Heroland is a semi turn-based RPG by developer FURYU Corporation and publishers XSEED Games and Marvelous USA, wherein you play as a tour guide in an amusement park designed to make its guests feel like heroes in an RPG. I say semi turn-based because everyone has a timer between moves.
As you are the tour guide, and not the adventurer, the guests will try and decide how to fight the battles on their own. But this doesn’t mean you can only sit back and watch. You carry the healing items used by the party and you can change the strategy used by the party to fight.
To begin with, while you can have as many items as you want in storage, you can only take 3 sets of items with you into the dungeons. As you level up, this limit increases. The party won’t use any of the items themselves, so it is up to you to use the items when you think it is appropriate.
While a character is between turns, you can advise them to use a different move if you don’t like what their current predicted move is. Don’t think this means you can just take direct control of the party though. Each time you advise a guest, there is a timer until you can advise again, meaning if you try to advise willy-nilly instead of at key moments, you could miss an opportunity to change a vital command. This timer is actually for all actions you can take: using items, advising guests, and changing the party’s strategy.
Changing the party’s strategy allows you to change the actions the characters will take on their own. For example, the “guard-up” strategy will make everyone spend their next turn guarding, the “beat them up” strategy will get them all to focus on one enemy, and “conserve sp” will make them use only normal moves that don’t consume sp (whereas “go wild” does the exact opposite, characters will only use moves that consume sp). As previously mentioned, this shares a timer with when you can advise individual members or use an item, so you need to think carefully on when to interfere.
As the dungeon is a theme park, the guests will have a 1-3 approval rating. You see what this rating will look like after every fight and earn money and experience based on what the ratings are at the end of the dungeon. A guest’s approval rating will rise when: they land a critical hit, you use a healing item on them, you advise them, you change the party’s strategy, or you let a member of the party claim loot dropped by the enemies. The only thing that seems to lower approval is if a guest gets KO’d, and even then you can regain the lost points if you revive the guest before the battle ends.
While allowing guests to always claim loot drops might seem a wise idea, there is something to keep in mind: you have to pay for the items and equipment the guests use. To gain access to new equipment, you need to claim the corresponding item yourself. I have actually tested this; letting a guest claim a weapon you haven’t claimed before will not unlock it in the shop. Oddly enough, while you as the tour guide use new weapons to unlock them for use by the guests, the guests themselves treat the weapons as souvenirs to be taken home and never to be seen again.
Overall, I thought Heroland had an interesting idea and was well designed. As such, I think a fair rating for it is 8/10.
Check Out the Heroland Trailer:
Heroland is available for $39.99 for PC via Steam.
Steam Review
I am a recent Computer Science/Game Development Programming Chapman University Graduate. I am a life long enthusiast of computer/video gaming and my favorite game genres are adventure, choice-driven stories, fighting, and racing. My favorite game/movie series include but aren't limited to 'Legend of Zelda'; 'Dragon Age'; 'Persona'; 'Sonic the Hedgehog'; 'Mario'; 'Metroid' ;'Megaman'; 'Naruto'; 'Batman'; 'Spiderman'; 'Star Wars'; and 'Star Trek.'
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