No video game character conveys endearment and sadism in a single expression as well as the Blue Slimes. In Dragon Quest Heroes: The World's Tree Woe and the Blight Below, these iconic teardrop-shaped blobs have never looked more adorable and homicidal, which is what makes killing them en masse one of this game's greatest pleasures. It's one of many delights aptly delivered by a collaboration that is one part Dynasty Warriors, one part Dragon Quest. As a hack-and-slasher with countless enemy encounters, character growth, and a shopping list of quests, it was joy to be reminded how much both series have in common.
As a contrast to all the dimension hopping that made up much of last year's Hyrule Warriors (a Dynasty Warriors take on The Legend of Zelda universe), this Dragon Quest spin-off takes the reverse approach. Instead of protagonists jumping to various worlds in older Dragon Quest games, adventurers from those games come into the new world established in Dragon Quest Heroes.
No performance issues in sight despite the battles' high headcount.
Welcoming these otherworldly guests is a new foursome comprising of two co-protagonists whose default names are Aurora and Luceus, the boisterous King Doric, and an skilled inventor named Isla. I have always admired the mainline series for defying traditional fantasy RPG party formations and archetypes and this new team could easily carry a mainline Dragon Quest installment. That's a bold statement especially when Aurora and Luceus are two sides of the same coin. Their complementary personalities are best showcased during the cutscenes where your see Luceus' analytical side and Aurora's impatience to jump into battle. Aside from a momentary interlude where you're forced to use one of the guest adventurers, you can have a wholly enjoyable time relying solely on these new characters while ignoring the rest of the roster.
It's a varied cast where each warrior easily proves their worth over the course of a single battle. The only thing better than seeing 3D models of characters like Dragon Quest IV's Alena and Kiryl is hearing them speak for the first time. Just as it was momentous to have voice acting in a Final Fantasy game in 2001 with Final Fantasy X, so too was the introduction of dialogue in Dragon Quest VIII ten years ago. Hearing much of the cast speak in English accents in Journey of the Cursed King created a rare connection to the Tolkienian roots of JRPGs. Having Yungus' cockney accent reprised in Dragon Quest Heroes--by the original voice actor no less--only makes this reunion all the more special.
This mingling of heroes from other worlds helps distract from the story's laughably generic premise of light versus dark. Even the two co-leaders are named Children of the Light. The story starts off on an uncommonly cheerful note, even by Dragon Quest standards, where humans and monsters are happily co-existing. Due to a spell by a dark wizard named Velasco, the monsters are suddenly reminded that they're supposed to hate humans. The ensuing chaos and unrest gives the game's heroes more than enough to deal with, let alone reason to investigate why their non-human friends suddenly turned on them. It's a good thing the story has its share of twists and guest character interactions to compensate for this otherwise plain narrative.
The bread and butter of the Dynasty Warriors franchise and many of its spin-offs has been the map-wide territorial tug-of-war where you and your armies race against the opposing military in conquering land one patch at a time. It essentially amounts to a game of which side can kill the other teams' generals faster. If you're ineffective with your time or get distracted my hordes of grunts, the resulting lack of shifting tides can make from some painfully prolonged battles. The great news is that there is much less of this in Dragon Quest Heroes. It's not a tug-of-war so much as it is an exercise in permanently putting out fires, namely enemy spawn points called maws. Once you defeat a given maw's Mawkeeper, that portal is gone, although most story missions will spawn multiple maws over the course of a battle. It's a veritable rush to run from maw to maw while weaving past the opposition, leaving the minions to the rest of your team.
Even with a cast of heroes this large, there's enough combat flourish to go around.
As a spin-off among a growing library of Warriors spin-offs, Dragon Quest Heroes sticks to the series' hack-and-slash gameplay, which means that it benefits from a battle system that has taken 15 prolific years to mature. It's come a long way from the outdated and stiff controls of Dynasty Warriors 2. From deft mid-air attacks to deadly four-hit combos, every hero's repertoire is more than adequate. You might wish for the depth and exactness of Devil May Cry but when time is of the essence and a single sword swing can take out half a dozen skeletons, you don't need precision. You certainly don't need it when your blade can summon a screen-clearing tornado.
As much of a draw it is to reunite with characters from various mainline Dragon Quests over a single game, what truly sets Dragon Quest Heroes apart from other Warriors games is its Monster Minion feature. A given kill has the potential to drop a medal version of that respective monster. With the medal, you can summon that monster as an ally.
Aside from the palpable drama of turning the tide, these minions create two minigames. The first is knowing how to best take advantage of a given monster's strengths. Given that they don't follow you throughout the battlefield, summoning a monster the moment you get its medal isn't necessarily the best move. Sometimes it's better to save them in anticipation of harder enemies at the latter half of a mission. The second game that is born out of the Monster Minions relates to the spawn points. The need for wise and strategic placement of monsters along a crowded path of enemies creates countless opportunities for--you guessed it--tower defense gameplay. These opportunities are brief, assuming you're smart and efficient in focusing on maws yourself, but it's nonetheless satisfying to have a squad of self-sufficient teammates, human or otherwise, who can limit the flow of Gargoyles, Goodybags, and Hackasauruses. Aside from some of the bosses, the entire bestiary is fair game. Your only limits are the monsters in a given map and the amount of medals you can carry at a given time. It's a blessing to the rest of the opposing army that you can't keep your newly recruited monsters for future battles. Using an army of Stone Golems mission after mission would surely nerf much of your playthrough.
King Slime, you're adorable. Prepare to die.
In missions where you have to protect an object, it's often the best strategy to leave a few friendly mid-boss type monsters on guard duty surrounding said object. You'd be surprised how gratifying it is check on them later on to find that they have everything under their control against equally large foes. And even if you have more pressing matters to attend to, no one would blame you for briefly jumping into this orgy of destruction, if only to see how many you can take down in a single coup de grace attack. It's sheer bedlam when you can get these larger creatures to fill up your screen. Then it becomes a game of whether or not you can create slowdown or reduce the framerate by having too much going on at once. The action was never not fluid during my playthrough.
As with every Warriors game, there's every opportunity to manage your heroes and enhance their skills in between missions. You start off in a standard issue basecamp, and by the time you're used to your amenities, you're upgraded to an airship. Both are as well-organized as any small town you can find in a JRPG: you have your church, alchemist, bar, and blacksmith. This is a Dragon Quest game, so naturally the weapons dealer is the burly gentleman sporting the horned helmet. Your base is also where you take on optional quests, which yields rewards like expanded inventory slots and Monster Medal capacity. It's a good idea to periodically grind by coming back to older areas in the map; quests add more purpose and incentives to these non-story skirmishes. It's diversions like these that provide a thoughtful connection to JRPG designs. Oftentimes, it feels like the only difference in Dragon Quest Heroes is the accelerated body count.
Yes, there are slippery Liquid Metal Slimes who yield tons of XP.
Seeing Akira Toriyama's many creations in Dragon Quest Heroes never get old, even after defeating over a thousand Skeletons. The treasure traps known as Mimics have never looked so lively, right down to the perpetually dangling tongue. Same goes for the Great Sabrecats, whose expressive cartoony faces wouldn't feel out of place in the Sunday comics section.
As much as I long for a new mainline Dragon Quest (not to mention the leisure time to play more JRPGs), Dragon Quest Heroes: The World's Tree Woe and the Blight Below affords every lover of the franchise the rare opportunity to cause genocidal destruction with the kind of efficiency you cannot find in a turn-based RPG. To flank a monster is to also admire it from angles you seldom see up close in other Dragon Quests. These tens of thousands of encounters plus the appearances by the series' many other heroes makes for an essential experience for any Dragon Quest fan, even if you haven't played a hack-and-slasher in ages. These characters are so fully realized that, assuming you're not a stickler for official canon, it wouldn't be unreasonable to consider Dragon Quest Heroes as a companion piece alongside the main series.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 momentarily recalls the greatness of earlier games in the series. Skating around and looking for opportunities to test your creativity and reflexes is sometimes as enjoyable today as it was 10, 15 years ago. However, these moments of excitement are fleeting. THPS5 a full-priced game that feels like an alpha release. The core mechanics are there, but the supporting systems are half-baked and rickety.
For anyone who's played Tony Hawk games in the past, skating, pulling off tricks and forming combos in THPS5 will come naturally, and it's accessible for newcomers, too. Grinding has been made slightly more difficult, however, because the same button that's used to grind is also tied to the new slam action, which forces your skater and their board downward. You can use it to your advantage if you've mistimed the distance between takeoff and landing during a combo, but you can no longer buffer a grind while in mid-air because you instantly plummet to the ground.
This is my Tony. There are many like him, but this one is mine.
Of course, skating sessions are only as good as the locations they take place in, and the eight maps in THPS5 are too small, lacking in interesting opportunities. They're also ugly, with poorly drawn textures and constant texture pop-in. After a few minutes with each map, you've seen pretty much everything there is to see. Pulling off combos often requires identifying a series of loosely connected objects that you can grind on between air-based tricks, and there are a few cleverly hidden ones to be found, but nowhere near as many as in past games, which were proudly stuffed with hard-to-find secrets and combo opportunities.
Some maps will frustrate you in other ways beyond their lack of interesting elements. It's all too easy hit a ramp or jump off of other objects, only to find that you've gone out of bounds. This feels unfair, because these areas are fully-rendered and look accessible. THPS5's camera jitters when you ride over rough terrain--or whenever the game feels like it. There were times that the camera was so shaky and disorienting that I had to stop playing in order to curb my discomfort. Frame rates are also an issue, which is surprising given the game's simple and outdated graphics. It's not uncommon that you fall through geometry, clip through it and ruin a combo, or fall victim to anomalous physics quirks, either.
When all else fails, go off the deep end.
Progressing from map to map requires that you collect stars by performing various feats and completing challenges. These challenges can include reaching a high-score, collecting items, or pushing balls out of a pool, among a few others. These tasks vary little from map to map, and they are indeed tasks, because they never deliver an enjoyable or challenging experience. You're only motivation to play them are the stars to unlock maps and skill points that can be used to increase your abilities, though they never make a tangible difference. Your skater feels the same on day one as it does on day five.
THPS5 is built as an online game, but it does little to entice you to playing with others. I was never paired with more than one other person outside of freeskate, and there were times when a multiplayer challenge would start with me as the sole participant. Online connectivity gets in the way during single player sessions, too. If you're connected to the internet when you try to play single player, THPS5 still tries to connect to a server. If it has any problems during this process, you have to wait for it to timeout, disconnect your console from the internet, and try again. At times like this, you can't help but feel like you're wasting your time with a game that isn't finished.
Try to start a private session when your console is connected, and you may get stuck on this screen.
Beyond the boring levels and challenges, THPS5 has another big problem with organization and presentation. When scrolling through the main menu, you're presented with a few options: THPS5 Levels, My Levels, and Player Created Levels. The game teases you with more to do by placing arrows on the top and the bottom of the list, as though you can scroll to see more, and it does the same thing on the map selection screen, creating the illusion that there's more to the game than there actually is. Once you're playing a challenge, there's no way to exit it besides returning to the game's main menu, and even if you stick with it and wait for the timer to tick away, you have to endure a series of loading screens before you're back to skating. I tried my hardest to engage with the activities in THPS5 to eek out enjoyment, but problems with menus, loading screens, and glitches made it all too easy to put the controller down and walk away.
Within THPS5 lies a basic skating game that's difficult to enjoy, because you have to jump over numerous hoops and ignore a plethora of obvious issues to find the smallest amount of fun. Previous THPS games were able to capture your imagination, and motivate you through character progression, gear, interesting levels, and even a great soundtrack. The soundtrack in THPS5 is good enough, but the game is riddled with technical glitches and design missteps, making it a huge step back for the series
When you don't have three friends and some reasonably good beer to keep you engaged, a board game--especially a virtual recreation of one--has to work a lot harder to hold your attention. Armello accomplishes this and then some, and while it could use some fine tuning, it remains one of the best virtual board game experiences available.
At first glance, Armello can feel like a tangle of things--dice and cards and boards and coins and stats--but the quick four-part prologue does a good job of making sense of these pieces. Your primary actions include moving a character around the board to complete quests and avoid hazards. There are eight playable characters, and each character has different strengths, weaknesses, and abilities in addition to items they can equip to skew their stats in a slightly different direction. They also each have great-looking combat animations. Ever wish Disney's Robin Hood had 40% more bears punching each other senseless? Well, this game is for you!
As if you can't tell Brun means business, in a world full of anthropomorphized animals, he's wearingsomeone's head as a belt buckle.
To win in Armello, you have to either kill the king or have the highest prestige when the monarch dies due to a disease called the rot. Every full day--one turn for day and one turn for night--the King's health dwindles lower while his rot creeps higher, so no matter how things shake out, there are a finite number of turns that can be taken before the King will keel over on his own. It's also possible to defeat the King in combat, either by gathering four spirit stones from quests or tiles, or gaining a higher rot level than him. If a would-be assassin fails, the victory will automatically be handed to the prestige leader. Unless you're playing against clever friends, a prestige victory is almost always the easiest way to win. This can make the game feel unbalanced, especially when playing against AI opponents that frequently make ill-advised assassination attempts. That said, if you can resist the siren song of an easy victory or have other players wanting to spoil your plans, the varied win conditions provide enough variety to accommodate different play styles and keep things spicy through multiple sessions of playing with friends.
You also have a hand of cards--which are as well-animated as the characters themselves--that can be anything from equippable items and followers to spells and tricks that can be applied to yourself, other actors on the board, or specific tiles. Imagine if you could slam your Hearthstone deck down on a Clue board and swarm Professor Plum with Murlocs, and you have an accurate idea of just how neat this is in practice. Cards all have different costs to play, and crucially, they can be played regardless of whose turn it is. This allows for some tense moments and sharp twists in matches with other human players. On the other hand, when it comes to the A.I. opponents, the game tends to jump around a bit too fast to take full advantage of that ability unless you're particularly quick on the draw.
Long live the king!
What Armello suffers from most is a lack of customization options, something it could have stood to learn from more-traditional strategy games. There's no way to define whether you want a quick or a long game, A.I. skill levels are static, and when you're playing with friends, you're bound to a move timer whether you like it or not. Graphics controls are also somewhat limited, which means that you won't be able to turn off the haze of clouds in the sky, which would be dlightful if you didn't have to look down through them when you zoom out to see the full board.
Armello picks and chooses a variety of elements from board, card, 4X, and role-playing games without demanding either a familiarity with or a fondness for any genre. It also leaves a lot of room to engage as deeply as you want with the game's guts without feeling like you're floundering if you don't. Whether you're bumbling your way to the top or playing all your cards right, Armello makes regicide ridiculously entertaining.
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