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If it hadn’t been for a guy at the local GameStop, I likely would have never heard about the Silicon Studio’s latest game, 3D Dot Game Heroes. Hearing things like it’s a modern day remake of The Legend of Zelda in high def with an 8-bit look and feel, I had to investigate. I contacted the game’s publisher Atlus for more information, and they actually hooked me up with a copy of the game 2 weeks before it’s release; and while it’s not literally a Zelda remake, the similarities are unmistakable. Releasing this coming Tuesday May the 11th on the PS3 for only 40 bucks, let’s check out 3D Dot Game Heroes. If you haven’t already, check out my newly designed website over at ZeitgeistGameReview.com and let me know what you think! Alright, it’s time to get our Retro on!
Long ago a Dark lord was stirring trouble for the 2D Kingdom of Dotnia, so a hero with a magical sword vanquished him to a dark orb with the help of 6 light sages and their orbs. For a long period of time afterwards, people from all over the world would visit the kingdom to honor the hero. But as time passed, the numbers started to dwindle; so to spice things up, the king made the kingdom 3D. As the kingdom began to prosper once again, a Dark Bishop named Fuelle has gotten his hands on the dark orb of the past and is beginning to cause a ruckus.
The game opens in the past where the hero of the day hides his magical sword to be found by one of his descendants in the future. Fast forward to the 3D era and you awaken as one of the descendants to this hero. After meeting with the King, he claims that you are the only one who can stop the Dark Bishop, and that you’ve got to find the magical sword, and collect the 6 light orbs and the sages that accompany them and put an end to all the corruption once and for all. Yea, pretty cliché, but hey, it’s retro.
The design of the game is likely the coolest feature and probably what is going to draw in the largest audience. See, everything you see in the game, minus maybe the sky, is made up of little 3d blocks, which give kind of an 8-bit feel to a high definition game. From start to finish it took me about 18 hours to complete, but that did not include all of the side quests, and more importantly, finding all of the hidden shit scattered throughout the kingdom. There is simply tons of things to find including items and weapons, but more importantly, throwbacks to classic video games of our past, including 1 or 2 quite infamous codes that we used in our 8-bit days. After completing the game, you can either continue to play, so you can go finish all of the side quests or max out your stats, or you can start a new game and retain all of the upgraded swords that you collected in your first play-through. So you’ve got some decent replayability.
Initially you have the ability to select from a long list of characters to play as, each with different starting stats, or you can enter the editor and create your own character to play as! The character creator allows you to create your characters dot by dot, and create several different poses to ensure the character can walk and attack without being a static block moving around the screen. Of course the first thing that came to mind for me was to create a raging boner and a set of walking boobs.
The game-play is pretty straight forward. Go to dungeon one, kill the boss, collect the orb, gain it’s magical power from the sage, move on to the next dungeon. Rinse and repeat. There are 7 dungeons total with a final boss at the end with of course tons of puzzles to solve in true Legend of Zelda fashion. In addition to collecting items, there is also a handful of upgradable swords to collect, each with a different upgrade potential. See, when your health is maxed out, your sword becomes huge-ified and is able to take out multiple foes from quite long distances. On some of my game-play videos this past week I’ve gotten a lot of comments asking if the huge sword makes the game too easy. Actually, the huge sword saves the game from becoming too difficult. To me, the entire game was about keeping my health full so that I didn’t have the normal sized sword. The monsters kind of kick your butt with a regular sword because the perspective of the camera I chose to play with made it kind of difficult to hit the monsters sometimes.
Aside from all of the upgradeable swords, I actually didn’t think that there were enough items in the game. While this is more similar to The Legend of Zelda than A Link to the Past, I think I was just spoiled by the plethora of items that you collect and use in that game. Granted, you get a bunch of spells in this game, I just didn’t find them all that interesting. It’s also not always apparent where you need to go. See, in Zelda games, you typically find an item in a dungeon, and that item is usually required to complete that dungeon. Well several times in Dot Game Heroes, I was able to complete a dungeon without finding the item inside it, and attempted to move on to the next dungeon, traveling half way across the world and finding that I actually needed an item in the previous dungeon to advance, so I had to backtrack to get it. So take my advice, make sure to clear every room in every dungeon before moving on.
The graphics in this game are really a love or hate kind of thing. Likely for us older gamers, the retro look and feel of the game is simply beautiful to us because it really brings us back to the games of our childhood. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be born today and having to start my gaming experience with something as beautiful as Uncharted 2 or Final Fantasy 13. It almost feels like you can’t appreciate games for what they are then, but that’s neither here nor there. Something that felt odd to me was that even though the graphics are pretty simplistic, if there are a lot of enemies on the screen, or if you kill a bunch of enemies at once so there are little blocks flying all over the place, the game actually had some surprising framerate issues here and there.
While there is no voice acting in the game, the soundtrack is kind of interesting. It’s got the 8-bit midi feel to it, but is backed up with a much fuller sound, really giving a very pleasant gaming experience.
What can I say besides I really enjoyed playing this game. While it does suffer from a few technical and design difficulties, the overall experience was very positive. I mean, who doesn’t want to play a brand new game clearly based on something so wonderful from our past. I don’t know how much you younger gamers out there would appreciate something like this, but for those of us who grew up in the 8-bit era, I can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t want to play this! Personally, I’d love to see another one of these in the future. The formula is tried and tested, and we know it works so keep pumping these bastards out Atlus! What are your thoughts on the game? Leave your questions and comments below!
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