The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I was cleaning up installs on my 360, and it occurred to me that I never actually wrote about Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax. Which seems like a huge mistake. And since this is a day to NEVAR FORGET, I guess I best not forget to write about it, and give you a review.

While some of the things they took out of the game are stupid, overall, it’s a really great game and a worthwhile purchase if you didn’t play the original.

The premise, if you’ve never caught it, is that there’s a spell going around that destroys the world and takes 30 seconds to cast. You’re a really fast person, so you’re recruited by the greedy Goddess of Time to stop the Evil Lords who are trying to cast the spell. So you run around and do everything you’d normally do in a JRPG, but you only have 30 seconds in which to do it.

Let me just be clear: the premise is still awesome. They get to make fun of and play off of genre tropes, all the while making a game that actually doesn’t play much like a JRPG at all, but is instead this weird, timed puzzle game. You have to balance grinding for experience, buying items and completing quests with finishing the overall quest of the map before your time is up. You also have to balance when you can afford to pay the Time Goddess to give you back your 30 seconds and plan your routes through the map accordingly.
There’s a ton of thought put into the game, and a ton of love, and it really shows. There are usually at least two or three ways to solve the major problem on each map, and many of them cause the story to branch off in a completely different direction, leading to completely different levels. Each level has special titles you can earn by performing crazy stunts in the levels themselves, and even wanting to replay each level to get enough money to collect all the equipment in each stage really gives you multiple ways to play every single level. I’m not a completionist, but I was enjoying the game so much that I got every ending, every branching story path, every piece of equipment, and every party member, and I wasn’t bored of the game replaying those stages again and again. There’s just plenty of variety in what you can do to tackle them, and the game normally rewards you for trying to complete a mission a different way. The game is also great about letting you know what you could have done, with the little caravan at the end of each level telling you about hidden items and paths you might have missed and might want to try out.

This version of the game has some problems, but the visuals aren’t one of them. People were wary about the redrawn art style, so of course, the first thing I did was turn on the original, pixel art. However, it sucked: on an HD screen, the pixels are blown up so much that you can’t tell what anything is supposed to be representing at all. The redrawn, HD graphics, however, have a ton of character and look really nice. You lose a sense of where the grid is in the game with them, but that’s just about the only problem. They are way better.
The real problem is that this version strips out all the minigames from the original and replaces them with lackluster versions of the normal gameplay. In the original, you eventually unlocked stories about other characters. One was kind of tower defense, where you summoned monsters. One was a shooter, and so on. They all still had the whole 30 second thing, but they were some variety. In SMNC, this is just replaced with normal game maps that have the same plot as the levels in the original PSP game. The main mechanics are strong enough to carry the game. I love those. But having different sorts of gameplay would have made these characters seem different, made the Hero of Time seem more special with his speediness, and generally would have worked well. Especially when they went out of their way to make sure the original graphics were in this version, it just seems stupid that they did away with that.

Still, it wasn’t about to keep me from enjoying it. The game really hooked me, and I’m glad I randomly bought it in a moment of weakness. I really did just about everything you could in the game, and had fun the whole time. (I didn’t beat Hero 3, because fuck, that shit is CRAZY and I don’t have enough patience to practice that to get it right, even with a guide.) If you missed this originally and the second time, think about going back and grabbing this. It’s a damn fun and creative little game.