Writing a review for "The Legend of a Hundred Heroes" is really a schizophrenic thing.
Rationally, it's not worth the wait that JRPG enthusiasts have been waiting for for so many years. Incredibly stale and outdated, it takes up almost all of the game's flow, and if you think that the "pixel turn-based" alone can represent the "dregs of the old times", then "The Legend of 100 Heroes" will definitely teach you a good lesson, and the poor "English translation" text makes it impossible to play without switching Japanese.
But emotionally speaking, "The Legend of a Hundred Heroes" is not so unbearable. At the very least, it's invaluable to those of you who are (or have been) middle-aged, and even the fatal flaws that dissuade a new generation of players are more like a full tribute to the spiritual pre-game — I know, it sounds a little strange, but when the rights are in KONAMI's hands, players don't really have a lot of choice.
Compared with the last trial, the sentences of the official version have been smoothed out a lot, but it still has an awkward translation flavor
To be honest, for an indie game, the debut of "100 Heroes" is too amazing. The exquisite scene composed of "3D scenes and pixel characters", the fast-paced battle of six members around the giant boss, another legendary game producer who fell out with KONAMI, and another classic game IP from the 90s of the last century - but the problem is that just when we excitedly called "The Legend of 100 Heroes" a "spiritual sequel", we forgot what "Fantasy Water Margin" really is.
For this question, the "memory" of the Internet may tell you this: it is a Japanese role-playing game series developed based on the Chinese masterpiece "Water Margin", with one of the few high-quality scripts on the original PlayStation, and the biggest feature is that it is based on 108 heroic characters, and is based on the "stronghold development" gameplay and unique combat system.
But few people will tell you that the original "Fantasy Water Margin" without memory correction is actually not as good as the legend, compared to the game of the same period, the obvious outdated graphics performance, slow-paced combat mechanics, poor numerical and character balance design, inconvenient player interaction interface, typos everywhere in the text - although "Fantasy Water Margin II" 3 years later helped the series get on the right track with a more mature industrial design, these problems are still deeply imprinted in the lineage of the series. And KONAMI, who once tried to get rid of these "genetic defects" in the sequel, was even more self-defeating, which sent half of the foot of "Fantasy Water Margin" to the grave.
That's the reality. Twenty years ago, neither manufacturers nor users were held hostage by the fast-paced market, and the "spectacle" of "Fantasy Water Margin" has made players tolerant - but here's the problem. Twenty years later, when "The Legend of 100 Heroes" came back, he was stunned and brought back the problems of "Fantasy Water Margin", but the spectacle of "108 Stars" and "Liangshanbo" has long been diluted by time.
At best, what is the "spiritual sequel" of "The Legend of 100 Heroes", from the main creative team to the core gameplay, everything you can see in "Fantasy Water Margin" is here, the production team knows very well what players want, and what they will pay for, and the "revolutionary" behavior of "Fantasy Water Margin IV" will never be repeated here. The biggest benefit of breaking away from the traditional commercial game development model, "creative freedom", is vividly demonstrated in "The Legend of 100 Heroes".
But on the other hand, you also need to accept that it does "have no money".
Despite reaching the crowdfunding goal needed for development early, making games is still a money-burning thing. Even today, when the scale of independent games is getting bigger and bigger, the project of "The Legend of 100 Heroes" still seems quite ambitious, with more than 100 characters, a huge world territory, and a narrative structure that advances multiple lines at the same time, even those "big factories" in the real sense are difficult to idealize into reality - now it seems that even the ten-second battle demonstration four years ago is more like a conceptual elaboration...... I wouldn't call it a "fraud", but it's certainly an over-the-top "exaggeration".
This is especially true for the localized text of a professional Japanese translator, especially for the unique visual presentation of "The Legend of a Hundred Heroes".
With Octopath Traveler in the past, many friends habitually referred to the expression of "2D characters" and "3D scenes" in the game as "HD-2D", but forgot that the biggest advantage of "HD-2D" is not simply "stereo lighting" or "particle effects", but the way of expression that enables players to complete "imagination" - more often, we see that it is actually a "process" rather than a "result" , just like two characters in the picture collide casually twice, and the player can generate a fierce confrontation in their minds.
Understand this, and you will find that "The Legend of 100 Heroes" actually does the opposite. Although the form of "pixel figures" and "3D scenes" is also used, its actual performance is not as refined as the former - the rough patchwork of materials brings a sense of incongruity between different materials and expressions, and the obvious lack of funds also makes the developers have to cut the "running" movements of most of the characters except the three protagonists, and have to leave a bunch of comical "double-speed walking" in the cutscenes, as well as a huge base but very low practical value of 3D scenes.
Even to this extent, "The Legend of 100 Heroes" still tries to reproduce the iconic "pixel performance" in the first two parts of "Fantasy Water Margin". The more realistic head-to-body proportions of the characters, as well as the relatively independent character action modules, also serve this.
It's hard to tell if it's pure coincidence or fate.
Compared with most JRPGs in the pre-3D era, "Fantasy Water Margin", which faced the problem of insufficient funding from the beginning, is really not "exquisite", and the reuse of materials for characters and scenes can be seen everywhere, but relying on the not so "kingly" battle story and the right "dynamic" of pixel characters, it still successfully created a large number of impressive characters and story bridges - which is why "The Legend of 100 Heroes" released that battle screen in advance before the crowdfunding started.
As the saying goes, the greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment, although "The Legend of 100 Heroes" still reproduces the "dynamic pixels" belonging to each character in "Fantasy Water Margin" as much as possible, and adds a lot of camera techniques similar to stretching or rotation on this basis, but the financial constraints still make this overall performance extremely mediocre, far less than the amazing in that short film.
The same principle applies to almost all aspects of "The Legend of a Hundred Heroes". In the player's imagination, it is a middle-to-upper volume "masterpiece" based on "Fantasy Water Margin" and polished with modern technology. But after you really open it, you will find that the only difference between it and "Fantasy Water Margin" is that only thanks to the changes in the game industry and market aesthetic preferences, the underlying design of the game has not undergone any qualitative changes - this may be a good thing for veteran players of "Fantasy Water Margin", but not for more ordinary players.
Take the core system of "The Legend of 100 Heroes" "recruitment" and "city construction" as an example. In the story, in order to resist the invasion from the empire, the protagonist "Noah" and his party are forced to use the abandoned old city as a base, starting the expansion of the combat power to attract talents from all over the world. And just like the "Fantasy Water Margin" series in our impression, this "self-made" process is the most important flavor of the series - the more characters players recruit during the adventure, the more basic functions of the city will be perfected, and the more playable elements of the game will be.
But even at that time, this set of gameplay had very obvious flaws, that is, it was too "slow" The pace of the game, "the city function will gradually improve with the player's progress", from another perspective, it can also be understood as "the basic function will be extremely lacking in the early stage of the game", and the game system with "city construction" as the core Although the whole game process is full, it also exposes the shortcomings of the game in the structural design.
In fact, this kind of "slow heat" that goes deep into the genes has indeed had a huge impact on the game experience of "The Legend of 100 Heroes". In the early stages of the game, players won't be able to quickly teleport around the map, change their party's character composition at any time, get resources before embarking on an adventure, or even check their progress toward side quests, which will only be mitigated when the city is on track - and at the end of the day, you can't tell if the game is really starting to get fun, or if it's the Stockholm effect of the long-term PUA.
Perhaps, the problem is not in it - "The Legend of 100 Heroes" just copied the existing game mode of "Fantasy Water Margin", and I was indeed spoiled by all kinds of "I'm afraid you won't be happy playing" game thinking on the market today. Twenty years later, it is difficult to simply evaluate these elements as "good" or "bad", only "not in line with the current market environment" is true.
And if the above can be barely understood as structural problems, then the rough "user interaction logic" of this work is the real sense of the "dregs of the times".
As an old-school player from the old era, you don't think you care about typical old-school Japanese game styles such as "Dark Thunder Encounters", "Leveling Up and Not Regaining Stamina", "Non-Participating Characters Have No Experience", "Fixed and Scarce Save Points", or even "Boss Battles Without Supplies", but in "Legend of the Hundred Heroes", these are not the most excessive...... You'll also have to re-experience the designs that "equipment and consumables take up limited backpack capacity", "reserve teams have to stay in the house after forming a team again to regain their strength", and "the entrance to the maze is up to two minutes away from the supply shop" - the essence of these designs is that they were mostly used to deal with the hardware limitations of the old generation, and they are really not necessary today.
Looking at the combat system of "The Legend of 100 Heroes", it is still a high-definition reproduction of the gameplay of "Fantasy Water Margin".
Up to six characters in the front and back rows of two columns stand according to their positioning and functions, players need to predict the attack distance and action speed of each unit on the field, and issue action instructions to all characters at one time, except for the "coat of arms" that has been replaced with the magic props in the world view of this work"Rune Lens", you can hardly find any conceptual or mechanical innovation, even the most obvious numerical balance and strategy monotony problem of the first generation of "Fantasy Water Margin", "The Legend of a Hundred Heroes" has also taken it all- Some front-row characters can't stand up in battle, some back-row characters can't reach the enemy with short hands, and almost all mob teams on the road can rely on group attacks to easily cut out characters with low defense in the player's team...... In the end, relying on the strong push of the stats is still more worry-free than the strategic combination between the classes, and the crispy mage profession that was useless twenty years ago is still only a dry stare on the cold bench today.
However, there is also an improvement in this comparison, and that is the implementation of the "True Auto Battle" feature - in this game, players are finally leaving those simpler battles to the AI. In order for the AI to respond to more combat situations, "Legend of 100 Heroes" allows players to make simple edits to each character's action logic in the "Strategy" menu. Specifically, the actions that need to be performed are set in priority order, and if the conditions cannot be met, they are automatically pushed to the next priority action, and there is a similar system in the strategy RPG "King of the Holy Beasts" released early last month.
"The Legend of a Hundred Heroes" is naturally not "The King of the Holy Beasts", so the similarity between the two stays at the conceptual level. In the actual game, the preset action conditions that players can preset are actually quite limited, and can only basically meet the attack or recovery needs when fighting against the Dark Thunder Jungle. But that's it, compared to the "Fantasy Water Margin", which can only automatically attack, the combat rhythm of "Legend of a Hundred Heroes" has also improved a lot - at least now, you can temporarily liberate your cerebellum in some less difficult encounters.
Of course, dissatisfaction is dissatisfaction, and playing still has to be played, which is the saddest thing about the "old people".
When playing "Legend of 100 Heroes", we switched to the new Kingston FURY Super Beast HF Edition memory 6000MT/s black version. The high-frequency, low-timing, cool black vest heatsink has a bold and avant-garde style while still providing reliable performance. On-chip ECC is extremely stable, helping to maintain data integrity.
A nominal 6000 MT/s was achieved with XMP overclocking enabled, and tested with AIDA64 with speeds of up to 87,831 MB/s read, 79,982 MB/s write, and 77,837 MB/s copy. The delay is 79.2ns.
After listing and criticizing the dregs of the old times that come with the game, we still need to face a very serious problem - "The Legend of 100 Heroes" is still the only blood relative left in the world by "Fantasy Water Margin", and for players who like the Japanese war genre and the "self-made, resist the invaders" setting, these shortcomings are not enough to hide all the charm of it. Personally, I'm more inclined to dissect the reasons behind "inflexible" than to condemn it to death.
Even for friends who have never been exposed to "Fantasy Water Margin", "Heroes and Heroes Gather in Liangshan" is also an interesting gimmick. The royal style of "punishing evil and promoting good" is important, but the process of "collecting partners" and "building Liangshanbo" is the key to "The Legend of a Hundred Heroes" to stabilize the negative design and the emotions of the elderly. It's hard for me to explain this in terms of game mechanics, because the process itself is based on the player's personal sensibilities - players who don't eat this set will only accumulate more negative emotions due to outdated designs, but players who eat this set will get the satisfaction of "collecting partners" on the way to match.
This is the "essence" of "Fantasy Water Margin", and it is also the "bottoms" of "The Legend of a Hundred Heroes".
Just like the title of the game, even if "The Legend of 100 Heroes" does not have a legitimate "108 stars", there are more than 100 heroes, although most of them have few lines, but they all have distinct personalities and background settings. Even in the indie game market, where diversity is more important, there are few creators willing to put businessmen, chefs, or farmers who are outside the battlefield into the main character, let alone use the thankless gameplay logic of "building a city" to emphasize their role in troubled times. Having done this, it has kept its "bottoms".
's excessive attachment is enough to fill the players' regrets after "Fantasy Water Margin III" over the years, but it also makes "The Legend of 100 Heroes" fail to become themselves after all.
That's funny to say. Emotionally, we hope that it can maintain the spirit of "Fantasy Water Margin", but rationally, we hope that it can repair the old as the new -
Players, it may be really getting harder and harder to serve.