fun and cool but the reward doesn't feel good because you just get some extra defense across the board of your party for villagers you might've just taken along for that specific challenge never to use them again and in the same time you went back, recruited the right villager you could've just murdered a bunch of enemies in the woods and gotten the same out of it by levelling your characters. Speaking of recruiting the right villager, why do you have to disband the whole party to get a new guy you need for a challenge and recruit everyone else as well and not just send someone home to his original place on the spot when you try to recruit one while being at max party member capacity? I think the spheres of hardiness and the temple challenge rewards should be shared amongst all villagers and could be turned into "The forces good in this area have been strengthened." Flower field and graveyard don't have signs reading "Flowers" and "Graveyard". NARRATIVE Humor and the Idea for the story are great but... it fails to capture me after the novelty wears off. The villagers have too little personality to care about and the game itself treats them like dirt and on top of that I don't feel like my time as a player is being respected because of all the tedious chores mentioned in the QUALITY OF LIFE segment. The big bad evil is showcased too little and doesn't really feel like a threat that needs to be dealt with. After reading that the monsters are going to eat us all by the villagers for the tenth time it lost it's novelty. Maybe a timer like in Majoras mask upon when it runs out the village gets razed would induce some urgency. Also the village could be a bit more in disarray like villagers standing around a big bonfire in which they burn their furniture because they gonna die anyways and they heavily drink or fight each other out of frustration etc. Like this it's just a village of a bunch of sitting ducks just waiting to get killed with slight variations to their dialogues. It would be cool if villagers would need inspiring or convincing to actually come along and try to do something despite the seeming futility of the whole situation and step by step would uncover that the hero was just an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and that's what got him killed and they go through all those purifying temple side missions and eventually win the day by working as a team and a force for good instead of being a legendary greedy little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, lol. The rewards of the temple could be improved and narratively woven into the story of the game. Eventually the Hero who was killed by the final boss was a grade AAAAA ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and got murdered because of all the negative emotions and his inhumanity were turned against him by the wizard. The puzzle rewards could be constructed in a way where they just seemed like pointless side content to the hero in which he wasn't willing to partake in because the rewards are just purity shrines that purify the one who overcame those challenges soul, making them more resilient against the dark magic of the big bad guy. It leaves player choice open to determine how many you want to do of those and how much you want or need to trivialize the final fight for yourself. I would really think of a hook or a bread crumb structure for the story other than the repetitive "The hero left legendary weapon x behind, why would he do that?". CONCLUSION Cannot recommend on a pure gameplay level because of all the aforementioned reasons and because 10$ is a steep price compared to other games that offer more fun.

A passionate indie project by a cool dev that has some cool surprisingly deep mechanics for RPG enjoyers.

There's a high level of charm on display here in what can best be described as a Action RPG... Party Jumble? I don't even really know. Can't say I've ever quite played anything like this. From the references to the original hero AAAAA doing all the kinds of antisocial stuff you'd expect a min-maxing JRPG player to do (robbing houses, breeding the same animal dozens of times to get one specific color, etc.); to all the townsfolk having their own personalities, quirks, and abilities when they join your party; and plenty of self-aware humor (IE everyone sort of knows they're in a videogame but have no clue what a videogame is) it's honestly a feat how well everything is thought out, crafted, and blended together. The gameplay is simple enough to pick up and play (recruit townsfolk, smack enemies, right trigger to use special abilities, visit town to find some upgrades, sleep to restore health, rinse/repeat), and the game makes it sound more complicated than it actually is, but that's all just part of the self-aware nature of the story. There's levels of meta on display here that I was honestly not ready for. But what's even better is this is the kind of game you can pick up for five minutes to smack some slimes and gain some XP, or spend an hour or two diving into dungeons and uncovering everything the game has to offer. I'm not without some gripes though. For one, the sound starts out very loud and there are no volume settings (in fact, the whole options menu is pretty sparse) so you'll have to go into your OS volume settings and turn it down. Two, I haven't tried co-op because Remote Play Together isn't supported at the time of writing this review, but hopefully that can get switched on soon because I can tell this game would make for a ton of laughs in the right company. All that being said though I still strongly recommend The Hero of Destiny was killed by the final boss. The gameplay is fun, the visuals have a really charming Amiga/PS1 palette & polycount, and I think anyone who's been gaming for any serious amount of time will be able to appreciate the story. Pick it up!