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30-Second Review: Half-Minute Hero

Faithfully submitted by Gamegnathus at 9:59 pm

HALF-MINUTE HERO is a PSP game from Marvelous Entertainment that boils jRPG tropes down into easily digestible chunks. Looting and level grinding are still here, they just take seconds instead of hours. It's based on the freeware game 30 Second Hero, and playing that gives you a good idea of what to expect from the game's title mode. When it sticks to the formula of short, self-contained RPGs, it works beautifully.

Unfortunately, the game deviates often, breaking up play into four separate modes. It tries to simplify the RTS, shoot-'em-up and escort styles the same way it does with the RPG, but with varying degrees of success.

Each mode has a goal that must be completed in 30 seconds. The hero has to defeat a dark lord. The knight has to make sure nothing distracts the sage while he casts a spell. The evil lord and the princess both have curfews for some silly reason. Each mode ranks you by how fast you're able to complete the level. If your overall rank is high enough for the mode, you unlock a harder enemy in a later mode, sort of like the Weapons in the Final Fantasy series.

Hero 30 is the most fleshed out of the four modes. In Hero 30 mode, the big bad guy, Noire, knows a powerful spell. It takes 30 seconds to cast, it destroys the world, and he's teaching it to various Dark Lords. The time goddess makes a pact with Hero: She'll help him stop the Dark Lords and go after Noire by altering time, so long as he pays for the extra time. She also makes it so Hero levels up faster, though with a side effect that starts him over every morning at level one.

Levels are treated as a series of sequels from the same console generation; the credits even roll after you defeat each dark lord. You start every game at level one with 30 seconds to save the world. The overworld is straight out of games like the first DRAGON QUEST and FINAL FANTASY. Random encounters begin and end in the blink of an eye. Battles takes place on a horizontal plane, combatants bouncing off of each other WARSONG style. You interact with NPCs to learn about the land, and when you're powerful enough, you take on the dark lord.

Each game has sidequests that give you a little more to do. Sometimes there's a reward, sometimes they add to the story, and sometimes they break your heart. The next paragraph contains a link that explains why a fun little retro throwback of a game made me feel like a terrible person.

Don't click this link unless you don't plan on playing Half-Minute Hero. I do not want to ruin anything for you.

The sidequests turn a game that could get mindless and repetitive into a series of interesting challenges. You know the titles of the sidequests going into each game, and those titles give you a hint as to what you need to do. The Evil Lord 30, Princess 30 and Knight 30 modes lack the side quests and get boring pretty quickly.

Hero 30 also has branching paths. At one point, I was given the option of tackling a particularly powerful evil lord on my own or trading my soul for a demon's powers. I pawned my soul and crushed the next four stages with my awesome power, then had to pay the time goddess a large sum of money to turn back time so my soul would be safe. If I hadn't bargained with the demon, I would have gone down a completely different path. You have to play through only 30 games to reach the end of the story, but you can go back and take a different path at any point.

Evil Lord 30 is the story of one of the Dark Lords that Hero defeated, but takes place 100 years further down the time line. This mode is a simplified RTS. The lord spends mana to summon three kinds of monsters: Shooters, brutes and nimbles. The bad guys come in the same varieties, and you play a bit of rock, paper, scissors with them. Brutes are strong against nimbles, which are strong against shooters, which are strong against brutes. But once you get the hang of that, the mode offers few challenges and there's little reason to replay levels except to earn a higher rank.

Princess 30 offers even less. It's a shooter — a genre that doesn't leave much room to simplify — in which every level is pretty much the same. The princess' knights carry her around while she wields a personality-changing crossbow and shoots things in the face. Both this and Evil Lord mode have some pretty amusing dialogue, but neither would be worth playing on their own.

After you complete the first three modes, you unlock Knight 30. The last of the 30 modes is a series of escort missions. You're no longer fighting against the clock, you just have to outlast it. The knight has to keep distractions away from the sage for 30 seconds so he can cast his spell. You start each stage unarmed, but you can pick up rocks, swords and the sage to throw, swing and carry to safety. Although the mode doesn't offer any more variety than Evil Lord 30 or Princess 30, it feels more challenging because Knight is pretty weak. Weapons break after a few swings and there usually are a lot of bad guys. Of course, it only feels challenging; I usually got the highest rank on the first try.

After you finish Knight 30, you unlock Hero 300, where Knight and Sage free Hero to save the world from Noire, who managed to steal the time goddess' power. Hero recruits Sage, Knight, Evil Lord and Princess, moving through four time periods over the course of 300 seconds. This mode is worth finishing Evil Lord 30 and Princess 30 for. It's basically a longer Hero 30 game, and it wraps the various modes together pretty well.

Evil Lord 30 and Princess 30 aren't much fun, but they're pretty easy to speed through if you don't care about getting good ranks. You'll spend most of your time with Hero 30, and it's distilled to perfection.