Originally Published 28 March 2011
Earlier this month, I played through 3D Dot Game Heroes. Like many things, I’ve been distracted and have only now gotten around to writing a review for it.
3D Dot Game Heroes is a parody / homage to the 16-bit era, top-down, action-adventure games of the mid-nineties. Specifically, the game most often reminded me of A Link to the Past. You take the role of a Hero (or Sage or Prince) and must go recover the six orbs to create the Light Orb and use it to defeat the Dark Bishop and his attempts to resurrect an ancient evil Dark King using the (unsurprisingly) Dark Orb.
Of course, the plot sounds ridiculous and hackneyed because it is deliberately trying to invoke the memories of those older games. Over the course of the game, there are numerous references dropped to various other games–people inside bomb-accessible caves who force you to pay to “fix their door”, enemies who have “secret[s] to everybody”, NPCs trying to trade their copies of Demon’s Souls for the game you are currently playing, and other such fun bits. Taken together, it is a rather humorous little narrative that is built.
The gameplay in 3DGH is somewhat similar to the 2D Zelda games–you have a sword, you can have one “active” item, and you can block or dash. These make up the key abilities of the hero. The main difference, however, is that your sword is generally of a size best described as “unreasonable”. Being at maximum health causes your weapon to be gigantic–often spanning an entire axis of the screen (or if you’re using a fully upgraded infinity plus one sword both). Unfortunately, this leads to my main complaint about the game.
The game seems to be built so as to be played with the player’s weapon at maximum power at all times. Being even half a hit point short of maximum health causes the weapon to revert to a far smaller and weaker version of the same. Although it is sometimes still usable, I found that losing a single tick of health would usually quickly spiral out to death due to the increased danger of having a shorter and weaker weapon. This kind of statistical instability led to some frustration on my part.
3DGH also seems to have decided to include the most annoying feature that has mostly been left behind in modern games: the lost forever item. In fact, the game has a large number of completely unclued quests which are lost forever if you do not do engage them at specific times. Worse yet, one of these quests spans the entire course of the game with a checkpoint between each major area. Miss a single checkpoint at the quest is failed. Not all of nostalgia is good.
Overall, I found the game entertaining, though I eventually resorted to a FAQ in order to find the unclued quests which were being triggered by quest advancement. If the game had cleaned up these few areas, I would have been able to recommend it without caveats. As is, however, I have to say that it is a niche title aimed (essentially) at people who are in their mid to late 20s.
3D Dot Game Heroes: 0