Cool, my first PSP review! I wanted to get a PSP a few months back just for this game. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as I hoped, so maybe it’s good that I didn’t. It’s still a good game, though!
I bet if you thought about it for a minute or two, you could think of a few movie series which started out great, but eventually devolved into a soulless derivative of the original product. Police Academy. Rocky. Karate Kid. Saw. Shrek. Jaws. The list goes on. Half-Minute hero is unique game in that it follows the same progression, but manages to compress it into just one installment. At the very least, the best part of the game takes up the entirety of the first half. Also, this model of putting all the ‘sequels’ into one game saves us a lot of money, eh?
The story of Half-Minute Hero follows the eternal struggle between the Time Goddess and the Ultimate Evil Lord through the ages. We play as various people in history who need the Time Goddess’s help to save the world. While the Time Goddess is more than willing to oblige, she is quite the money grubber and doesn’t miss the change to turn the plight of these heroes into a lucrative venture. So, we interact with the Time Goddess as we play through a variety of different gameplay modes. As a reviewer of RPGs, I’ll be talking about Hero 30 the most; partly because it’s an RPG mode, and partly because it’s half of the game.
In Hero 30, we take on the role of an adventurer (named “Hero” by default). As Hero is travelling through a particular kingdom, a garden variety Evil Lord shows up, having learned a new spell that can destroy the entire world in thirty seconds! The king calls upon Hero to stop the Evil Lord’s nefarious plans! Thanks a ton, king. Why don’t YOU do it? I can’t even finish taking a piss in thirty seconds, let alone save the world. As if it even needs to be said, Hero totally fails, and the world is destroyed. The end!
…Psyche! After the world is destroyed, Hero hears the voice of the Time Goddess, explaining that she can help him defeat the Evil Lord by rewinding time. This miraculous service comes at a price, though; specifically, 100 gold coins plus 100 more for each subsequent time. After defeating the Evil Lord, the Time Goddess explains that someone is teaching the thirty-second destruction spell Evil Lords all throughout the land. So, Hero sets off to stop all the Evil Lords, ‘thirty seconds’ at a time.
Forget all the flair and histrionics of most RPGs; instead, we have very straightforward gameplay; run around, get into to battles where Hero just runs head first into enemies, much like how a kid will simulate a battle with his action figures by banging them together for a few seconds. Head into town (where time is graciously frozen, free of charge), buy some equipment, ask villagers about what’s the buzz. Solve their problems and get some clues on how to take down the Evil Lord du jour, who likely wants to destroy the world for a hilariously contrived reason (although, I suppose they’re no more contrived than the motives of your typical RPG villains). Bang into the Evil Lord head first, save the day, and run off to a new town.
Half-Minute Hero (or rather, Hero 30 mode) is an interesting piece of commentary on the RPG genre. Anyone who reads my writings knows that I’m not a big fan of having my time wasted. More than any other type of game, RPGs are the biggest offender for having lots of padding for no good reason. Here, we have a game that not only recognizes it, but boldly boils down the entirety of RPGs to the bare essentials, allowing characters to go from Level 1 Schlubs to Level 30 Deathmasters and stick it to the Evil Lords that threaten humanity in just a few minutes. I enjoy thinking about how most RPGs take around thirty hours to complete, where Hero 30 mode takes five hours, and I can save the world almost fifty times. Should RPGs be boiled down to six minute affairs? Perhaps not, but we’re faced with clear proof that that RPGs have leeway to trim a lot of fat.
After completing Hero 30, we move onto ‘the sequels’, and steady decline of the Half-Minute Hero begins. The first mode up to bat is ‘Evil Lord 30’, a Real-Time Strategy game boiled down to thirty second missions. We play as a ‘good’ Evil Lord attempting to take down the wizard who turns his love into a bat. The strategy element works in a Paper-Rock-Scissors method (or Rochambeau, if you’re a sophisticated Evil Lord); there are three types of units, and each one beats a certain type while losing to another. Players are given objectives, and have thirty seconds to complete them.
Next, we move on to Princess 30, which boils down side scrolling 'shmups into 30 second levels. Here, we control the princess, dead set on finding a cure to her father’s illness. To that end, she sets out from her castle wielding a crossbow. With a company of guards to defend her, she runs around, looking for items which can possibly produce an antidote for the king, while shooting frantically at monsters coming from all directions.
These two modes are much shorter than Hero 30, amassing maybe ninety minutes of game time apiece. Although the humour from Hero 30 mode is still there, it’s never quite as exciting or charming as it is when the protagonist can’t talk. Perhaps it was just more fun to talk with the Time Goddess and the other random people that Hero met on his adventure, rather than the same two or three people the entire time. Even so, the laughs are what got me through them.
These game modes also failed to engage me in a fun and interesting way, likely because RTSes and 'shmups are contrarily some of least time-wasting genres. RTS games necessitate long play times to have any depth, and any 'shmup that wants to be engaging with only thirty seconds would have to generate a bullet hell unlike anything the world has ever seen. I suppose it also doesn’t help that in Princess 30, your ‘ship’ takes up the majority of the screen, making it impossible to dodge anything. Thus we don’t lose by getting hit; the object of the game is just to speed through the level. This isn’t difficult to do, even without shooting enemies.
Then comes Knight 30, the point where this game undoubtedly jumps the shark. In this era, the Time Goddess has been killed, and the Evil Lords have takes over the earth. A sage appears, with the knowledge of a spell that can destroy all evil in an area in just thirty seconds. Unfortunately, he is frail, and needs to be protected. He saves a knight on the brink of death and asks the knight to protect him as he travels the world, purifying it.
Knight 30 is painfully simple: the Sage can only be hit a few times by oncoming enemies. In order to protect the Sage, players control the knight and fend off attackers, set traps, or even pick the Sage up and move him to a different location. The problem with Knight 30 is that it’s just outrageously easy. There are some levels where I did absolutely nothing and won. There were many more levels where I could pick up the Sage and move him to a slightly safer location a few feet away, and then wait for victory. The levels in the other game modes usually took a few minutes to complete; but the levels in Knight 30 literally took about thirty seconds to complete. I guess I could take solace in the fact that it was over in a flash, but I’d rather just take solace in the fact that I played a fun game mode.
The charm of the dialogue is all but gone at this point, to boot. If it wasn’t apparent by the story description, Knight 30 takes on a much more serious tone from this point until the end of the entire game. The original appeal of Half-Minute Hero has waved bye-bye, with no signs of coming back. In some strange way, it’s remarkable how a game that started off with such promise went down the crapper so easily. Sure, after beating Knight 30, we get to play Hero 300 (which wraps up the story proper), and Hero 3. It was nice of them to bring back the most entertaining gameplay mode at the end, but the effort was too little, too late, perhaps.
Although the second half was underwhelming, Half-Minute Hero was more than worth it for Hero 30 mode. I would recommend trying at least that much of the game to any RPG fan. It’s not as if it’ll take up much time, or anything, and it’s shocking to see how well the most bloated genre in video games can be simplified into near-instantaneous outings. In that regard, Half-Minute Hero is a very insightful, intelligent game. It’s too bad about the rest of the game, though. Maybe they can go the route of old retro games and bring it back in ten years, when gamers have completely forgotten why their series had been put to rest in the first place?