Herc's Adventures

I get the feeling this was made for the Sega genesis but was transplanted to 32 bit hardware at the last minute die to the games presentation, that's hardly a bad thing as I do love me 90s games in general regardless of it if 8 bit or 16 bit, however I get the feeling this games lack of legacy was due to how outdated people likely felt this was at the time of its release.

We have here a top-down beat em up where we can choose between Hercules (this game came out around the time of Disney's adaptation and is more accurate here than it is there) Atlanta and Jason, two figures in the Greek mythology who would go in to appear in the Disney TV show albeit with vastly different interpretations than how they're depicted in this game. As you can see from the cast, our three heroes have different strengths and weaknesses which greatly alter their game play from each other and thus encourage replay value to this rather long campaign (at least for its time it was long.) Hercules is of course a muscle bound warrior voiced by homer Simpson, Atlanta is an archer with great endurance but piss weak strength to begin with and Jason is an upstart who has decent strength and endurance but doesn't excel at either of them. Unlike lost beat em ups, this takes place in an open world meaning at no point will you be blocked off by an invisible that only disappears once you've defeated all of the enemies. Instead, they'll tend to swarm in on you which is the encouragement of taking them our which is rather unique even to this day in this style if gaming. The story is also really good here, being far more faithful to the Greek myth than even other media that interprets the Hercules story. The best parts are whenever one of the gods interacts with you as apart from Zeus, none of them seem particularly happy to interact with you (although they could've made Hera more vindictive for lore reasons) with hades being very bitter the further into the game you get. One way to story is accurate to Disney's version is that they made hades the villain of the story, not because of what Zeus or Poseidon did to him, which was often the case in Greek lore, but rather because he's an evil bastard who wants the goddess of spring all to himself. It's like his Disney counterpart only not nearly as funny, although that's only because he isn't voiced by James Woods here.

If there was something stopping me from giving this a perfect score, it's how restrictive the saving is in this game. This is what I mean when I said the game felt like it was made for the genesis originally as the mechanic feels tacked on here compared to other Saturn/ps1 games if the day. Basically, you need to expend resources just to make a save by talking to specific npcs in the game (don't worry, they stick out like a sore thumb) which I feel the game handled clumsily here. I guess some of the external features of the Greek legend are a bit forced here as well, particularly when you head to Egypt as it feels completely out of place from the rest of the game (to say nothing of its alien invasion.) This also goes for the Amazon region that's clearly meant to be Valhalla but instead comes off like a fourth wave feminists wet dream by having women roaming around (including fat half naked and possibly bisexual women who attack by sexually assaulting our heroes) whilst having all of the men locked up in cages. All I can say is this game was light years ahead of its time for demonising these types of women by portraying them as bad guys for seemingly no reason. Apart from that, I have little to complain about, it's another fantastic Lucas arts game that was unfairly overlooked back in the day and deserves more attention in the nostalgia circuit.