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Class of Heroes 1: Review of this Frustrating but Addictive Dungeon Crawler - A Black Falcon - 7th January 2015
Class of Heroes 1: Review of this Frustrating but Addictive Dungeon Crawler - A Black Falcon - 7th January 2015
Here are a couple of corrections from mistakes I made in this. Maybe I shouldn't have written and posted this so early in the morning... :p Also, some more comparisons between this game and the sequel (Class of Heroes 2 for PSP), particularly in map and level design.
Okay, so there are three more kinds of dangerous map spaces in this game than the ones I mentioned. In addition to the no-magic, deep water, and 'elevator floor' (auto-move) tiles, there are also trap tiles, warp tiles, and darkness tiles. Yeah, I should have remembered that, but I did later and am writing up this addition now. (Shallow water is basically just a graphical effect and has no effect on your party, so I'm not really going to count that as a different tile; they are just warnings that deep water is nearby, but it's easy enough to tell the difference.) Oh, for completion's sake, in addition to Chest spaces, which have you fight an enemy and then get past the chest lock in order to get some items, there are also joke-chest spaces. These only appear on a few rare maps, which have quite a few of these weird things. Normal chest spaces have tough monsters, but these either have no monster or a very weak one. That one map that's absolutely covered with super-weak-monster spaces is a pain to get across, even though it's mostly without walls... but the joke coffins in a few other maps are kind of amusing; no enemies there, just some silly text. I wish the game had more text explanations of things as you explored the dungeon, that and puzzles in the dungeons are things that modern Japanese dungeon crawlers seem to usually sadly lack in compared to the classic Western ones they otherwise emulate!
Now though, on to the tiles which actually are a threat. Most importantly, Electric Trap tiles do damage to your party when you touch them. Yeah, should have remembered that. Getting over trap tiles is easy: just like deep water, a Levitate spell will protect you from damage. The only times they are actually a problem is when no-magic and trap tiles appear near eachother; otherwise, just casting levitate makes them irrelevant, which is probably why I forgot them.
Warp tiles warp you to some specific tile in the current map. You'd think that this means that the game would then actually have those teleporter mazes I said it doesn't have, yes? Well... no, not really. The closest that CoH1 ever gets to warp mazes is when you've got a long corridor you've got to get through that is full of pillars and warps, and sometimes also no-magic or darkness tiles. These are really easy to navigate though, because the only maze is 'walk forward, hit warp which sends you back, check map and go a different way next time', because the warps here just send you to the start of the passage, nothing more. There are maybe a few maps at most that do anything more interesting than that with teleporters; they are pretty seriously under-utilized in this game. CoH's maps aren't nearly as challenging to navigate, from a level-design standpoint, as the mazes are in some other first-person dungeon-crawling RPGs. They ARE fun to explore despite this, though. I like what variety the level designs have, and the mirrored-maps style isn't as bad as it may sound. Still, if you want traditional first-person-RPG teleporter mazes, you'll need to play Class of Heroes 2, which has plenty of them. Unfortunately it doesn't have a good map system, so there's no way to tell where teleporters GO. This makes navigation confusing! CoH1 is like this as well, but it doesn't matter because of how few teleporters there are in the first game; I never had any issues remembering where they'd go, once I ran into them once. In a game like CoH2, which has a lot more of them, Etrian Odyssey-style markers to show where teleporters go REALLY was needed. I'm already almost getting lost in the game, and I'm not too far into it. This won't happen in the first game because of simpler layouts.
Darkness tiles are, well, dark. You can't see anything in these, even with a magical light spell or torch to minimally extend your vision. Fortunately your map still works in darkness tiles, though, so they aren't too hard to navigate most of the time, you just need to consult the map for where to turn. One of the trickiest maps in this mostly easy-to-navigate game was this one Labyrinth which is it's a giant maze of no-magic darkness tiles, loaded with moving-floor tiles. That one took a while to get through, particularly before the map was working there! But most of the maps aren't nearly as tricky. There's plenty of challenge to be found in CoH, of course, thanks to the massive grind mountain in the postgame, but it comes more from enemies than puzzles in the dungeons. CoH2 definitely ups dungeon complexity, but it does come at the cost of scale -- since in the sequel most dungeons have full empty spaces in between paths, there's probably less than half the number of tiles per map in CoH2 than there are in the first game. In the first game, most floors use every tile; few have any blank tiles, and the ones that do rarely have too many. So sure, maps aren't mirrored anymore in the sequel, but there probably often aren't any more tiles per map as half of a CoH1 map... but at least what's there is a bit more complex to navigate. CoH2 areas also are more complex in design -- they aren't linear anymore, but the mapping system hasn't been improved to accommodate for it and again the maps are presented in a liner left-to-right order that does not reflect their actual layout. So, you'll just have to remember which map connects to which. It quickly gets quite confusing, unless you draw something out on paper showing how the maps in each area interconnect. Does the PS3 version of CoH2 improve on this, at least? I hope it does!
Next, in a minor point, one weird change between CoH1 and CoH2 is the buttons. For some reason in CoH1 X opens the Change Party/Interact/etc. menu, while in the sequel it's O that opens that menu. Confusing. In both games X selects items in menus as in the standard Western style, so I don't know why they reversed the button in the sequel; it's not like X is doing anything in that game, when you press it while exploring.
Also, I mentioned the few songs, but not how repetitive they get. That one menu-interface song gets very old after a while, and you'll be listening to it a lot...
Last, while there are a lot of little things I like better in CoH1 than CoH2 -- I like the magic system more, I like that there are no race restrictions on the classes, I like that every tile of the maps is usually used, I like that each character has an individual inventory, etc -- I can't deny that the second game is, overall, better. CoH2 has better graphics, more variety, more complex maze layouts, some interesting new clases, etc. But I do like the first game quite a bit too, despite having so many flaws.
Class of Heroes 1: Review of this Frustrating but Addictive Dungeon Crawler - A Black Falcon - 7th January 2015
Alright, I updated the main review to include the new stuff from the second post. The Gameplay sections are much better now.
Class of Heroes 1: Review of this Frustrating but Addictive Dungeon Crawler - A Black Falcon - 30th January 2015
Class of Heroes 1: Review of this Frustrating but Addictive Dungeon Crawler - Dark Jaguar - 31st January 2015
You need to start putting these in the game review forum. Trust me, we'll see them.