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Review: Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax

A quirky take on traditional, lengthy 8-bit JRPGs, Half-Minute Hero was a relative success when it launched on PSP last year. Its premise was relatively simple: evil lords have found the power to destroy the world in 30 seconds, and you, generic hero, must save the day – or rather, the half-minute. Now retooled in HD for Xbox Live Arcade, the fate of the world is now on your big TV – but is the game worth the 800MSP? Read on to find out.

The hot: Where traditional 8-bit JRPGs end up being slow and boring, developer Marvelous Entertainment came up with a really interesting concept. In the main Hero 30 mode, you have thirty seconds in which to level up (by battling monsters automatically), accomplish tasks and fight the evil lord at the end of every level. Luckily, if you’re running out of time, you can pray to the Time Goddess and whack the timer back up to 30 seconds – you quite literally buy yourself more time. The speedy nature of the game will be the one thing that keeps gamers engaged over 30 levels, some of which can be as devilishly hard as the classic games they’re based on.

The cold: This is perhaps the most repetitive game I’ve ever played. The first ten levels play out in exactly the same way, with roughly the same monsters, essentially the same boss and exactly the same music. Don’t get me wrong, I end up listening to the same song on infinite loop sometimes, but when I have to mute my TV and play Half-Minute Hero to a Spotify playlist, there’s something wrong.

The game recommends you use the D-Pad for movement, which is a massive insult to the vast majority of Xbox 360 gamers, and controlling the game via the left analog stick would be a lot more enjoyable if the game didn’t interpret moving the stick left as moving it upward.

In the PSP version of this game, there were a diverse choice of game modes – there was a real-time strategy mode, a shoot-’em-up and even an action game, as well as Hero 300 and Hero 3 (variations on the standard Hero 30 mode). What do XBLA buyers get? Nothing. The likes of Evil Lord 30, Princess 30 and Knight 30 have been reworked, bizarrely, to be slight variations on Hero 30 that last for one paltry level. This complete lack of variation reeks of laziness on the part of the developer.

Finally, the game allows you to switch between two polar opposite graphical styles – 8-bit, otherwise known as “the only option in the PSP game”, and Neo-Comic, otherwise known as “looking a hell of a lot like anime”. Whilst you can switch between the two, do understand that both look like they’re trying too hard to be Zelda games – the 8-bit version copies the NES-era Zelda sprites reasonably well, and Neo-Comic’s style is so similar to the likes of Zelda: Wind Waker that you might as well change Hero’s name to Link.

Wrap-up: Half-Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax showed so much promise, and I really wanted to like it, but Marvelous let itself down with loose controls, repetitive gameplay and fewer modes than its portable cousin. There’s a crapton of great games on the XBLA, but unfortunately, this isn’t one of them.


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