Thursday evening, I was invited to attend a demo sampling of XSEED Games’ upcoming lineup in New York City. One of the titles on site that had generated a lot of genuine interest, was a seemingly innocent PSP title called Half-Minute Hero. This original and quirky title is just begging for the ADD-riddled gamer to find his or her way towards the addiction that they will soon face upon playing. HMH is a full RPG experience — in 30 seconds! It sounds silly to talk about it and say, Hey guys, you should go drop a 40 spot (Or however much it ends up retailing for) on this new hit PSP title, it’ll last you a whole 30 seconds! But it’s more than that, it actually boasts a surprising 15+ hours of gameplay.

Half-Minute Hero begins quick and gets right to the point, much like you’d expect from a game with a title like itself. Stages are cleared in all of 30 seconds. The demo level I was able to get my hands on warned me of the evil lord’s plan to unleash impending doom upon the world. I had to reach a level that would give me the grits to give him a whooping. In this case, level 5 seemed to do fine to keep the evil at bay for now. So how do we reach this highly acclaimed level of great skill?

The developers, Marvelous Entertainment and Opus Studio, must have been RPG fans who sat around and meditated, then sat around in smoke-filled rooms discussing what about RPGs are fun, and what the general audience views as a hindering task. The first thing that comes to mind? Grinding. Oh grinding, you can be fun with a workable battle system, but only so for long. We obtain some new weapons, slice and dice, and move on, but once you’ve leveled up rather high, the process elongates itself to be noted as an exhaustingly daunting deed. Well, Half-Minute Hero is here to pacify your needs of RPG questing and a particularly unprecedented style of gameplay.

So let’s talk grinding. You control the hero with the D-pad and roam around the overworld as you await a random encounter. Random encounter? Oh no, not a million random encounters! No no, my friends, this isn’t Black Sigil, this is more like a godsend to RPG gamers. After each battle you will be thirst for more and more battles, as many battles as you can squeeze into your precious little 30 seconds! Battles are set to autoplay as you watch your hero deal an unruly barrage of attacks toward his enemies, as the screen changes over to a 2D battle plane. Keep your eye on the HP gauge of your hero and don’t be afraid to run away. You have the option to let the battle play out in all of, oh, say two seconds, or abandon ship by holding the L+R buttons to flee. When your HP runs too low, bolt for the nearest town where time freezes and brings up a small area onscreen in which you’ll see a row of people that may be able to aid in your quest. A shopkeeper who sells healing items in the form of delectable treats that will automatically heal you upon purchasing. Another shopkeeper has on sale one or two higher-attack powered weapons and last but not least there is the Time Goddess who offers you more time on your quest — for a price. If you can afford it and do not expect to be able to complete the stage in the allotted time, I suggest dishing out because otherwise you must begin the stage over, losing any levels you gained along the way.

The model I played was fully in English despite the images presented here, no English assets have been provided for articles yet, though only a demo and not everything was available for play. I was told by one of the Xseed representatives that a demo may be up on PSN to download onto your PSP before the game hits retail stores. In the final mode, there will be so much more available with four different gameplay modes and different characters to play as with their own storylines. You’ll have your gunner, your hero, your mage and your beautiful princess in which different types of gameplay will be presented for each. Multiplayer play is also promised with up to four friends of rampantly snappy fun.

Convoluted menus are out, managing items are once upon a time. Half-Minute Hero is full of nothing but 8-bit charm, rapid-fire adrenaline-pumping gameplay, and a badass metal track to keep the juices flowing. Expect nothing short of joy and a gratifying experience once this enters your sweaty palms around HHM’s Fall 2009 scheduled release date.

       

Tags: 30 Second Hero, Half-Minute Hero, Marvelous, Opus Studio, PSP, RPG, xseed

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Featured, PSP, Previews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.