Heirs of the Kings is a retro-styled Japanese role-playing recreation that’s so by-the-numbers it would as properly be in binary.
A hero from a small village meets a mismatched crew of three different characters: two cute women—one among whom’s a healer, the opposite who’s a fighter—and a snooty man who’s nowhere close to nearly as good at fight because the hero. Following an assault on (say it with me now) the small village the place the hero grew up, figuring out little concerning the exterior world, they embark on a quest to go to the shrines of the fundamental kings who died making a defend to guard the world from darkish forces.
Is the defend now fading except a gaggle of 4 mismatched however completely complementary characters handle to repair it? Sure, sure it’s.
You struggle monsters in random encounters, enhance your weapons and armor, achieve abilities, and solid spells. And simply once you begin to marvel when the airship goes to point out up, the airship exhibits up.
I’m not complaining; I reduce my tooth on video games like this again within the Sport Boy/PlayStation days. Even with the large graphic updates which are accessible now, there’s one thing to be stated for pouring your creativeness into 16 bit sprites marching their means throughout an overworld map.
And if the baseline of that have is what you’re in search of, Heirs of the Kings has it. The ability tree, primarily based on “Soul Maps,” is an attention-grabbing contact—an internet of stat upgrades that you simply unlock, together with new abilities tied both to the characters’ combating fashion or their elemental affinity.
The issue is that whereas Heirs of the Kings has the type of a retro JRPG, it lacks the center that made these video games memorable. I discovered the relationships between the characters to be shallow, with little or no interplay between them till they get into publish boss-battle areas the place the speaking goes on for too lengthy. We discover out, abruptly, that the warrior girl is jealous of the lovable healer, and apparently the snooty tutorial has an antagonistic flirtation occurring.
The sport additionally tries to carry onto a thriller concerning the hero’s heritage lengthy after we’ve began to unlock his elemental affinity.
Even should you’re prepared to place up with the underwritten story, fight (the opposite huge draw of an RPG) is a muddle as properly. Whereas your characters have elemental assaults which may have strengths and weaknesses, the enemies you’ll be combating are virtually utterly randomized, that means you’ll get a mixture of fairies, dragons, boars, and issues which resemble muffins with kitty faces. Till you get to a boss struggle, there appears to be no thought put into the association of enemies.
The sport options an auto-fight operate you possibly can activate and off by urgent Y, and I used to be capable of play the sport for hours with out having to strategize my assaults. On the primary event when my celebration was utterly worn out, I used to be capable of spend particular expertise factors that I’d amassed over hours of play to revive the celebration at full power in the midst of the battle, with the enemy as weak as the purpose the place it had ended.
KEMCO’s Heirs of the Kings works as a retro-throwback to the times when the boundaries of computing energy needed to be augmented by writing characters that caught in your head like a track that you would be able to’t get out. Sadly, this recreation has the tempo, however not the center.