REVIEW : Little Town Hero (PS4)
Little Town Hero, created by Pokemon studio Game Freak, attempts to do a lot with a little. Fast-travelling from the mines near its titular town to its main street, the two furthest points on the map only saves you about a minute or so of travel time. But the game wants its small village to means something, as it consumes several hours familiarizing you with the small area and its inhabitants. Its gameplay runs the same way, doing for card-battlers what Pokemon did for party-focused, turn-based RPGs: distilling it into something the ordinary person can wrap their head around.
And it works, seldom. When you face down a majestic monster and cobble concurrently a hard-earned win with all the tools at your disposal, it can make the equipment upgrading, crafting systems, and myriad currencies of other games feel like bloat. But usually, Little Town Hero doesn’t leave the stringent confines it builds for itself; alternatively, it plays everything safe by constraining your choices so things don’t get too out of hand. While that seldom produces some challenging minutes, battles quickly begin to repeat themselves, making you wish you could see what its combat might be capable of if it weren’t afraid to take more risks.
The star of Little Town Hero’s tiny village is Axe, a young hooligan quickly thrust into protecting his home from beasts after he gets a red stone that gives him an edge against them in battle. Because the village is guarded by a castle and enclosed by cliffs, no one knows where the beasts are coming from, so Axe and his friends begin hunting down their origins.
The crux of Little Town Hero is its turn-based gameplay, which acquires elements from card games but throws in a few twists. Fights revolve encompassing a tiny deck of cards, named Ideas. The aim in most fights is to break all three of your enemies hearts by killing all of their cards in a single turn by having them trade hits with yours, then hitting them directly.
Unfortunately, this game lacks key features of other card games. The most glaring lack is that you can’t build a deck of your own; for most of the game, you’re stuck with a deck that caps out at just 13 cards. You can’t alter or customize which cards you bring to fight.
You can also alleviate much of the luck that factors into most other card games, which presents it easier to get the cards you need but also drives home how simple the plan behind every battle is to survive longer fights, you need to recover cards by either losing a heart or spending BP. You can even swap out cards in your hand for those in your deck at the cost of BP.
Boss fights are a little more interesting since they offer a couple of strategic layers. Rather than fighting in place, you take on beasts across a large swath of the village, planned out like a small board, moving a random number of spaces each turn. Most spaces on the board have a special effect when you land on them, conferring access to an ally who can deal direct damage, allowing you to join two cards into one, or letting you use certain cards to activate critical barrels or cannons. Some villagers might even have ideas, like hitting a monster in the nose, that add new, one-use cards to your deck specific to that fight.
This doesn’t make later boss fights breezy–some of them are tough. But even here, because you don’t have that several options to pick from, your path to victory doesn’t feel personal or creative. It also doesn’t help that during boss fights, both parties gain a guarding shield that has to be whittled down before hearts will take damage, which makes boss battles take longer than normal fights–certain battles took the better part of an hour to get through.
Little Town Hero finds some success in bypassing some of the complicated systems and tedious menus that can bog down other card games and RPGs, but it ends up suffering for it.
The story you unwind along the way and chains all the fights together is somewhat involved, but anticipated and tedious. Discovering the source of all the monster attacks has a couple of twists, but mostly leads to a predictable story that moves at a crawl. Characters are largely forgettable, quickly fall into archetypes, and play out their roles without much room for nuance. A couple of later moments get some warm weight thanks to a convincing score from Undertale creator Toby Fox and longtime Pokemon composer Hitomi Sato, but characters are too silly to hold up their end of the bargain, and the city doesn’t have enough going on to make it worth examining beyond where quests tell you to go.
PREVIEW : Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town (PC)
