Random Battle

Looks like I missed quite an important news at the E3 this year (2009).

Half-Minute Hero (which was named Yuusha 30) is coming to North America this fall. I talked about this game previously, it’s an RPG with a twist: you have 30 seconds to grind, buy equipment and defeat the final boss. There are many stages and a few other games modes too (one where you play the villain and one where you play a princess surrounded by body guards).

It looks like XSEED Games is doing the job of bringing us this little game that looks like a ton of fun, 30 seconds at the time.

There’s also going to be a demo released tomorrow (september 10th)!

As I said in my last post, I recently finished playing through the remake of Dragon Quest IV for the Nintendo DS. There was one thing that annoyed me more than anything else in the game. It’s how much the main character sucked (stat wise).

Normally, the main character is a powerful character that is a must to your party. If you could only have one member in your group, it would be him. Well not in Dragon Quest IV, the main character was not the strongest, not the fastest, didn’t have the best spells, he wasn’t the best at anything. He was not the worst in any either (except speed). He was in the top 4 characters, but he was not especially helpful. He had 2 things going for him. He was the strongest character that could equip the best armor (making him a tank) and he had the best healing spell which was only useful in the final boss battle (and the bonus quests after the game). So he was pretty much the dumb tank while a physical attacker, a healer and a powerful mage took care of things.

I did not like that my main character was the tank which is usually reserved to beefy but stupid characters.

I recently finished playing through the remake of Dragon Quest IV for the Nintendo DS. It’s a fairly standard jRPG (4 characters group, grinding, turn-based battles, …) which is a genre I enjoy playing from time to time.

As I said, this is game that requires grinding, however in the last few years grinding has become less and less useful to finish a game. So when playing DQ4, I did not grind too much, I battled for money, not so much for experience. I managed to get through most of the game just fine, with many battles being hard fought which made them quite more enjoyable. I did die once or twice though which is perfectly fine (since the deaths were not due to cheap tricks by the game developer to make the game artificially difficult).

Battle preparation

Back to the topic, I went into the final battle with relatively good equipment, my four best characters and my HP/MP were mostly full. I forgot one important thing to do before engaging the battle. I did not use the item that would allow me to switch party members during the fight, I was not stuck with my four main characters.

Fight!

The battle started, I used my boss-fight routine and it worked well most of the fight. Boost defense of the party, reduce defense of the boss, hack away and heal when necessary (with the occasional omniheal which refills all the HP for every party member). The boss went through plenty of stages (it has 7 stages!!). At one point in the fight, my healer’s MP was getting low (my MP ring – Prayer Ring – broke during the fight) and my HP was not as high as I wanted it. I couldn’t cast omniheal anymore, my healer died before he managed to heal the party. My caster died, my main attacker died too. I was left with my main character, the hero, with no mana and without enough HP to survive any attack. I could have casted one tiny healing spell, but that wouldn’t have helped me.

I decided to give up the fight, I told my hero to attack one last time before dying. I got lucky, my hero attacked before the boss and the damage dealt was enough to kill the final stage of the boss. I was victorious!!

Victory is mine

The win was so rewarding considering I was so dead. I had really given up and I was thinking of what to do to be able to win next time. The victory felt really good. I’d love it if more games could reproduce that feeling, I don’t remember the last modern game where the final fight was close.

Normally when you talk about RPGs, you think about a 30 to 80 hours long game. This PSP game does things differently and I’m really hoping they bring this title to North America.

Basically, an evil wizard is casting a spell that will destroy the world. The spell takes 30 seconds to cast, that’s how long you have to defeat him. That means leveling-up, shoping and getting to the evil fortress. Fortunately, the countdown stops when inside a town to shop and there are ways to reset the clock.

You have to decide how much to level-up, how much to explore and what to buy, all in 30 seconds.

Here’s a video of the gameplay, you can grab the demo on your PSP: