Heroland

I was so intrigued by a game that boasts the director from Fantasy Life, the writer being the director of Mother 3, the artist of Mother 3 & Legend of Mana, and the musician of SMT4. Unfortunately, Heroland is nothing like any of that.

Heroland is 9 chapters of you in the role of a tour guide at an RPG-flavored theme park guiding guests through dungeons, usually three per chapter. Guests take on the role of Tank, Warrior, Mage or Healer, and you always have a party of four and you always want one of each if possible. Some guests are Freelancers and can fill any slot without complaint. But as the guide, you do not fight. You get a turn every so often, and you can either give a general direction to the whole party, a specific order to one character, or use an item. Otherwise the characters and monsters take their turn in this active time battle system without any of your input. And when I say you guide the party, I mean you click the button to go to the next battle in a straight line, though maybe sometimes you get to choose which enemy group out of 2 or 3 you'll fight. You never move your character around in any environment. Think of how Persona 3 Portable streamlined locations out of P3, it's like that. It's so streamlined, the battles play themselves and anything you control is just menus.

Heroland fails to strike a balance. On the one hand it wants to be fun and lighthearted and easy on the input for casual playing, but the Steam version will always fully pause when it's not the active window and there's just enough input required in battles to save the guests from their bad decisions that you can't take your eye off it. And it's frustrating how long battles take for how little there is for you to do, and the pomp and circumstance of starting a fight, winning a fight, going to the next one, and completing a tour takes about 10 minutes and you will have done closer to 10 seconds worth of input. It's slow and bloated.

But even more bloated is the story. The characters will never. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. The actual plot of the game with a royal succession crisis, the theme park being founded on real life legends and possibly being run by the Dark Lord himself, that's interesting enough. But there's 20+ party members with their own sidequests that you wanna do because you need to grind levels evenly because you never know who'll be required for the next main story quest. All of the sidequests aren't even diegetic nor do they have to make sense. But whether it's sidequest or main, whether it's dialog or mission title, the "wonderful writing full of intelligent humour and wit" that Ollie Reynolds of NintendoLife calls it is just an endless barrage of REFERENCES. Timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly Doctor Who reference. One Punch Man reference. Dragon Ball reference. Breaking the fourth wall to address the state of the manga artist industry and fair working conditions for the game's developers. Somebody calls the tour guide's fairy Buzz Buzz and she literally says "Nice reference" because Earthbound. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Avalon Code, The X-Files, nothing is safe from being referenced in the sidequest mission titles. I don't even remember the memetic origin of the phrase "That's just how it is on this bitch of an earth" but it was hot enough in 2019 to make it in the game verbatim. They allude to tentacle mpreg because fandoms make weird stuff. Have I belabored the point enough? It took me 55 hours to beat the game and they were speaking in references the whole time.

I do not recommend this game whatsoever. Have more respect for your time.