Heirs of the Kings is a retro-styled Japanese role-playing recreation that’s so by-the-numbers it would as nicely 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 pretty much 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, understanding little concerning the exterior world, they embark on a quest to go to the shrines of the basic kings who died making a defend to guard the world from darkish forces.
Is the defend now fading except a bunch of 4 mismatched however completely complementary characters handle to repair it? Sure, sure it’s.
You battle monsters in random encounters, enhance your weapons and armor, achieve abilities, and forged spells. And simply once you begin to surprise when the airship goes to indicate up, the airship exhibits up.
I’m not complaining; I lower my enamel on video games like this again within the Recreation Boy/PlayStation days. Even with the large graphic updates which are out there now, there’s one thing to be mentioned for pouring your creativeness into 16 bit sprites marching their manner throughout an overworld map.
And if the baseline of that have is what you’re searching for, Heirs of the Kings has it. The talent tree, based mostly 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 type or their elemental affinity.
The issue is that whereas Heirs of the Kings has the type of a retro JRPG, it lacks the guts 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 educational has an antagonistic flirtation happening.
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 massive draw of an RPG) is a muddle as nicely. Whereas your characters have elemental assaults which may have strengths and weaknesses, the enemies you’ll be combating are virtually fully 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 battle, there appears to be no thought put into the association of enemies.
The sport options an auto-fight operate you may 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 fully worn out, I used to be capable of spend particular expertise factors that I’d collected over hours of play to revive the celebration at full energy in the course 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 you can’t get out. Sadly, this recreation has the tempo, however not the guts.