chuckro | Mystic Heroes

In a time thought to be legend (unless you're Chinese, in which case it's between the fall of the Shang Dynasty and the rise of the Zhou Dynasty), the evil Emperor Kang is using the Dragon Orb to summon monsters and terrorize the people. It's up to the Mystic Heroes to stop him and restore peace.

That's pretty much all the plot, incidentally. Apparently this is the third game in the series, it's just the first to make it to the states, which explains why they never bother to introduce the characters. But there's never more than a sentence of exposition before each stage, and the dialogue is absurdly banal and characterless. By the end, I couldn't be bothered to fight the boss rush stages to get the dragon ~~ball~~ orb back and save the world.

I bought this with the hope that I would like it because it's similar to Koei’s usual beat-em-ups, the various Warriors franchises. I even got the PS2 version, because it apparently has more features than the Gamecube version. And it's similar in that you need to personally beat up an entire army each stage and there are friendly units you need to keep out of trouble, but that's most of the similarities right there. Just mashing the attack button—one of my favored strategies—is ineffective. This game is a lot more dependent on constantly emptying and refilling your magic gauge. Pretty much all of your combos use it up, you can only use a musou-type attack when your gauge is full, and your projectile attacks also use it. (Also, Circle is normal attack and Triangle and Square use magic—which feels very backwards.)

You can juggle enemies infinitely with the normal and sword attack, if you’re careful. Several of the bosses can be cheesed this way—just start hitting them, bounce them into a wall, and keep slashing until they die. But by the same token, if you get surrounded by a bunch of enemies, they'll just keep knocking you down.

The red bars over enemies don’t appear until you start hitting them, so you actually need to keep track of what color the enemy warriors are. You need to spend more time making sure you kill every mook, as many times the stages don't end until you do. Archers are just as annoying as ever (more so, even—sometimes they’re just arrowslits and you can never kill them), and cannons are their stronger cousins. But the flipside to that is that there’s limited value to grinding. Most of the power-ups are items hidden around stages, and number of kills doesn't translate into anything but a high score. You can't take a character into Free Mode and power them up if you're too weak to tackle a boss. Using your magic a lot gets you higher levels for the four types of spells (sword, jumping, projectile and aimed projectile), but that doesn't make them more effective, it just means you can equip better spell runes, if you can find them.

Each character has some customizability in that the runes control your special attacks, but there and no weapon or equipment choices otherwise.

It's a much more cartoony game that the Warriors series, and has a much more “fantastic” feel. You fight a lot more monsters, and the magic is all out in the open. Every stage has a boss, and most of them are monsters. There are some giant creatures for the boss fights (given their own stage), which are basically gimmick bosses. One of the first bosses is a Roc, and you spend most of the fight attacking its legs to build up your magic gauge, then jumping to fire at it.

I got annoyed at the poor level design—there's too much platforming given the control scheme and camera controls of the game. Mt. Zetso is a giant stage you need to circle around repeatedly to reach the top of, but you can easily get knocked back down and have to run up again. (No penalty besides your time, but annoying.) The castle stage later on has the same problem. They also throw in a number of the traps common in Samurai Warriors castle stages, but really, they're mostly either damage floors or floors that drop out and make you fall back to an earlier part of the level.

But probably the most disappointing feature of all: No two-player story mode. The only place you can play two-player is the special “multiplayer” mode, which only has a few stages and no missions or anything to make it particularly interesting.

Overall: They took out a lot of the important things I like about the Warriors games, mixed in more action-adventure genre elements that didn't really work, didn't have a plot worth caring about, and generally made a game more frustrating than fun. I wasn't a fan.