Hero's Sword

Intro

"Hero's Sword" is a short RPG developed by Seangrei using RPG Maker VX that was created over the course of four days as part of a competition with a few other game makers. And while the short development time does help explain why this game is pretty bad in a whole lot of ways. It doesn't change the fact this game isn't very good.

Story
Summary

The game kicks off with us playing as a squire and his master, the wielder of the holy sword, going to the King's Castle in order to learn that the local princess of an unspecified country has been kidnapped. Of course our master being the wielder of the sword of legends quickly convinces the king to not give into the Dark Lord's demands since we'll rescue his daughter with the power of teamwork. Along the way we pick up a rabbit girl and a werewolf on our way to the Dark Lord's Tower and ultimately put ourselves to the test to see if we can overcome the Dark Lord with the power of the Hero's Sword and good friends at our side.

Weaknesses

Narratively this project suffers from a lot of issues in my opinion. For starters the cast is very underdeveloped for a game of this type. To make matters worse the lack of details makes this already generic story feel even more generic. After all, both the kingdom and the Dark Lord are nameless in this game.

Strength

Probably the only plus side the game has going for it is that you can finish this game in about 90 minutes if you know what your doing. And I only consider this a plus since it means you get through this generic quest and move onto something better rather quickly if your the type that is to stubborn to give up on this game immediately.

Gameplay

On the gameplay front this game is a pretty basic turn-based RPGs with all of the usual options you'd expect such as attack, skills, guard, items, and flee. In fact, the only real change we get to the system is that everyone's skill option has a unique name such as chivalry. Of course, the real issue with this game is the starting balance. For example, one of the early fights you can run into is against a group of five jellies. Normally these would be a pretty forgettable enemy, but in this game the slimes both have decent attack and appear in groups of five. To make matters worse they can heal both themselves and each other and the player can't even take them down in a single round of combat if both of their party members connect. As a result this fight can drag on for way longer than it should. To make matters worse the jellies are both highly evasive so scoring multiple hits in a row is difficult as well as worth very little experience with each jelly with worth a meager four points. And you can't even successfully run from this fight at low levels due to your party members being too slow to get away. So your effectively trapped in a potentially five to ten minute fight depending on RNG. As you can imagine this results in a fight that is highly tedious and frustrating since it goes on for way too long and doesn't net the player enough rewards to justify it. After all, the potions your almost guaranteed to get form the slimes only heal 200 hit points which makes them weaker than the starting healing spells both of your starting characters have. This only gets worse later on when Kuro joins your party since she can heal an individual character in battle anywhere from 400 to 550 hit points for free.

And these sorts of issues just plague all of the early fights. Either your dealing with enemies that hit way harder than you and also dodge your every counter or your dealing with enemies that are weak, but can inflict negative status conditions like poison. Thankfully once you've gained a few levels the game's difficulty quickly falls off. In fact, I'd argue the early game is the hardest part of the game since I was able to consistently just run from enemies by the time I reached the Dark Lord's tower if I didn't want to deal with them. Though, I'd recommend dealing with every random encounter you can if you have enough resources to do so since the boss ramps up a lot in terms of stats between forms. And if your party can't damage him you'll be absolutely screwed in the final battle. Albeit you only need to be just strong enough for Sanu to damage him a little bit since both forms of the final boss are highly vulnerable to poison and paralysis and Sanu has skills that can inflict both of these conditions for free. So while this game is supposedly meant to be difficult. The final boss is an absolute joke that can be endlessly stun locked to death.

Graphics & Sound

As far as I'm aware both of these aspects rely entirely on the RTP. As such, I don't have a lot to say about the assets themselves since the assets found within the RTP is rather good in my opinion. Albeit I do get tired of seeing it everywhere, but considering this game was made in four days I'm not surprised it relies on. Unfortunately the game suffers from rather bland maps as well. This is especially true of places like the King's Castle, the cave dungeon, and the Dark Lord's tower. This is because these maps tend to be rather lacking in details or too big for their own good.

Conclusion

"Hero's Sword" is ultimately just a rather generic RPG whose only selling point is that it's challenging, but it's only challenging in the early game because of balancing issues that result in an early game that is more frustrating than anything. This isn't to say you can't beat this game if you apply yourself and do a bit of grinding, but a short project like this really should have aimed for the game being challenging because you need to make use of a wide arrange of skills in order to deal with your enemies. Instead the final boss boils down to endlessly stun locking him while allowing poison to lower his health to the point you can finish him off with an attack that does a single point of damage.