Little Town Hero: Y8 Review

Game Y8Games, to put it mildly, are rarely released on the PC. Anywhere outside of Nintendo's consoles, Game Freak has been releasing a variety of Pokémon games on them for years , only occasionally allowing themselves to be distracted by something else. Little Town Hero is one such rare occurrence. The game, of course, first came out on Switch, and this summer has consistently visited PS4, Xbox One and finally PC. Naturally, we could not pass by such an event.

So, on the one hand, we have a classic Japanese RPG - colorful, cartoonish, a little naive and about children. The main characters are boys and girls, as well as their parents. True, "funny stories" are not really about Little Town Hero.

And what can be funny about the fact that your home village is attacked by huge monsters that appear from nowhere? This is all the more strange because the village is under the protection of the castle, because of which the inhabitants cannot even go outside their settlement and see the world. It was this desire - to go out and see, having gone on an adventure - that drove the tomboy boy, whose name you give, and his friends.

They managed to sneak past the guards, but then they met an old soldier who sent the guys home. However, he agreed to teach them the art of war, so that the boys become soldiers and enter the service in the castle - only in this way they can go beyond the settlement and learn about the world. But in exchange, the soldier asked for help in dealing with the monsters, which are just his concern - only after dealing with them, the warrior can return to the castle.

It was our hero who managed to cope with the monster - it seems, thanks to the power of a strange stone found in a local mine. Naturally, now it is he, with the support of friends, who will have to sort out all this mess and find out where the monsters come from in the closed area.

However, Little Town Hero has a place for irony and funny situations. Our heroes blackmail soldiers drinking in taverns, mock hungry guards, luring them out of their posts with the smell of all sorts of delicious food, catch sheep and communicate with garden scarecrows.

And all the way, our hero faces off with one of his friends named Matok, who will never accept the fact that we are the ones who are able to fight monsters. The heroes even argue about who will give the gift to which girl, in order to eventually climb the tower and inspect the village in search of the lair of monsters.

Another thing is that in general both the story and the characters are not impressive. Yes, in places it is cute, in places it is funny and interesting, but nothing outstanding. In addition, the game looks kind of truncated, incomplete - the action takes place within several small locations, where, moreover, we are very often limited by freedom. For example, if you need to do something according to the plot, then they will not be allowed anywhere further until we do this.

There are side quests, but mostly primitive ones, like finding escaped sheep. No global map travel with random or planned skirmishes there is no crafting, a classic role-playing system and the usual turn-based battles with the Active Time Battle mechanics.

Everything seems to be in the spirit of Hearthstone . There are attack (red), defense (yellow) and support (blue) cards. Energy is spent on using cards, and its amount increases from round to round. And if your card has 2 damage and 3 armor, and the enemy has the opposite, then both of them will destroy each other. If you have 4 defense points or your opponent has 2, then your card will win and remain in your hand.

Further there are nuances and differences. To begin with, all cards are initially considered "ideas" - they cannot be used, but they are almost always invulnerable. Then we turn them from ideas (Izzits) into actions (Dazzits), spending this or that amount of energy. And after that, as a rule, they remain in the hand already activated, that is, they can be used for free.

At the same time, you cannot directly attack the enemy hero - first you need to break all his cards in the current round. Each attack is allowed to be used once, so the focus is mainly on defense and support actions that can not only enhance the attack or defense of other cards, but also generate new ones, inflict damage on enemy cards or remove useful effects from them.

And only when all the opponent's cards are broken can a phase come in which we are allowed to hit directly on the enemy's health. Well, or on his shield. But this can only be done with attack cards - it is important to save at least one of these by this moment.

If you do not have a red card at this stage, then you will receive BP (Break Points) points, for which you can exchange the cards in your hand for the necessary cards from the deck at any time. This is a very important point, because the hand sooner or later becomes scarce. Another way is to allow damage to your health, after which all the “ideas” in the reset are reanimated and returned, and you also get a shield.

Another important point is the ability in most duels to move around the map, as in board games (the number of moves is determined by the roll of the dice) in order to get to one of the allies, some kind of cannon or fighting chicken.

All of them provide one or another support - for example, they reduce the cost of one of the cards to zero, restore the shield and reanimate all the "ideas", inflict damage on all "dazzits" of the enemy or directly to his health, bypassing any phases.

Therefore, it is very important to plan where and to whom to go, whose help and when to use, focusing on the situation and the availability of maps. All this, as well as the fact that any card takes away only one star of enemy health, and even the shield must be destroyed first, makes the confrontation quite long. But if you do not reduce the level of difficulty, then such duels turn out to be very intense and interesting, and victory in them gives a feeling of pride.

Little Town Hero looks like a kind of testing ground, a demo for practicing entertaining experiments with card and table mechanics. And we must pay tribute to Game Freak - the authors of "Pokemon" proved that they know how to come up with something fresh, even on the basis of seemingly familiar gameplay. But if we consider Little Town Hero as a full-fledged game, then it pulls only for the title of a prowler.

Pros: there are humor and funny characters; the mechanics of card battles were very interesting and unusually played, to which elements of board games were also added; soundtrack from the author Undertale Toby Fox (Toby Fox).

Minuses: the game can hardly be called complete - few locations, scale and freedom; not a very interesting plot; the picture is bright, but clearly outdated.