With the experience of developing Battle of the Gods, Kadokawa Games soon launched a title in the SRPG field: Relayer.
In fact, when the game was first published in Fami Tong, I was quite impressed, and the cover of that issue was it. The main visual picture of the confrontation between the two mechs on the left red and the right and white is hard not to be reminiscent of the Sazaby vs Bull Gundam in "Counter Attack Of Xiaya".
▲ The main visual diagram of "Heir"
▲ Illustration of the famous scene of "Counterattack Xiaya"
I have played a lot of games produced by Kadokawa before, and in the past two years, "Battle of the Gods", "Fang gen Shujian", and "Fang Gen Film" have all been seriously played because of work relations. This time I am involved in the field of mechs, and I am also a fan of Super Robot Wars, and I really want to see what tricks Kadokawa can play in this genre.
Unfortunately, the attempt was not too successful.
Voice actors and human designs add points, and the mecha is highly repetitive
I genuinely think Kadokawa has spent all of kadokawa's budget on hiring voice actors and artists.
The game arranges a full voice for the entire main line process, plus the character settings are various, and there is no shortage of common attributes of ACG such as Royal Sister, Lolita, Glasses Lady, Mouthless, and Sick Petite. I found the relevant information of voice actors on the game's Official Website of Japan, including Satomi Akasaka, Nan Dainori, Ito Mirai, etc., both veteran predecessors and debut newcomers, the overall sound is fresh and natural, and the "attributes" of each character are also in place, which is worthy of praise.
In terms of standing painting, after all, it is a work with "beautiful girls" as the selling point, and this aspect is not bad, and some characters with slightly dragon sets have their own standing paintings.
▲But why are they all in space and don't wear seat belts...
But here is also a little bit of spit revealed "no money" lazy details: childhood memories of the part of the standing painting directly used the original vertical painting black shadow, soaking in the hot spring bridge section in order to save money without drawing a version or even specially arranged the "only foot hot spring" plot ... Everywhere it shows the difficulty of a small team.
Another important selling point of the game, "Mecha", also has some problems with the same as vertical painting: the body features are not obvious enough, it is easy to face blindness, and many bodies basically only have a slight difference in head and color, and it is even more difficult to distinguish who is who on the battlefield. In order to avoid the situation of not being able to recognize who is who, the game puts a separate avatar for the pilot of each fuselage in the battle scene, and the recognition is there, but this avatar is very obstructive of the line of sight - I don't know what the other players are in, at least I often adjust the perspective repeatedly in the "walking the grid" link, and the result is still in the wrong position.
As for the combat performance part, the first look at the 3D perspective of the two normal proportions of the body (referring to non-machine combat, SD Gundam cartoon style) battle close-up is still quite amazing, but this "stunning" soon becomes boring - watch more than a few times to know, in addition to some of the big move "Big Bang" special performance, the rest of the combat close-ups are also so many, melee spelling, long-range sniper, floating gun siege, the enemy and us are similar. So I turned off the animation in the middle of the game, after all, the pace of the battle was very slow.
Heavy not heavy combat system
The following are the promotional content before the game is officially released.
"The game contains 20 actionable characters and 20 NPCs; a maximum of 12 airframes are dispatched by players on a single mission, with 16 units on standby during mission preparation; 106 battle animations, 20 classes (4 base mechs correspond to 5 advanced classes each); 373 skills, including 169 passive and 204 active skills; 1128 collectible weapons, and 120 custom chips to equip."
▲Official publicity map
In fact, there is indeed so much content in the game, and the preview of FamiTong magazine also said that "the game content is enough to play for 100 hours". Everyone has played a lot of games, and similar publicity methods should have been seen too many times. It's true that you can play 100 hours, but it still matters whether those 100 hours are "full of surprises" or "boring".
Apparently, Heirs belongs to the latter.
The game's combat system is very simple, and the three menus of battle (flat slash)/skill/prop can be clearly explained.
Heirs has a different innovation in the Super Robot Wars series: the "Hate Value" system has been added to the machine warfare game, and the "class" division of the mech has been specialized.
The skills of each airframe vary according to the "class" of each airframe, the assault type is mainly melee attack, the tank type has a variety of taunts to attract hatred, the sniper type has a map cannon, the reconnaissance type can buff or debuff the enemy, and there will be more options after unlocking the advanced class.
Most of these skills are unlocked through the Starlight Block, also known as the Skill Tree system. There are simply increased body attributes in the skill tree, as well as actively used skills and passive skills, and the "tree" of each class has 20 branches, which will unlock advanced and advanced classes when full. There is an irreversible branch of choice when advancing from a basic class to an advanced class.
By the way, the operation of the skill tree here is very "stuck", and the movement in various branches is not smooth. The same problem also appears on the equipment purchase and weapon upgrade page, there are many useless pop-up windows, upgrade a weapon point three or four times to confirm, the store automatically match the attribute of the "strongest equipment" function is basically negligible, very unintelligent.
In addition, there are two ways to strengthen the body, as well as to increase the level and change equipment. Because the role is bound to the airframe, there is no subdivision such as the driver level and the airframe level. Equipment is obtained through battlefield pick-ups, level rewards, shop purchases, and weapon enhancements – there aren't many pieces of equipment, and of the 1128 weapons mentioned in the announcement, even enhanced versions like "Big Sword +1" are counted as new weapons.
One of the more interesting settings is the effect of the change after the weapon upgrade, which will "spoil" the original weapon into a completely different piece of equipment, and there are some extremely good attributes but with Debuff entries, and the excellent attack power value is not worth letting yourself lose blood every turn.
▲The attribute "downtime" refers to 1/8 of the fixed blood loss per turn
The common "terrain" elements in SRPGs have not found much effect at this time, at most there is a certain bonus in back attacks and numerical correction of related passive skills. Considering that the main battlefield is in space, it is indeed a little difficult to make a high and low difference.
I don't know if it is to make the game flow longer, many of the game's levels are recommended to be relatively high, if you only play the main line task normally, the level of each character is absolutely not up to the requirements (even if it is simple and difficult), then you can only brush the "simulation battle" - that is, to play the previous main line level again, the enemy configuration is exactly the same, very boring - but not to fight and reckless but the main line level, further slow down the original fun of the battle.
Fortunately, Heirs, like Super Robot Wars 30 released last year, offers an "auto-combat" feature. In some difficult levels, the problem of hanging up and brushing is not big, but when a little "strategy" is needed, it cannot be counted on - even if it is a plot level that has just been played, the AI ability needs to be improved.
A grand plot that is disrupted by battles
We will not spoil here, rest assured, are the content and basic settings announced before the release, the official website has.
Science fiction themes will more or less have some macro propositions, the source of human birth, the life and death of the earth, the game between various organs in the environment... "Successor" is naturally the same.
Simply put, it is a three-way game scenario: GT Labo, an agency independent of the Government's Children of the Stars, the sudden emergence of the invading force "Successor", and the Earth Coalition Army, which wants to solve the aliens simply and rudely through military force. The contradiction that runs through the core of the game is that her "dead" sister as a child suddenly becomes a companion of the alien invaders.
These are all things that are instilled in the players at the very beginning of the game – you may already be aware of the problem.
In Japanese AVG works, "making concepts" is a very common phenomenon, and users who are keen on this should have long been accustomed to it, as long as they have a good rhythm, everyone can usually accept it. However, "Heirs" hastily done this thing too quickly: I just opened two levels of content, and the "Dictionary of Terms" unlocked about 1/3 of the length, and it may be difficult to keep up with the speed of the plot without carefully reading the material.
After the initial stage, the rhythm of the plot suddenly slows down, and the protagonist team is busy rescuing the members of the hostile forces when the earth is alive, highlighting a boundless love.
The boring battles interspersed in the story further make the game's progression rhythm into embarrassment - not to mention that if you want to continue to watch the plot, you may have to brush more simulation levels to level up, otherwise you can't beat it at all.
On the other hand, the frequent occurrence of words such as "naked" and "sexual fetish" in the character dialogue made me a little uncomfortable. I don't want to define it as "charming", but it is difficult for me to find other suitable adjectives with so many such bridges.
▲ Deliberately arranging such lines is still quite boring
summary
"Heirs" is a more provocative work. I don't know if Kadokawa wants to be able to replicate the success of "Thirteen Machine Defense Circles" - the same sci-fi mecha boy and girl, the same wargame form promotion process, the same cosmic starry sky grand proposition. Of course, "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" has much more AVG elements than "Heir", and as mentioned earlier, "Heir" does not control the balance between plot and combat very well.
Regardless of the battle system or the story setting, the height that "Heir" can achieve is relatively limited - the body setting cannot impress, the combat system is decent, there are many levels but the sense of repetition is obvious, the plot is huge but there is logical confusion, and then intermittently add some less humorous gags.
Heirs is priced at HK$468 at PSN, which is not cheap. We only recommend players who are interested in the three elements of wargames, mecha and beautiful girls to start first, and others who want to try a little bit can play the trial version first and see if the setting is your dish.