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Review: 3D DOT GAME HEROES

Reviewed by Lisvender on PS3 Developed by From Software.  Published by Atlus.

From Software’s first game since Demon’s Souls is a weird creature. It’s a Zeldalike that doesn’t borrow from current Zeldas, but from the original one for the NES. It presents itself as an experience stuck between generations of graphical technology, and similarly, it plays as a game stuck between generations of design theory. It is a cheerfully self-aware love letter to not only Zelda, but to fantasy adventures of the 8-bit day, but, sadly, that novelty is its only true feature.

Long, long ago, the Dark King Onyx, a really bad dude, set his army of monsters on Dotnia, a quaint little kingdom located somewhere between Hyrule and Alefgard. A courageous warrior and six powerful sages worked together to defeat Onyx and seal him in an orb, and peace returned to the land. Unfortunately, if not surprisingly, this peace was not to last. Now, hundreds of years later, the power-hungry bishop Fuelle gets his hands on that orb, puts a curse on the princess of Dotnia, and steals away to a tall tower surrounded by poisonous swamps. Monsters are running rampant across the land, and rumors of Onyx’s return have the good people in a panic. Now the descendants of the sages and the warrior must unite to put a stop to Fuelle’s scheme.

You play the warrior’s descendant, and you’ll have explore the countryside, delve into underground labyrinths, and battle bad guys as you search for the sages’ descendants and gather their power. You’ll explore six different temples, each with a big boss at the end. Your character fights with a sword and a shield, but he/she will also make use of a series of useful tools, including a boomerang to stun enemies, a bow and arrow to hit switches, bombs for breaking open walls, and candles to light dark halls. It’s all very Zelda, but a few twists make Heroes stand out from the games it apes.

The most noticeable aspect of the game is its appearance. Dotnia is a curious place, and a singular one among video game worlds. It’s rendered in 3D, but everything in it is built from very large blocks, as though roughly translated from chunky, low-resolution pixel art. Characters move with jumpy, two-frame animations, and slain monsters burst open into a shower of boxes. It’s meant to look like an 8-bit game brought a step nearer to reality.

Heroes’s look is initially striking, but this awkward, teenaged area that Dotnia occupies creates some problems. Some current visual effects have worked their way into this growing land: depth of field effects, light and shadows, and sparkling reflections are everywhere. Unfortunately, these effects are so prevalent as to be distracting and annoying at times. The game includes a character editor, which allows you to sculpt your own 3D pixel thing and use it as your hero, Spore-style. Putting together a character box by box, though, is tedious, and when viewed from the perspectives that the game provides, your creation will be hardly recognizable.

In fact, hardly any of the game’s details are recognizable during play. The simply designed inhabitants of Heroes would probably look great if viewed directly from the front or side, as they would be in the 2D games that inspired them, but here, as 3D models looked down on from a bird’s-eye view, they dissolve into blocky bundles of angular confusion. Using one of the game’s zoomed-in camera angles makes the details more noticeable, but it also makes effectively fighting and exploring impossible. You can only change the camera angle in the overworld, anyway, so you won’t see a difference in the dungeons.

Which brings me to another problem. The viewpoint in the dungeons is fixed at a low angle, which means that everything up against the near, “fourth” wall is obscured. This can be irritating when monsters creep down there, but it’s really frustrating when a critical puzzle object, such as a floor switch or a hookshot pole, is positioned down there. The only way to really figure out rooms like that is to use an FAQ, or to make a lucky guess.

The other major difference between Zelda and Heroes is the big sword. You’ve probably heard about it. When your character is at full health, his/her sword will grow to an enormous size, allowing you to swipe down monsters with joy and aplomb. You can bring your sword to a blacksmith to increase its size until it reaches across the screen and pierce through walls if you wish. Much has been made of the big sword in 3D Dot Game Heroes, but while it makes a fine symbolic image for the game, I consider it a liability. The big sword is so effective that it makes all the other treasures in the game unnecessary except as keys to progress gates. Why bother using the bow, the boomerang, or the fire rod, when the sword wipes out your enemies so much more quickly than they do?

The audio is good in some parts, just okay in others. The music is layered with happy, chirpy chiptunes, but it also features some strong horns and strings, and a few songs, such as the main overworld theme, are quite catchy. Some of the dungeon themes, however, can be grating. Tools and bombs make strong, satisfying sounds, and when you strike an enemy with your sword, you’ll hear one of the best slashing samples ever used in a game. What you won’t hear is any voice acting, as the game employs the traditional text boxes of RPGs past, but for the dialogue you get here, that might be a blessing.

There’s a ton of nerd humor in 3D Dot Game Heroes, some of it subtle, obscure, and clever, and the rest broad and heavy. While the game plays like Zelda, references to many different classic games are everywhere. Dragon Warrior gets the lion’s share of the attention, with sound effects, characters, and conversations lifted directly from the beloved series, while Final Fantasy, Hydlide, Tower of Druaga, and Spelunker get their dues as well. Each of the game’s loading screens is Dotnia-style riff on a classic video game’s box art, too, and this would be cute if the game didn’t load so often.

It’s a little confusing that we have games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Uncharted 2, which feature complex, detailed environments and yet stream data seamlessly, while 3D Dot Game Heroes, with its small, simple world and no voice acting, which loads every time your character enters a new area. There’s an install option on the main menu, but even that doesn’t do away with the loading entirely. I’m truly bewildered by this. The only explanation I can think of is that From Software didn’t give this game much time for optimization. It would certainly explain its jumpy frame rate. Yes, this game, with its simple graphics, can’t manage a stable frame rate. If you kill too many enemies and have too many little blocks flying around the screen, or if you’re in a room with a lot of lighting effects running, the game chugs. What the hell? Is this really what we should expect from an exclusive on the most powerful games console on earth?

3D Dot Game Heroes is a tough game to review. It’s joyful, and it revels in the simplicity of the 8-bit era, but it also has very little of its own to say. It can be enjoyable to run around Dotnia smashing monsters with a big sword, but it also feels unbalanced, with many of its items and ideas going underused. The pseudo/retro graphics are charming, but they wreck the visibility. To give this game a 1/3 feels too harsh, but to give it a 2/3 seems too generous. Perhaps the best solution is to give it both scores, and then summarize my position thus: 3D Dot Game Heroes is pretty good for smiling at the past, but if you want to play a Zelda game, trust in the name brand.

Controller1.com rating: 1/3 (2/3 for retro lovers)