Welcome to our review of Little Town Hero, the first GameFreak game that is not part of the Pokemon franchise in ages!
The story is set in an isolated village on the edge of the world. The only gate leading outside is heavily guarded by a castle, and the villagers are not allowed to leave. Most of the villagers don’t give it a thought, and happily go on with their everyday lives.
However, the protagonist is a little different from the others – he wants to see the world outside. One day, a “Monster” appears in the village, shocking everyone because until then, no one knew such creatures existed. The protagonist is able to fight it using a mysterious Red stone he found in the coal mines. In the course of his defense of the village, he gradually unravels secrets of how the stones and the monsters came to be…
Unlike most RPGs, there is no need to fight weak monsters repeatedly to level grind in “Little Town Hero”. Instead, you will need to have a good strategy to fight each boss monster one on one… Will the protagonist live the adventure he craves and escape the humdrum village life?
Little Town Hero was among my most anticipated games for the end of the year. Finally, GameFreak would be working on another game that is not called Pokemon. They were to be introducing a RPG called Little Town Hero that is all about trying to escape a single town to go explore the great outside.
Little Town Hero does everything right on paper to get your attraction, a brand new battle system based on ideas in order to beat the monsters invading the town. This combined with a charming art style that is most endearing at times, what can go wrong right?
Well, just about everything. Literally everything.
The battle system is quite inventive but within minutes, you will feel like you are doing maths homework and it is just anything but fun. Add in total randomness and before you know it, you are stuck in lengthy levels on a Mario Party-esque game board. Sure, your friends across town will help you find your way in battles and do their best to help you, but all the battles feel needlessly lengthy and without the ability to skip action scenes, you are in for a horribly long fight just to get the enemy down from his three hearts.
The town itself feels very empty and quite often, you will feel like you are not properly enjoying what could have been. Sorry to say this, but Little Town Hero was a rather boring experience for me personally. I often encountered small freezes occurring every time the game went into a cutscene too. At first, making me think the game had crashed on me, but even worse is that I got used to it in the end.
I often felt out of touch with the story and every time I lost a battle, I felt more and more discouraged to continue playing. For a 25 Euro game, this was probably the worst part of all. I just think this game is so unpolished and unworthy of its pedigree.
In conclusion, Little Town Hero hails from one of the best studios and sadly proves that even they can make bad games. Yes, I called it a bad game because gameplay-wise, it’s rather far away from enjoyable. It looks great and plays badly. My honest suggestion right now is not to buy it.
