Developer: Opas
Publisher: Marvelous
RRP: £6.99 (Steam) and £7.97 (Humblebundle)
Released: 27th September 2012
Available on: Steam and Humblebundle
Played Using: An Xbox Control Pad
Approximate game length: 8 hours
Thirty seconds. What can you do in thirty seconds? Honestly not a lot really. How about saving the world? Do you think you could do that in thirty seconds? Well apparently you can, or so this game shows me.
Half Minute Hero (I’m not saying the rest) is what happens when you take an eastern style RPG (or JRPG) and strip it down to the absolute basics. As the name implies you have thirty seconds in which to save the world, that might seem like a extremely tall order but you have a secret. You have the goddess of time helping you… for a price.
It should be mentioned that there is a fairly major flaw with this game in that you can’t delete save games from previous runs from within the game. So if you’ve played it before (I like I had) you have to manually going into the games system files and delete the saves (but not before disabling Steams cloud functionality for the game). It’s a fairly major flaw and its not likely to be fixed at any point considering the age of the game and that there are threads online telling you how to preform this deletion that date from 2013.
Usually I don’t speak on the story for games but.. well in this case the story is very, very simple and knowing it really makes no difference to the enjoyment of the game (seriously you’re pretty much told it at the very start of the game). So the basic story is someone has been teaching various Evil Overlords the spell of destruction, a spell so powerful it will destroy the world in thirty seconds. It’s up to you to stop them from completing the spell. That’s it.
As I said at the beginning this is a stripped down eastern RPG, specifically of the classic variety. You have an overworld map and will randomly encounter monsters as you wander it. Once you find a monster combat will ensue. Thing is the combat isn’t typical at all. Its not turn based or anything like that, instead your hero runs at the enemy and they hit each other, first to run out of hit points loses.
Essentially the combat auto-resolves with the only inputs the player having being when to use items, dash or retreat. That isn’t to say the player has no influence at all. The player guides the hero, chooses when to rewind time and purchase equipment, which of course has an affect on how you do in the combat.
In typical RPG fashion your hero levels up as he defeats monsters, most of which are random encounters. You have no control over this at all. However unlike other RPG’s when ever you start a new quest your level is reset to level one.
You get to choose your equipment before you start a quest, but any equipment acquired in that quest will be equipped automatically.
But with only thirty seconds how can you possibly kill enough monsters to gain any real power? Well monsters drop gold and gold can be used in towns to heal,
buy equipment and rewind time at goddess statues. However rewinding time comes with a small catch, each time you rewind time the cost of doing so goes up by one hundred gold, meaning that it can become extremely expensive after a few times so use it wisely. Also thankfully in the standard mod of the game time is frozen inside towns and villages so you don’t have to rush that.
You can go back and play previous quests but you can’t use equipment that was gained from quests completed after it. Usually going back to re-complete these quests is just to pick up some item you haven’t got or beat your existing time (because you are awarded a rank for how long you take). But most of the quests have side missions in them, you don’t have to complete every side mission, in fact not doing so can open new pathways to take in the overworld.
There an element of competition with this game both against yourself and other people. When you replay a mission you see a ‘shadow’ version of yourself
performing the quest, so you can try and beat your time. I also have to say that I think this is the first time I’ve seen a RPG with a leader board just for completing missions.
I can’t say this is a bad game, its truly not. In fact for the price its a pretty good one, however it doesn’t have an awful lot of replayability to it in my eyes. In fact if it wasn’t for me writing this review I doubt I would ever have installed it again.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Half Minute Hero: The Second Coming
Saturday Morning RPG
Cthulhu Saves the World
