Category: Nintendo News

Fantasy Hero ~unsigned legacy~ arrives on Nintendo Switch four years after its original release on PlayStation Vita, where it received a rather middling reception at best. Some praised its varied stats, skills and upgrade customisation, while others criticised it for a bland plot and uninspired combat mechanics. So in 2018, how does this JRPG fare on Nintendo’s hybrid?

You take up the role as one of four different characters. Acress is your typical JRPG hero whom the game is clearly designed around, but then you also have Ashta (a mechanic who commands a robot in battle), Mask (who uses his size and weight to eliminate enemies with melee attacks), and Haul (who works from afar with pistols). But no matter who you pick, the foursome band together to tell the same story. Humanity is close to extinction after an army of monsters called Decoders took over and slaughtered the human race, bringing it to its knees upon our introduction. But after a new material named Hero Artes is discovered, the tide of battle may be about to change.

This is a plot deeply rooted in familiar tropes. The world is in ruin and you and your friends are the only ones who can put an end to the suffering thanks to a game-changing revelation. It’s a story you’ve most likely heard a number of times already in videogames, and unfortunately the game sticks to this long beaten path. FHUL does very little to mix things up, as its narrative mostly becomes a vehicle to the next mission.

Speaking of which, mission structure is defined by three different outgoings. Main missions move the story along and naturally come with the biggest set-pieces; side missions generally have you killing certain enemies, collecting items or participating in everyone’s favourite, escort quests; and EX missions are high level undertakings that reward you with the best equipment and materials in the game.

Every one of these missions is accepted from the Community Billboard, which is located in the centre of the main hub area. It’s here where you’ll engage in some bartering with the shopkeeper in order to purchase items, enhance and upgrade your weapons with the blacksmith, and take a rest in your bed back home which allows you to allocate skill points and improve your stats. The skill tree itself is fairly basic, but you feel the weight of its rewards during battle. Separated into three branches, you can choose to focus your points on the weapon your chosen character wields, their magical abilities, or bodily enhancements that improve HP and defences.

As well as that, there’s the core stats that make up your character. HP, stamina, physical defence, attack power, luck, and others can all be bolstered through stat points gained upon every mission success. These, in combination with skill allocation, give you the biggest opportunity to streamline the experience to your preferred playstyle. A number of abilities can be allocated to the D-pad to be used to take the advantage, for example Haul’s varied ammo types could poison enemies or even set them on fire, while Acress’ talent lies in transforming himself into an armoured knight that deals extra damage. All of these skills are fun to experiment with, but unfortunately they’re only having an effect on a combat system that is far simpler than itself.

If you were to liken FHUL’s combat to anything else, it would have to be a scaled-down version of a Musou game. A light and heavy attack are mapped to the face buttons and these two can be used in unison to perform some flashier moves, but besides that the general flow of a battle is based around spamming those buttons. This is fine in the early sections of the game, but as things progress, the difficulty begins to ramp up at an alarming rate which results in some battles feeling a little too unfair. 

A variety of attacking options could have circumvented this, but with just a light and heavy attack at your fingertips and a few abilities on top, the game gets too frustrating far too quickly. This is then worsened even further by the complete lack of a checkpoint system during missions, meaning that dying at the final hurdle results in you having to play the entire level over again. It’s cheap, disheartening, and cruel.

As previously mentioned, this is a port of a PlayStation Vita title, and it most definitely shows. Even in docked mode, the overall presentation looks incredibly dated, with textures being the worst offender. They look pixelated and blocky, while the characters themselves don’t fare much better. Everyone has a faint black border around their model which does help them to stand out more, but other than to give them a bit of a presence, we don’t quite understand why it’s there at all.

Problems also arise in the translation for the game, with English taking the centre stage in text boxes while conversations are fully voiced in Japanese. The English translation is rife with spelling mistakes and grammatical issues, and while this is something we can look past for the most part, others may understandably take more of an issue with it.

Conclusion

The nature of Fantasy Hero ~unsigned legacy~’s mission based structure lends itself well to the pick up and play style of Nintendo Switch, but there’s nowhere near enough compelling content here to make it worth your time. A dull plot filled to the brim with typical JRPG tropes fails to give you much of an incentive to progress, while the combat itself is far too basic and at times punishingly difficult. This may have been a passable experience upon its original release, but in 2018, this port has little to offer.

The shmup has been a gaming staple for decades, and it has found something of a welcome new home on Nintendo Switch with many a retro port and and a fair few modern throwbacks nestling in the warmth of its hybrid bosom. Revived indie twin-stick affair Black Hole falls comfortably into the latter, but does its bullet hell in space gimmick offer anything new in a genre that’s long been stuck inside its own vacuum?

The short answer is no, but it’s still an enjoyable attempt to capture the ‘pick up and play’ ethos that made the shoot ’em up such a classic to begin with. Once designed for defunct platform Ouya and the Android-based ForgeTV, this modern shooter feels instantly at home on Switch. The use of HD Rumble makes every collision with an asteroid or an enemy projectile that bit more tactile, and it runs buttery smooth in both handheld and tabletop modes, with barely any drop in frames.

There’s also support for touchscreen controls, but they’re unresponsive at best and are ultimately deemed pointless when you’ve got two perfectly good (and, more importantly, responsive) analog sticks right next to them. The same applies to the game’s use of motion-based controls – you’ve got to applaud the developer for attempting to include so many control schemes in one package, but none them feel responsive enough to justify their existence. 

With a more traditional set of sticks, Black Hole’s big twist on the classic shmup setup is the presence of the titular gravitational phenomenon, which adds a rotational force that constantly drags you and other items on screen around if left unattended. It’s a neat little concept, one that requires you to evade asteroids and collect glowing space crystals while fighting an ever-present resistance. Those little pickups – handily broken up into different colours – each come with a different reward. Green ones replenish your health wheel, blue ones offer a short window of shield, white ones increase your overall score and yellow ones can be spent on upgrades for your ship between levels.

It’s a rewarding combination of long-term and short-term payoff as you try to rack up that final score and rise up the leaderboard while attempting to grab as many yellow ones to increase your spending choices. Being able to upgrade everything from the spread of your fire, to armour, speed and secondary weapons adds a strong incentive to chase down this collectible currency, while risking losing it all within the chaos of asteroids that blow apart into debris and the myriad enemies that attack in waves.

The upgrade system does mean the three ships you can choose from all feel quite samey during the first two or three levels, but thankfully that early slog soon falls away once you invest in the right places. There is a caveat though – these upgrades only last as long as your set of lives, so should you burn through them all every upgrade will be lost. It might seem harsh, but levels can be blasted through so quickly that the feedback loop of shooting through levels to upgrade never feels overtly unfair if you have to start over.

The inclusion of a speedrun mode will appeal to those who can’t play any game without a clock running somewhere, while the addition of a handy Colourblind mode is a welcoming touch. Much like Portal-esque puzzle shooter ChromaGun, it’s comforting to see developers making concessions for players who wouldn’t normally be able to distinguish between on-screen colours. The use of letters instead of colours can sometimes be a little difficult to make out in handheld mode, but it’s an empowering feature nonetheless.

Considering the fixed-screen nature of Black Hole, the lack of any co-op support is a glaring omission. With the valuable use of stardust crystals and the overall high score chasing nature of the game, it seems bizarre not to include some sort of co-op or competitive mode where two or more players enter the fray. Each level would be no less chaotic in action, so it’s genuinely baffling to limit its own remit to single-player only. With 40 levels to play through, there’s plenty for that one player to enjoy, but this shmup could have added another dimensional string to its bow with support for multiplayer.

Conclusion

Black Hole’s intense shmup action feels far more suited to Nintendo Switch than its previous platforms, and the gravitational mechanic makes for a cool twist on a well-worn formula. It’s a solid little shooter for one player to blast through with twin-sticks at the ready, it’s just a shame there’s no support for local couchplay to go along with its litany of customisable options.