An sbsolutely fantastic take on JRPG's for the PSP.
Half-Minute Hero is a strange beast of an RPG, something that's certainly unique in a tidal wave of sameness that tends to pour out of Japanese RPG's as of late. It's not without a few faults, but the core gameplay of the Hero 30 mode included here, while short, is so worth checking out that I could easily ignore any other issue I have with the game. If you own a PSP, then you should own this game, it's that good.
For those of you that are unaware of what Half-Minute Hero is about, it's a full fledged handheld version of a Flash title, fleshed out for it's appearance on the PSP and given a better 8-bit design art style with some incredibly catchy chiptune style rock music by The Alfee, a popular techno band out of Japan. The high intensity of the music matches the gameplay quite well, enough so that I wanted to make a note of it while I was doing this review and check out more tracks by the band outside of the main game. From the title track to the story over screen that accompanies each mission, I found myself really digging the soundtrack of Half-Minute Hero.
The concept of the game, as the name implies, is that you have thirty seconds to finish your quest. During this time, an Evil Lord has cast a world destruction spell, and you need to move your hero from his starting point to the Evil Lord's castle, and defeat him within the time limit. Accompanying you throughout each quest is the Time Goddess, who is also at odds with whatever creature is granting all these Evil Lord's the ability to cast the spell in the first place, and she'll help you out with little hints prior to a quest starting, and you can opt to pray at a Time Goddess statue found in most towns to reset the day and the timer, giving you a short extension (for a bit of a gold). So while the game does impose the 30 second time limit, it's not entirely set in stone, and you can opt to pay some cash to get it extended, which is a necessary mechanic for quite a few quests.
The 8-bit art style of the game also ties heavily into the overall gameplay, it's easy to pick up on an early Dragon Warrior vibe (early NES RPG aka Dragon Quest), but the story is very light hearted and full of jokes, keeping it from being stale like a lot of early JRPG titles from the 8 bit days. The Time Goddess, the villagers, and even the Evil Lords themselves are typically caricatures of actual RPG stereotypes, and the humor works really well for fans that are already familiar with the genre. Some of the humor is going to be lost on players that aren't typical players of RPG's, but I think just about everyone will pick up on a joke or two.
There's a series of modes available in the game, with Hero 30 definitely feeling like the main mode, but only being one of five. There's an Evil Lord 30, Princess 30, Knight 30, and Wizard 30, along with a cool little surprise I won't ruin here. To be honest, I'm not nearly as in love with the other modes as I was the Hero 30. Princess 30 is designed to be an odd shooter style event, where knights carry the princess as a group, and you use the face buttons to fire in various directions to take out enemies, controlling your movement with the D-Pad. Evil Lord 30 is an RTS hybrid, using units to take out enemies instead of engaging them directly, and the other two modes involve protecting units within a time limit as opposed to seeking out enemies to destroy. They're all ok in their own right, but not nearly as well realized or engaging as the main hero mode in my opinion. Hero 30 contains a number of quests, so it can take you a few hours to complete, while the rest of modes will easily tack on another six or so hours of gameplay. However, for Hero mode, you also are granted various titles depending on how you tackled stages, and there's usually multiple ways to defeat Evil Lords, and various people to save or accompany you on your quest, so it's worth replaying multiple times.
As your quest begins in Hero 30 mode you get a little pep talk from the Time Goddess, and then the counter starts. Most of the maps for each quest are pretty short, sometimes there's a direct path to the Evil Lord Castle, but more often than not there's a few obstacles in the way, broken bridges, rocks, mazes, caverns, and so on. To get an idea of the right path to take, you'll run into a village or two and talk to the people in the town. Villagers with an exclamation mark over their head usually have some type of useful info, or might tie into a side quest that's worth checking out, and will most likely make your final battle a little easier to manage. There are typically side quests present in every scenario, often yielding a special weapon or partner to help you out. The partners that you'll come across are actually a little useless in my opinion, they tend to die quickly, so for the most part they don't seem necessary other than to give you a little attack boost (but they can show up later!). However, the weapon and armor rewards are usually worth the effort, and there's a few that will result in insta-kills for Evil Lords and other challenging enemies.
The battles themselves are played out without much involvement from the player. There's random encounters on the field, and your hero will move from right to left across a 2D side-scrolling plane bumping into enemy monsters and whittling away at their HP quickly (while the same is done to you). Each kill nets experience, but you really don't see the numbers, instead you get a bar in the top left of the screen that fills up after each fight. Like everything else in the game, leveling and fighting is quick, and you'll want to pay close attention to your HP, which is pretty limited. In the villages you can buy one-use herbs for on the fly healing, and there's also vendors that will sell you food that instantly replenishes your health. In reality, you can kind of cheese your way through the game by grinding, you make enough money per kill that you can usually buy all the weapons/armor, items, and time boosts to become pretty over-powered by the time you hit the Evil Lord. However, you'll also get a pretty awful rating (the game will literally call you Sucky Hero), so depending on whether or not that would bother you, it's not worth doing. Also, it's really not the intended way to play the game, and it would be a good way to suck the fun out of playing it in the first place.
As it stands, Half Minute Hero is absolutely worth checking out for the Hero 30 mode, even if I found the other modes involved a little disappointing. They're worth playing too, but none of them were nearly as fun for me as the main Hero mode was. Also, for those of you with a friend interested in the game, there's some multiplayer involved with a local connection, but I was unable to test that for the review. All together, I really enjoyed Half Minute Hero, and I think it's absolutely worth picking for PSP owners. It's a great spin on a tired formula, with some fantastic art design and a quality soundtrack to go along with it. Definitely pick this one up and you won't be disappointed.
