| Better than you. Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: The land of rain and trees (Oregon) Gender:  Posts: 22,048 Thanks: 1,350 Thanked 3,714 Times in 1,671 Posts Points: 5,614.77 Bank: 26,040,876.19 Total Points: 26,046,490.96 | 3D Dot Game Heroes Preview for the PS3 from 1UP.com Quote: Take my word on this: There's something incredibly sleazy about playing The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and 3D Dot Game Heroes back-to-back. It's basically like going on a comfortable date with your long-time girlfriend, taking her home, and then sneaking out to spend time with some crazy stalker chick who dresses exactly like your girlfriend in order to catch your attention. And you've been dating your girlfriend for 20 years and you really like her, but after all that time you can't help but feel like your relationship is getting a little stale and predictable. And the stalker chick is a lot younger, and specifically styles herself to look like your girlfriend did back when you were in junior high and she was the class hottie who you thought was way out of your league -- plus, the stalker adds an extra touch of daring, modern sexiness that your girlfriend never would even consider, conservative and modest as she is. And you feel kind of guilty about it, but --
-- actually, you know, let's start over. I'm straining an analogy that wasn't very strong to begin with, and someone's going to get hurt. In simpler terms, 3D Dot Game Heroes wants to be a Zelda game. And not just any Zelda game, but the original NES Legend of Zelda. You control a little hero in a top-down world where you can only swing your sword in cardinal directions, battling through more than half-a-dozen dungeons scattered about a vast overworld in a quest to reach an evil overlord who lives at the peak of the northern mountain range. Along the way, you'll collect a boomerang, and bombs, and faeries, and money, and accidentally blast open hidden doors where the residents insist you pay them for the door repair charge. It's not so much that Heroes wears its influence on its sleeve as it is that it butchered the original Zelda, skinned it, and started wearing its skin as clothing.
Of course, there is a significant difference between Zelda and Heroes: The latter game is a PS3 title, and it makes full use of the system's tricks and gimmicks. Oh, it doesn't push the hardware by any means, but Heroes is fully 3D and sports lots of interesting graphical effects. Depending on your choice of camera angle, you may see the game world with a shallow depth-of-field that centers the focal plane on your hero, with foreground and background elements fading into blurriness, like miniature photography. Light shimmers across the surface of water. There's even HDR lighting, so that when you exit a dungeon the overworld looks briefly blown out until your hero's eyes adjust. It's kind of overkill, because the entire world is designed in a blocky style that looks exactly like an NES game thrust into the third dimension. Destroy an enemy and it'll even explode in a shower of tiny cubes.
The visual style could be little more than a cheap gimmick, but Heroes does a pretty good job of selling it. Although it's very deliberately designed to resemble the original Zelda, there are a lot of modern RPG sensibilities lurking beneath the surface. The game is crammed with sidequests, and the hero has a lot more options for upgrading than simply finding the next more powerful sword. In fact, your first quest is to go acquire the legendary sword; after that, you're basically just investing money into improvements. And in the style of post- Japanese RPGs, the hero's weapon is ludicrously huge. No, really, when fully charged up, it spans more than half the screen. The tradeoff is that once you take a bit of damage, your sword powers down and becomes much smaller. Also, Heroes moves a lot faster than Zelda did, so enemies pose more of a threat. Bosses are particularly dangerous, soaking up a ton of damage and offering no quarter.
Did I mention that the bestiary is ripped straight from the original Zelda, too? There are red octopi that spit rocks, four-legged spiders that bound about the room, dog-faced goblins that fire arrows, and up in the mountains you'll encounter leonine centaur creatures who chuck swords at you. The second boss is a giant bee surrounded by a ring of smaller bees, like those infuriating minibosses in Death Mountain.
But lest you think Heroes stops at replicating Link's first NES adventure, don't worry. Its inspiration ranges further. The first enemies you'll fight will be bunnicorns ripped straight from the Dragon Quest series -- which is also where the magic-casting sound effect comes from. And yeah, speaking of the audio, the overworld theme is hilariously similar to the Zelda overworld theme, while the file selection music is basically the Dragon Quest file selection tune with a few notes shuffled around on the sheet music.
"OK, I get it," you're thinking. "From Software is toeing the line between ripping off and paying tribute to some great NES classics. But so what? I played those games 20 years ago. Why would I want to play them again now -- fancy visual effects notwithstanding?" This is a totally reasonable question. The answer is that once you look beyond the obvious references and creative pillaging, 3D Dot Game Heroes is actually a pretty smart piece of work. It's not simply about recapturing the look and mechanics of classic NES games but also their innate design philosophy. Great as the Zelda franchise is, few would deny that it's built itself into a formula and has shed some of the charm and mystique of the adventure that launched the franchise in the first place. Heroes recaptures a bit of that feeling, offering a pleasantly stripped-down game that nevertheless is anything but barebones. And again, it's not a slavish imitation of the original Zelda; it foregoes many of the original game's more annoying elements in the name of playability and minimizing player frustration. It also incorporates a good many ideas from later Zeldas, from dash boots to magic spells, without necessarily adhering to the formula set down by A Link to the Past.
Take away all the graphical flash and what you have is basically Zelda II from another universe -- a universe where the follow-up to Zelda wasn't the oddball Adventure of Link but rather a game that served as a conceptual bridge between the first and third games in the series. There's little question that 3D Dot Game Heroes is going to appeal primarily to those of us who spent long adolescent nights sorting through the abstract mysteries of Hyrule 20 years ago, but hey -- we deserve to be pandered to a little, too. Atlus will be publishing 3D Dot Game Heroes in the U.S. in May at the very friendly price of $40, and anyone who still gets a kick out of classic NES adventures should look forward to it. Just don't let Zelda know about your little fling. | Check the link for pics and vids. __________________
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10-27-2009, 04:19 PM 
