Welcome to Heroland, an isolated island where all your JRPG dreams will come true. Unless your dreams involve direct control of party members or equipping more than a weapon to determine class composition. You’ll be our tour guide, Lucky, an afro-addled, almost-mute who is only given three-prompt answers and has a fairy following him around that speaks for him. Yes, Heroland is a fun spot for all ages including small children, adults of all castes, and even anthropomorphic otter-people who claim they’re not otters but humans.
Heroland
Developer: Furyu Corporation
Price: $39.99
Platform: Playstation 4(Reviewed,) Nintendo Switch and PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PS4 code for review.
The protagonist, Lucky, is completely inconsequential. Some might argue this is a good thing. It’s fresh in a world full of games with “The Chosen One” protagonists. There has to be a happy medium though. Surely, Lucky must have one thing about him that makes him special to the plot, but he stands in a crowd. Just about anyone can and does come into Heroland and become a tour guide. Making Lucky seem even more inconsequential. Worse, he’s not even interested in becoming a tour guide as he’s being blackmailed into staying and doing his job. After bumping into a “co-worker” they drop a really expensive vase and you’re just running dungeons to pay back the absurd “debt” you’ve accrued in doing so.
At first, I was really enjoying Heroland. It seemed like there was a lot I was going to be able to do and collect and enough variation in how many NPCs wanted me to take them through dungeons. Heroland wants you to fall into those niches that make JRPGs fun and interesting. There’s a monster index, a room for you to decorate for Lucky, and a lot of dungeons and side-quests to complete. And that’s the actual problem, all of those things are fun and exciting when you get to a new town or experience something catastrophic in your world. Heroland is just one island. When you get into a new dungeon, nothing changes in the overall world around you. Your group goes into the new dungeon, but it’s the same colleagues in different mascot outfits, and the same series of rooms with different coloring.
And maybe that’s the magic behind Heroland. That it’s just a big joke and all the NPCs take it so seriously. That the effort going into this game was heavily focused on writing and the art and design were kind of left on the bench. William Shakespeare has one of his characters in Hamlet says “…brevity is the soul of wit,” and I think that’s something game writers often fail to capture. Heroland is no exception. It’s unnecessarily wordy and dumps text on you as if you’re paying to play the game by the minute.
I continued plodding my way through this game as if it were my job instead of Lucky’s. Spending hours trying to get through all the text necessary to move onto the next dungeon and eventually hit a wall where I had to run characters through a few older dungeons to get them up to speed. Which might have been the worst part of Heroland. I actually like grinding in RPGs but because I wasn’t directly controlling my party and merely babysitting them, I hated doing it. My enjoyment of Heroland faded quickly and as a result, I started noticing other areas where the game started to fall apart.
Weapons have a durability that isn’t represented in the UI at all so they break randomly after dungeons. Items are severely limited in the amount you can carry with you into a dungeon. Each character has a character ability and a weapon ability and you can only use them five times throughout a single dungeon. It is impossible to give enough orders to prevent them from using those abilities in any given fight, so they give you an item, in limited pouch slots, to replenish those abilities. A lot of thought was put into all the different ways to make the game both challenging and fun but it doesn’t seem like any of them were refined. Sometimes the game is just challenging and sometimes it’s fun but usually not.
One thing I liked about Heroland was how many people they threw at you. A veritable Chrono Cross of characters that were all chomping at the bit to tell me their stories so I could take them through a side-quest dungeon. Unfortunately, this is countered, pretty hard, by only having four classes. Each character has a unique character ability but it largely didn’t matter because it was more like a class ability than a character ability. Tanks have a group heal, healers have a special heal, mages have an attack all ability and oh fun, so do warriors. The real lack of variation started to make making friends much more of a chore and less of a novelty.
That’s really the problem with Heroland. It’s funny and light-hearted, the art is cute and the idea is novel but the execution is done poorly. Considering how long the game ended up being I felt even more annoyed at how pointless my journey had become. There were an unnecessary number of dungeons to go through, a surprising amount of side-content thanks to the strong number of characters in your party, and a story that was boring. Writing isn’t something you can just throw words at and hope it fixes the problem. The localization was stellar but the overall wordiness of the game absolutely killed my desire to play Heroland.
The Final Word
You remember all those ideas people throw at the wall and don’t stick? Heroland manages to pick those ideas off the floor and use them as integral parts of its game design. If you’re looking for something to play over time that doesn’t require much concentration and doesn’t really grip you, Heroland is your game.
MonsterVine Review Score: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
