As the spiritual sequel to "Fantasy Water Margin", after the "Legend of 100 Heroes" began crowdfunding, it immediately triggered an unprecedented wave of support among the fans of the old series, and the amount of crowdfunding reached millions of dollars in just one month.
And just as the crowdfunding was about to be completed, Murayama Andron and his team made a decision to launch another spin-off game for "The Legend of 100 Heroes", so that enthusiastic fans could experience part of the game's unique charm in advance without having to wait for years.
This is "The Legend of the Hundred Heroes: Rise", which shows a corner of the world of the "Hundred Heroes" and has a similar town construction system to the main story, but the combat in this game does not follow the turn-based system of "The Legend of the Hundred Heroes", but adopts a horizontal action system.
Trinity side-scrolling battles
The battle system of "100 Heroes: Rise" is tailored around the three protagonists. When a single protagonist is very monotonous, the player can only attack, jump, dodge (block) three operations, but when the three protagonists are all in the team, they can learn from each other's strengths, and can also use "switch attack" to make the combat system have more room for operation.
The second protagonist, Garu
The weapons of the three protagonists each have different characteristics: the dual-wielding short attack rate is high, which can output a lot of damage to a single enemy; the large weight and wide range of the giant sword, which can both break the shield and be suitable for dealing with enemy clusters; and the longest range of magic bullets, which can be used to break the energy shield or easily solve the enemy in the air. Therefore, each character's weapon is both a means of damage and a puzzle prop - for example, in boss battles, using a giant sword to hit the stone back, you can achieve "mechanic killing", which greatly reduces the difficulty of the battle.
The X, Y, and B keys on the handle all correspond to a protagonist, and the keys can not only switch roles, but also control the attacks of this character. This "one-click" design, while incorporating three attack styles, also maximizes the fluency of the combo move. On the other hand, the difference in the feel and performance of each character when moving and dodging ensures that there is enough difference between them that players do not switch characters just to "change weapons", but will use the most suitable candidate according to the actual situation of the battle.
Use the different character traits to climb the otherwise unreachable platform
In addition, when the player switches between different characters during the attack, a special "serial attack" system can also be triggered, so that each "substitution" becomes a derived attack with higher damage and more dazzling effects. In order to prevent the "serial attack" from being overused, the game also designed a cooldown period for it, so that this "explosive technique" will not destroy the balance of the battle.
However, some design problems still make the combat system of this game have various defects.
The first is that when the character is attacked, he will enter a long fall to the ground, and there is no "body" and other operations to avoid. This "one touch and one fall" design is completely unnecessary and very affects the smoothness of the battle. In addition, the character does not have an invincible frame during the fall to the ground, if it is hit by the enemy again at this time, it is necessary to play the fall action from the beginning, and may even be hit by the enemy for an infinite series, bringing a very bad game experience to the player.
Secondly, there are also great problems with the abnormal state setting of this game. When encountering attribute attacks, the character will most likely enter various abnormal states such as electric shock and burning, and the player cannot switch characters for several seconds that the abnormal state lasts. If there are air monsters and energy shield monsters that must switch characters to deal with at this time, the player can only stand and be beaten. The game neither provides the means to lift anomalies nor the equipment to increase resistance, which makes people feel very unreasonable.
Explore the main story with equal emphasis on construction
The story takes place in the calm frontier town of "Neue Nevière". After the excavation of ancient ruins nearby, the town immediately attracted adventurers from all over the world who coveted treasures, and the heroine "CJ" played by the player was one of the many treasure hunters.
By the way, in the game's original promo, the heroine's name is "JB"
In order to make good use of this "gold rush" to develop the town, the acting mayor came up with a brilliant idea: every adventurer who wants to explore the ruins must help the villagers fetch water, deliver food and run errands, and complete the task in exchange for permission to enter the ruins.
However, even if the player enters the ruins, it does not mean that they can say goodbye to errands from now on. On the ruins road, it is full of powerful enemies and rocks that stand in the way, but there are hardly any shops in the town that lacks construction, cannot cast powerful weapons and armor for the protagonist, and cannot provide the tools needed to climb the mountain. To this end, the protagonist needs to continue to help the villagers build a town, so that the town gradually becomes full of shops from nothing.
After following the main line to complete all the missions, the town will also usher in its "complete body" - there are logistics facilities such as hotels and taverns, as well as equipment shops that sell weapons, armor, and accessories, as well as adventure supplies stores that provide tools, runes, and backpacks, as well as pawnshops and trading houses that can make money. The functions of these shops do not intersect with each other, and they all help the player become stronger and easily conquer the ruins rooms that were previously difficult to pass.
However, because of this, the main plot in this work is essentially just a commissioned task by the villagers. There is no plot connection between these missions, just to build more shops, and even to break the main line, so that the protagonist's goal of exploring the ruins is always interrupted from time to time.
If you want to further upgrade these stores, players will need to do additional side quests. After completing a certain number of tasks, the shop will not only have new items on the shelves, but the appearance will also change from the original thatched house to a beautiful log cabin. Watching the town go from shabby to prosperous under its own efforts is the greatest pleasure that this game of town construction can bring to people.
In addition, the game has specially designed five "collection cards". Each side quest completed, a stamp can be placed on the collector card, and when a certain number of stamps are reached, additional rewards can be awarded. And every time a collection card is filled, the village will also upgrade: the population will increase, and the BGM will change. The player's own combat ability will also be enhanced.
Because the set of inline cards is directly integrated into the UI interface of the game, it has also become a very intuitive visual incentive for some players - just like the experience bar in MMORPG. If the player sees that only a little bit of the card is left to fill, then the motivation to clear the side quest will be more sufficient.
However, there are some issues with the experience rewards for these side quests. When the game is late, the side quests that reward experience points are not improved according to the progress of the main line. The experience gained from killing one monster at this point is even equivalent to completing ten such side quests, which to some extent reduces my interest in doing such side quests.
In addition, the poor Sinicization of this work also makes the plot that is not very good seem worse. Almost all texts have traces of direct translation from English — "mission accomplished" is translated as "task clearance", and "new day" is translated as "do it again". Not only that, the word order of most of the dialogue has not been adjusted, and it does not consider the context of the game at all, and it also has a strong translation cavity, which makes people feel unsatisfactory when reading, which creates a huge obstacle to the player's normal understanding of the plot.
A rough turndown to "Quest Clear"
"Battle" is a typo
Lack of polished conversations
Collect resources in replica levels
When the town is built, players who want to upgrade their weapons and refine potions will need to collect enough resources in the wild and bring them back to the shopkeeper to commission. In order to meet the needs of players to repeatedly swipe resources, this game has designed many "dungeon-style" independent levels.
These quests refresh each time they enter or exit, and are filled with collection points for resources such as trees and ores. Many points can only provide beginner resources in the early stages of the game, and when players upgrade tools such as axes and cross pickaxes, and then go to these points to mine, they can get high-quality advanced resources. This gives players a reason to repeatedly explore old levels to access resources, creating an experience similar to that of the Alchemy Workshop series.
However, when the player wants to return to town, there is some trepidation. The game does not provide "one-click back to the city" props, and the limited number of teleportation points in the map can only send the player back to the beginning of the copy, and if you want to return to the town, you also need to carry out secondary teleportation, which is very cumbersome in operation. Later in the game, the distance between the teleportation points is also stretched far, so that the player must walk a long road to use the teleportation function after collecting resources. This also makes it impossible for players to use resources as they did in Alchemy Workshop, adding a lot of "garbage time" to the experience of collecting resources.
Moreover, in the face of a wide variety of resources, the game does not design any illustrations to help players retrieve the location of resources. When the material is found to be missing, the player can only ponder in his memory to think about which section of the quest the material came from. Many times, this creates unnecessary headaches for players.
Some of the roads in the quest also have a "back road" design similar to the one in the galaxy - when the player explores the old level, he finds that he can use a variety of equippable "attribute runes" to open the originally helpless mechanism, and at the same time get rewards, he also satisfies the desire to explore and the sense of accomplishment when unlocking secrets.
However, some of the rewards for "going back" are very confusing. For example, in the game, there is a path unlocked with the "Fire Rune", and there is only one large gold chest as a reward on the entire road, but the box contains the "Fire Rune" you use to open the road. This kind of deceitful passage like "opening the lock but picking up the key to open this lock" has a total of three or four places in the game, and it is difficult to believe that it is a temporary omission of the production team, rather than deliberately.
Overall
As a small volume game that warms up for the main transmission, "The Legend of 100 Heroes: Rise" is barely qualified in performance. It outlines a corner of the canonical worldview, shows players the charm of town construction, resource collection and other systems, and creates a certain interesting horizontal action battle tailored for the game. However, there are some flaws in the details of its combat system, the quality of the main line mission is mediocre, the structure is broken, and the poor quality of Chineseization makes players have many inconveniences in understanding the plot.