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Glory of Heracles
Nintendo DS / DSi
A Real Greek Tragedy
2/5 stars
The ‘Glory of Heracles’ franchise is one of those venerable RPG series that has been around since the 3rd Generation, originally appearing on the 8-bit NES, but never localized outside of Japan, with two NES games and two SNES games making up the main franchise along with a Game Boy Brick sidestory. Originally developed and published by Data East, a company called Paon now owns the rights to the franchise. I had never heard of the ‘Glory of Heracles’ franchise until I discovered the ‘Glory of ROMs and Emulation’, at which point I learned that the series was essentially like a ‘Dragon Quest’ game set in the world of Ancient Greek mythology. As someone who has spent far too much time and effort studying Classics and who loves traditional ‘Dragon Quest’ style RPGs, I felt like I’d discovered a treasure trove and tracked down as many fan-translations as possible… yet I still haven’t gotten around to playing them. However, when Paon released a new game in the ‘Glory of Heracles’ franchise with the simple reboot title “Glory of Heracles” (“GoH”) AND Nintendo decided to help them localize it into English, I figured it was finally time to give the series a shot, despite the fact that this new “GoH” was released exclusively on the DS.
Presentation
“GoH” is a fairly unimpressive looking game. Like many 5th Generation RPGs, like “Breath of Fire 3” and “Xenogears,” “GoH” employs polygonal backdrops with sprite-based characters. While the environmental polygons actually look decent, the sprites are problematic. Each character and monster sprite has numerous frames of animation, which allows them to ‘move’ quite smoothly. However, each sprite looks far more complicated than necessary, resulting in an overwrought look where characters’ heads and facial features are lost in pixilation. Occasionally, character portraits pop-up alongside dialog boxes to let the player know who is speaking, but this only happens inconsistently, and with no character portraits anywhere else in the game, it can be jarring and take a while to figure out which portrait belongs to which character. In lieu of character portraits, dialog sections in the game usually mark the speaker’s sprite with a cartoony speech balloon filled with squiggly lines.
The camera in “GoH” is kind of strange as well. It is possible to rotate it with the DS’ shoulder buttons, but it can also be set to rotate itself ‘smartly.’ While the camera does actually do a pretty good job of figuring out which way it should be facing based on what the player wants to look at, it also has a tendency to align itself diagonally, with the result of making the game look like it’s isometric when it’s not.
The sound in “GoH” is unimpressive as well. Sound effects are merely adequate and the music has a distinctly MIDI quality. None of the individual tracks in the soundtrack are particularly memorable or catchy. I couldn’t hum the battle theme right now to save my life, and that is by far the most repeated track in the game.
Story
I have been hoping for an incredibly long time for an RPG based on Ancient Greek mythology and/or history. With the incredibly breadth and depth of the Ancient Greek tradition, ranging from Classical Mythology, Orphic Mythology, ancient novels, ancient theater, and even ancient historians, one would think that source material would be as easy to come by as throwing a dart at a board. Unfortunately, the Japanese development team behind “GoH” seems to know about as much as the ancient world as someone who read a “Hi-Lights for Kids” article about the subject. Even Wikipedia serves as an ever-present source of consolidated, if not quite academically rigorous, information on the subject – in other words, more than enough to assemble a compelling story. Instead of an even semi-accurate account of any ancient myth or chunk of ancient history, “GoH’s” story presents a ‘kitchen sink’ approach to mythology, with plenty of characters from disparate time periods co-existing, conspicuously absent characters from major mythological events, gender swaps, misinterpretations of ancient political systems, and overuse of boring, clichéd tropes.
The game begins with a nameless amnesiac hero awakening somewhere on the island of Crete. This nameless character soon meets up with an ally, the woman-posing-as-a-man Leucos (Why not use Atalanta instead of making up a character?). Shortly after their initial encounter, these two characters discover that they have something in common: They are immortal and don’t know why. Deciding to head to Mt. Olympus to ask the gods directly about their immortality, the hero and Leucos encounter some nymphs (which are not the sexy maidens of Greek myth, but super-deformed fairies that would feel more at home in 21st century Tokyo) who proclaim that they can sense a person’s spirit, and identify the amnesiac hero as Heracles (the Greek original upon which the Roman Hercules was based). On their way to Mt. Olympus, Heracles and Leucos encounter a slew of other amnesiac immortals and join forces with them, including another Heracles (at which point the hero begins operating under an assumed name chosen by the player in order to avoid confusion). At this point, the amnesia trope seems completely idiotic, and the writing team decided, as a master stroke, to hang an enormous lampshade on the issue, at which point the multitude of Heracleses and amnesiac immortals becomes something of a running gag.
Upon reaching Mt. Olympus, the party is given cryptic and vaguely threatening advice by an extremely minor goddess before setting back out into the world to deal with a threat the likes of which the world has never seen: Someone is creating immortal (actually undead) soldiers to fight in the Trojan War. This undead menace is tied to a set of invented magical/technological McGuffins called craseis (which means ‘mixer’ in Greek… so the writers were apparently able to get their hands on a “Liddell & Scott Greek-English Lexicon” but not a copy of “Bulfinch’s Mythology”). The party decides that it might be a good idea to travel the world, destroy all the craseis (and, while they’re at it, a bunch of ancient tombs called taphoi), try to track down the missing-in-action inventor of the craseis (Daedalus), and hopefully get their memories back.
Despite the fact that the overall plot is a hackneyed joke of a writing project, the characters, for what it’s worth, do get their memories back and thus experience some slight bit of character development (though none of it jibes with actual mythology in any way). Other than that small bit of silver lining, the rest of the story in “GoH” is all dark clouds.
Even worse, the narrative in “GoH” is just one monolithic ‘railroad.’ This is the most linear game I’ve ever played, as it allows exactly ZERO revisitations to previous towns and dungeons. The areas between each successive destination are narrow corridors on the world map that even have roads to prevent idiotic players from constantly bumping up against impassable terrain and failing to make progress. There are also exactly ZERO side quests of any flavor. In fact, the game even goes out of its way to prevent the player from performing the traditional RPG activity of looting random strangers’ houses by causing Leucos to chastise the hero if he considers taking an item out of a cabinet and displaying a message about ‘feeling unlucky’ if the hero follows through with his thieving ways. I ended up never taking any items found in towns simply because I’m extremely paranoid about ANYTHING making my ‘luck’ worse in a game, despite never receiving anything resembling a solid explanation of exactly what ‘unlucky’ means in “GoH.” The extremely small, linear world map (that INEXPLICABLY looks nothing like an actual map of the ancient world, and even features entirely made-up countries) and dearth of hidden goodies (there are a few… a SCANT few) allowed me to plow through the game in exactly 30 hours… and I don’t think I could have tolerated an hour more.
Gameplay
“GoH” has a pretty good battle system. It is 100% turn-based and up to five characters can be in the player’s party at any given time. There are two rows on both the player’s and the enemies’ side of the battlefield, with back row characters/enemies kept safely out of range from melee attacks by the other side’s front row. Back row characters/enemies also have the added bonus of recovering a small amount of their magic points at the end of each turn. There are, however, ranged attacks available to some characters, and magic and some MP-consuming skills can reach the back row regardless. Once everything in the front row is dead, the back row moves forward (except, ridiculously, in the final battle). Battles occur randomly on the world map and in dungeons. The encounter rate is quite reasonable, however one huge annoyance with random encounters is the fact that ‘powerful’ encounters can happen randomly as well, and if a ‘powerful’ group of enemies gets a free turn due to a surprise attack, the player’s team can get wiped out with no warning. Of course, since the characters are all immortal, there is no ‘Game Over’ screen, and they simply stand up with a pittance of hit points left… and NO other penalty! Traditionally, RPGs would take away half the player’s money to punish them for continuing, but “GoH” doesn’t have a continue penalty of any kind. Of course it would be unnecessarily tedious to expect a player to re-grind all of their money between towns, as there is a LOT of equipment to buy.
The equipment system in “GoH” is solidly designed as well. Each character has two hand slots, with a weapon hand and an off-hand that can either carry a sub-weapon or a shield (I never used a shield… why defend when a sub-weapon will boost the character’s damage output enough to kill everything in one turn?). In addition to weapons, each character can equip armor on their head and body, along with a cape, accessory, and two bonus slots. The bonus slots are an interesting addition to the traditional RPG equipment system, in that they can either contain consumable items that are used automatically when a certain condition is met (such as ‘low HP,’ or ‘KO’d’), consumable items that unlock extra attack features for certain characters (such as arrows that add status ailments to their targets), or just two more items that would normally go in the accessory slot (I loaded up most of my characters with triple accessories!). The flaw in the equipment system is just how many different sources for equipment there are and how expensive it is to constantly run on the upgrade treadmill. Each new town has the potential to host a number of shops. There are, of course, the traditional weapon and armor shops that just sell slightly more powerful gear than what the characters already have. But “GoH” also includes blacksmiths who can combine old equipment with bits of random crap dropped by monsters and copious amounts of money to create significantly better gear than what’s available at the regular shops. There are also polishers who can remove the rust from ‘rusty’ items found in treasure chests or dropped by bosses, which are usually pretty powerful. On top of all that, there are alchemists who can be paid to add special abilities to almost every piece of equipment in the game. Thus “GoH” encourages players to hoard old gear instead of selling it for money to spend on upgrades. And that’s just the gear that can be bought or crafted in towns… there are plenty of amazing items hidden in treasure chests as well. Since there are so many equipment options, it’s possible to waste a lot of time poring over stat comparisons and special ability trade-offs.
Frequently, however, older pieces of equipment will stick around for a long time simply because of the abilities they provide. While each character comes with their own set of ‘abilities’ and ‘skills,’ they can learn more by praying at various temples or gain temporary access by wearing gear that grants abilities or skills. Abilities are passive things that trigger randomly in battle, stuff like ‘critical’ which allows a character to land critical hits, ‘dispatch’ which allows a character to take an extra attack against an enemy that’s almost dead, or ‘vigor’ which allows a character to regenerate a little bit of their hit points at the end of the turn. Skills, on the other hand, are special attacks that consume MP but don’t count as magic. Some skills allow characters to target the back row, add status ailments, or just deal enormous chunks of damage. When it comes down to it, abilities are far-and-away more useful than skills. I found that by simply stacking critical with an ability called ‘pinnacle’ (or its lesser version, ‘peak’) that causes abilities to activate more frequently, my entire party managed to critically hit almost every turn, resulting in huge damage with no drawbacks or limits.
Speaking of limits, the magic system in “GoH” is kind of strange and overly convoluted. Instead of just consuming MP, like skills do, each magic spell requires a specific amount of ‘ether’ to be on the battlefield. Ether is tracked by 5 icons at the top of the screen, showing the respective amounts of fire, earth, wind, water, and dark ether that are available at any given time. Casting a spell when its ether requirement isn’t available results in a backlash that deals damage to the caster. For weak spells, the backlash is fairly insignificant (but then, so is the damage output of the spell), but casting powerful magic without enough ether will typically result in a KO’d caster. Ether constantly fluctuates, both based on the natural ether complement in a given area and by the ‘overkill’ deaths of enemies.
Overkill is a mechanic that causes dead enemies to lie on the battle field until the end of the turn. Continuing to damage their corpses can cause them to completely disintegrate into ether, which is added to the current ether total. In addition, overkilling an enemy partially refills the MP of the character that deals the overkilling blow. Another feature of the overkill mechanic is that it’s the only way to keep undead enemies from standing back up at the end of the turn.
Unfortunately, since “GoH” is a DS game, it just had to include some annoying touchscreen gimmickry. For most spells and skills, there is an option to either let the spell/skill go off normally or to use the touchscreen to play an inane mini-game to give the spell/skill a damage boost ranging from 140-200%. There is no penalty for failing the minigames, and partial success even grants part of the bonus. The touchscreen shenanigans go even further in that the early game forces tutorials for almost every simple action and requires the use of the touchscreen to move through them, despite the fact that every touchscreen function in the game (besides the spell/skill boost minigames) can be performed equally well with the d-pad and buttons.
Overall
Despite possessing a solid, strategic, and reasonably enjoyable turn-based battle system along with other solid RPG gameplay accoutrements, “Glory of Heracles” completely flops in every other way. It’s ugly, lacks musical ambiance, and has an absolute joke of a story that can’t even stand up to the likes of “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” or “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Yes, Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless were far better Ancient Greek heroes on TV, who went on far more interesting Ancient Greek adventures, than anything in this game. Classicists should avoid this turkey like the plague, as it’s an insult to one of the greatest mythological traditions on Earth. Non-Classicists should avoid it too, since they will not like the consequences of inadvertently spouting some of the nonsense from this game within earshot of a Classicist as if it was based on actual mythology.
Presentation: 2.5/5
Story: 1.5/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
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