Behold The Boxart!
3D Dot Game Heroes is a game filled with several trips down nostalgia lane. Each new screen and hidden cave found gives that good old feeling of discovery that one would get when playing older RPGs. Naturally, that is precisely what the game is meant to do.
For those that don’t know, 3D Dot Game Heroes is a brand new PS3 game specifically made to capture the look and feel of the old top down adventure/RPGs. For the most part, however it focuses heavily on the Legend of Zelda series, drawing inspiration in both visual and gameplay styles.
While the look is definitely going for an “8-bit” feel, the gameplay is far similar to the Super Nintendo “Link to the Past” game from that series. It definitely takes more than a few ideas from those famous titles, but don’t get the idea that it’s simply an old game with a fresh coat of paint. There’s plenty of new features and ideas to really set it apart from those games of old.
Before you even get in the world, you’re given a choice of a few pages of different heroes to play as. These choices range from the traditional looking hero in shining armor, to crazy ideas of land sharks and cars! Each character can be male or female (Yes, even the car) as well as one of three different classes. Your choices here won’t have any major impact in the game world, but the few little changes they provide are nice incentives to do another play through.
If none of those characters fit what you’re looking for, you can always try your hand at building your own hero! The game comes with a very well done creation system, where you literally build your own hero block by block. It does take quite a while to get something really nice looking out of the building system, but those who take advantage of it will have that extra bit of fun with watching their own creations walk around the world.
Storyline wise, it’s a pretty standard affair. The world is in danger of having a great evil unleashed on it, and you are the only person able to best the forces of darkness that are plotting these horrible things. That’s about all you’ll get for motivation, but what more do you need?
The story is old school at it’s finest, and it hardly ever takes itself seriously, with several game references and even gags coming at you from all angles. Of course you’ll have plenty of nods to Zelda, but you may not expect the jokes from games like Megaman and Demon’s Souls.
Who Needs Story When You Have Chickens To Slay?
Gameplay is exactly what you’d expect. You move from scrolling screen to scrolling screen, taking out monsters with your trusty sword. Very early on you get the ability to dash, useful for moving faster and thrusting yourself right into the way of harmful enemies! Soon enough, you’ll enter your first dungeon, complete with a hidden map and boss room key. Defeat the boss monster, find the hidden treasure in the depths of the dungeon and you’ll have everything you need to get to the next dungeon marked on your map.
It’s a perfect idea that’s been cloned well before 3D Dot Game Heroes had the idea, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. The already open world only becomes more open with more things to see and do with each special item you get from each dungeon.
A few modern touches do make their way into the gameplay, but not anything bad at all. The ability to save anywhere at any time is always nice, (especially for the gamer who’s short on time!) and fast traveling through the world is definitely welcome once you’ve sniffed out every little secret in one section and have no reason to keep wandering around there.
A sword leveling feature is also in the game, becoming the main focus of your money gathering adventures almost right away. True to every RPG hero, your sword is ridiculously huge, capable of spanning the entire screen in width and length! Your money can be used to upgrade each sword in the game (Of which there are several, all with their own special abilities.) ranging from making the thing even more massive in size, to allowing it to penetrate through objects and even shoot magic. Such power comes at a price, however, and you must have full health to have the full effect of the sword. Take even one hit and you’ll be reduced to a normal sized blade that takes many more swings to defeat the monsters in your way. It’s a great system, making you feel all powerful at full health, while making things much more frantic and on edge when you’re deep in a dungeon and low on health.
Pretty Much Awesome At Max Health
Solid gameplay aside, the art direction in this title is quite unique and fun to look at. Half “8-bit” and half legos, the world looks exactly like what you’d expect an old NES game to look like if it suddenly popped up into three dimensions. Everything in the world is made of little blocks to look like pixels. Even better, when an enemy is defeated or an item destroyed, their little pixel blocks explode in a shower of physical bits, tumbling all about around you.
Along with the charming pixel look, the world definitely looks nice with it’s good use of depth of field blur, and wonderful lighting and color. While it’s certainly not the best looking game ever, it doesn’t have to be with it’s style and charm. Some games do more with less and this game fits firmly in that category.
Pretty AND Amazing
The only feature that I found lacking in the entire experience is the last to get touched on, the music. While the tunes for each area are great (Especially the lost forest area, my absolute favorite of the bunch) quite a number of them suffer from one big flaw — they lack length. No amount of listenability can make up for a lack of length.I don’t think any of the songs top more than two minutes in length! While it may be another nod towards games of old, it just didn’t sit well with me when I had to hear the same song repeat over and over and over and OVER while I was searching for a hidden cave, or just trying to find my way to the next dungeon. The main theme of the game is the biggest culprit of this issue, and I actually found myself trying to find paths around the areas that played that song towards my later hours in the game.
Though I personally had no problem with it, some players may find the lack of direction in the game a touch confusing. It doesn’t hold your hand and guide you to each new dungeon. Instead, you get a marker on your map showing you where you need to go, and it’s up to you to find your own way there. It’s a system that’s been in plenty of games in the past and it gives an incentive to explore and find new areas and shortcuts. Still, it can be confusing at times, and there’s no hint mode or anything to guide you towards what to do next.
All in all, 3D Dot Game Heroes is great fun! For older gamers who love older generation titles, or newer gamers wanting a taste of those “Golden Days” of gaming that “old” people tend to prattle on about, I’d definitely recommend picking it up. The style alone is worth seeing and while the adventure isn’t as lengthy as some modern action/RPG titles, a New Game + feature along with the different classes offers more than enough reason to dive in more than once.
Even if that’s not enough to sway you towards the game, the $39.99 price tag might be the icing on the cake that seals the deal. Twenty dollars less than most games is quite the deal for the quality you’ll be grabbing here.
