PixlBit

Take everything that makes a JRPG what it is, compress it down to thirty second slices and you’ll find yourself with Half-Minute Hero from Marvelous Entertainment. A fun and spastic gameplay experience. OK, I’m done, go play it.

What? My review has to be longer than thirty seconds? That hardly seems fair. Fine.

Taking place in a perfectly stereotypical world of the genre, our main character, appropriately enough named Hero, is on a quest to become his name. Unfortunately for him, he can’t just grind to become stronger, because some evil force has decided to teach various evil lords a spell that will destroy the world. The only catch is that the spell takes exactly thirty seconds to cast.

Within those thirty seconds you need to gain levels, acquire loot and do sidequests all before confronting the caster and killing him. Impossible, you say? Well, you would be right if it weren’t for an incredibly greedy time goddess who will turn back time for you at an increasing gold cost. What this does is create a complex mechanic: you can repeatedly pay to restart the map and continue leveling up, but do this too much and you risk accidentally overpricing your available continues, basically failing the quest. What this really means is that each quest can take you up to about ten minutes to beat. Essentially, Half Minute Hero has taken all the grinding, exploration, and emotional dialogue of the traditional JRPG universe and repackaged it for you in bite-sized chunks. Combat is a rapid affair in which your only options are to run away or use your single consumable as your hero and the enemies automatically rip into each other. Even random encounters happen at such a blistering pace that you’re almost unsure of how you’re doing. Like me, you will probably just stare at your health bar waiting to use your potion at the right moment.

The main story of the game, Hero 30, consists of around thirty of these quests for you to play. While the idea becomes a bit stagnant after a while, each story does have enough enjoyable dialogue and tongue-in-cheek comments going to keep you playing through with a smile. The default artwork of the world has a cartoony look I associate with some of the more annoying games to have come from the 90’s, and I recommend you switch to the alternate 8-bit mode as soon as you can.

Following the main story there are three additional modes known as Evil Lord 30, Princess 30 and Knight 30. Each of these is identical to the main campaign except that you play the title character of each one. After these are an epic quest known as Hero 300, which unites all the characters for a massive adventure that has no time limit.

The game also has online mode in which you and up to three friends can compete to be the first to kill the dark lord in the main story. But since you can’t actually attack each other, it becomes more like a race than any kind of combative challenge as I had hoped.

While I had trouble adapting to the flow of the game, I still think Half Minute Hero is well worth the arcade cost and is a nice, quick diversion for your time.