Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:09 pm
The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion
This game is awesome I tell you. The way you handle the character is just unbeliveable! First off, this game is called The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion,a famous/popular Japinese game, a Role-Playing Game (RPG). The main story is that you the main character named Avin going on an adventure to rescue his lost sister, Eimelle. With awesome game graphics and intense gameplay, it got a great rating of 7.2! Very nice!
The graphics of this game takes on to a whole new level. The characters and the housing, field, houses and everything just goes well. Very good with this part. The battling technique is great. It's challenging but what can you say, this game is just great. The monsters were really well done, although when playing in a battle, you can sort of see the little glitch, but sometimes not noticable. In between fights, and even in between story sequences, it can be easy to get lost. Like most RPGs, Legend of Heroes is mostly a very linear game, in which you'll need to travel from one place to another in order to trigger the next sequence of story events. While you find a map of the world soon enough, it's not so specific that it tells you where you need to go next, and the story sequences don't often do a great job of it, either. As a result, there are too many times in this game when you'll find yourself wandering around, trying to remember or just figure out what you were supposed to be doing. This can be particularly problematic if you save your progress (you can save anywhere) and come back to the game some hours later. So those 50-plus hours of gameplay do include a lot of time spent figuring out where to go next. Granted, part of the point of role-playing games is to let you explore, but Legend of Heroes definitely could have benefited from some kind of journal system to help keep the pacing of the story from getting derailed. With that, this games graphics rating got hit with another 7.
The Legend of Heroes is a pleasant-looking game, but that's thanks mostly to the anime artwork that appears during dialogue. You'll see the characters make different expressions depending on their moods, but you'll still wish there were more of these drawings, because they're the best aspect of the presentation. The anime portraits are different from the squat little characters you'll see running around in the field, who can be rather difficult to tell apart. These 2D characters don't look like much, and the 3D environments they'll travel around in aren't that remarkable, either, though they're certainly decent. Combat isn't all that flashy, save for some requisite screen-filling spell effects that are nothing if not colorful. The game's audio is pretty sparse. Some of the menu sounds border on being grating, the music is mostly forgettable, and some of the tracks loop too frequently. This is a game you could safely play with the volume turned down. 6 for the soundings, not good at all!
The best thing about The Legend of Heroes has going for it is sheer size, so if you're seriously into Japanese RPGs, you'll find that you can really sink your teeth into this one, reading dialogue and leveling up to your heart's content. The game doesn't take any serious risks with its gameplay or format, and its storyline, filled with the botched translations that older Japanese RPGs all used to have, feels like a throwback that might make you get all nostalgic. So if you're an RPG fan and you want a conventional RPG to have with you on the go, The Legend of Heroes is such a great game, and it's a perfect one for you!
Overall Rating: 7.5
