Little Town Hero Review ( Switch)

Review code provided by Rainy Frog Games.

Little Town

In Little Town Hero, you play as Axe, a minor coal miner. He lives in a peaceful village guarded by a castle that prevents any outside travel. While training with hopes of being a soldier so he can see the outside world, he comes across a red stone. Shortly after the town is attacked by a monster and he is the only one who can fight it head on.

Thoughts

The combat system is unique as your move pool isn’t set or always available. At the start of a turn you’ll have a certain amount of power (this game’s action points), and some izzits in your wheel. As the turns go by, the amount of power you have at the start of a turn slowly increases. These izzits use power to turn into dazzits. In a turn you must try to break all your opponents dazzits with your own. Red dazzits are attacks and can only be used once in a turn, yellow are shields and can be used until they break, while blue are special effects (some of which may deal damage).

Your and their dazzits have attack and defense numbers. Which fight against each other detracting the other’s defense by their attack number. If the defense reaches zero the dazzit will break. You must fight against every one of the opponent’s dazzits in a turn. If you run out or can’t use one, you must struggle, and will take the damage directly to your life. Your goal is not only to prevent that, but also to break all their dazzits in a turn. If you do that they will reach an all break, if you have a red dazzit left (or enough power to unlock one) you can then deal damage directly to their life.

Life Breaker

Everyone has three hearts, but in monster fights the both of you will have a guard up. This is a number that must be broken before you can attack their heart in another all break. When attacking the heart the number of the dazzit’s attack doesn’t matter, but when hitting guard it will. So if you hit a guard of eight, with an attack of six the guard will still have two left on it.

Reaching an all break without a spare dazzit isn’t the worst though. As you will earn a battle point. These are used to swap izzits around from your hand and headspace (deck). As well as to replenish them. Because you only have so many izzits you will run out of ideas. Which can either be replenished with an increasing number of battle points or when you take damage to your life.

Around and About

Monsters and your sparring partners can have special effects on their dazzits. These may apply instantly, when chosen, broken or if not broken. It is vital to use the right stick to check what each dazzit’s effect is. Especially in monster fights these can be very annoying such as ultimate break. Which lets them break any dazzit it fights regardless of defense.

In monster fights, at the end of a turn a number will roll from one to four, and then you will move around the area, akin to a Mario Party board. In a way to combat the monster’s special effects learning on particular spaces can help you. Either through the support of townspeople or gimmicks. Townspeople have their own special move which can be applied if you’re on their space, such as lowering all enemies dazzit numbers by 1.

While gimmicks are tied to a particular move of yours. For example if you have throw as a dazzit, you can throw the chicken you landed next to, at the monster. The nameless townsfolk also can add a special izzit to your headspace that can only be used in that fight. One of the most important special effects your dazzits can have is to unlock free mobility, if that’s the case you can choose any space within a 1-4 radius to land on.

Hero

At first it seems that the story follows a monster of the day pattern. As you’ll beat a monster, hit the next chapter and run around town doing things until the next. However, there are a few side quests you can do. These range from finding out the source of a talking scarecrow, finding chickens, and side monsters. As I went to do one and turns out a couple of the monsters are completely optional. Generally it is a good idea to do these side quests, as you might get a new town member to assist you in battle.You can also re-fight previous monsters at the scarecrow.

Completing monster fights (real or retreads), sparring with friends and side quests earn you eureka points. These eureka points are your skill points that are used in your skill tree. Which can increase your guard number, add to the damage or defense of certain moves and add additional effects. One nice thing they did was when you lose a monster fight, before you retry you can then apply your new eureka points.

A Small, Small World

My first thought about the game’s appearance was that this game screams budget. Which given it is slightly less than half the price of a full retail game, makes sense. However, since the game is set entirely in the one town, I think a couple things could’ve looked better. At least the unnamed NPCs could have different hair or clothing colours. Especially since some of them are important for side quests.

The best looking parts of the town would be the buildings, and I like most of the monster designs. Animations were also pretty poor, such as a couple monsters would simple jump from off screen when locations changed. While the start of every turn has a slow animation of your opponent thinking and you can’t skip or turn off those or cut-scenes.

Even with this the performance isn’t great. As the game would pause while loading a text box or cutscene for a few seconds. Music would also stutter due to this and sometimes stuttered in battle. There’s only four different maps monsters show up in and despite that one of them clips through the buildings. Sometimes there’s a touch of slowdown while exploring. At least, the performance is the same in both handheld and docked.

I also found the camera controls to be stiff when I had to walk around town even taking off the follow thing I didn’t feel like I had full control of it. While the town isn’t huge I do wish there was a run button.

Music is one of the best aspects of this game. Most of which was composed by Toby Fox (Undertale’s creator). I like the sound design in general, even if there isn’t voice acting. One thing I wasn’t expecting to care much for was the story. As the main character is a bit dense, however they managed to make the setting’s background intriguing and part of the plot.

A Roll Of The Dice

Despite having a young protagonist it’s hard to call this game easy. This game is slow paced and requires you to carefully think your options. I personally really struggled with the third boss, partially due to luck and my first attempt went over forty minutes and I still hadn’t landed any damage on it. The next one I had a little trouble with, but almost all the ones following (not counting final) I could beat by the second try at the latest. Certainly your mistakes in battle will drag you down, but even with minimal mistakes you can feel pretty hopeless.

This can be particularly annoying when other fights make you feel the combat has a more puzzle aspect to it. Whereas in monster fights, the izzits you have on hand and where you are on the map are the most important but you can barely control it.

A Card

The luck of combat really made the game more of a drag at the start, especially since for the first few chapters you couldn’t walk more than a few seconds without running into a cut-scene. I didn’t start to properly enjoy Little Town Hero until almost halfway through the game. I’m also not sure if other people will hit the same difficulty spikes as me or find them elsewhere.

The game took me over twenty hours to beat, but I did do most of the side quests, and I feel like the final boss can easily add hours to anyone’s play time if you don’t just shut the Switch off. While the game has some slight performance and graphical issues, it’s a game with a nice setting, good tracks, and an interesting game play system. Yet the gameplay in itself would be a primary issue for many. For one being not easy or easy to understand without playing it yourself, and the element of RNG.

Because of this I have very mixed feelings about the game. So I’ll give it an I Like It, But….the gameplay should be better due to the difficulty spikes and random luck.
If you have the game make sure it’s update or you won’t be able to play in English.