4cr Preview – 3D Dot Game Heroes

From Software has been on a roll lately. They went for years producing obtuse mech games that fell square in the very definition of “niche,” but last year’s Demon’s Souls shot them into stardom. If you were worried that Souls was a fluke, stop. After getting a good look at an English build of the game, 3D Dot Game Heroes has shot up to the top of my list of games to play this year. From Software and the brilliant localization team at Atlus have created a game that is funny, challenging, and beautiful – a game that pays homage to the 8-bit generation without becoming a shallow copy.

Enticed yet? Scroll past the cut for the nitty-gritty.

3D Dot Game Heroes opens with your character, the decendent of the legendary hero, being woken in your home. The King of Dotnia, lamenting the dearth of interest in 2D games, has declared that the world should be henceforth rendered in 3D, but something has gone horribly wrong in the process. He asks you to retrieve the sword of your ancestor and track down the six orbs (and their accompanying sages) in order to save the kingdom.

If that sounds like a certain Nintendo series, you’re not wrong. At its core, 3D Dot Game Heroes is an homage to Zelda. You wander around an overworld with items assigned to a couple of buttons. You smack enemies with a sword, block with a shield, etc. Other items spotted include bombs, a bow for shooting arrows, and bottles that can be filled with potions. There are seven dungeons to complete on your journey to defeat the evil demon, each filled with puzzles to solve and monsters to vanquish. One of the first bosses, a fireball-spewing worm with a glowing tail, is right out of Zelda!

Now, I did say this was an homage, not a complete rip-off. The core game is definitely old-school Zelda, transmogrified into a 3D world, but the developers didn’t stop with the old-school gameplay. There’s some depth to be found – especially in things like the sword customization. If you go to a blacksmith you can enhance your weapons in various ways (like lengthening or widening it). Each weapon has special characteristics – we were shown one that can swipe through solid objects, letting you hide behind a tree to strike monsters from safety. There are a couple dozen different swords in total, and you probably won’t be able to find them all in a single playthrough. Fortunately, 3D Dot Game Heroes rewards you for playing through the game multiple times. There is a “new game +” option, so you get to keep your same character and weapons over every subsequent playthrough, and along the way, you’ll unlock new difficulty options. On the hardest difficulty (called the “from mode”), enemies will blow through your health (represented as apples, *wink-wink*) in one or two hits and you’ll have to kill more monsters on every screen.

Most of the screenshots to date have depicted the hero as a knight in blue armor, but you aren’t stuck in that form. 3D Dot Game Heroes comes with a pretty snazzy character editor. You can build whatever pixelated avatar that you want, within the confines of the cube they give you. Want to play as a certain green-tunic’ed hero? Go for it. Pac-Man? Have fun. You can even play as a single block (don’t get any ideas – no matter what size your character, enemies can strike you in the same radius). You can fully customize all six frames of animation that your avatar can perform – two for walking, standing, two more for attacking, and a victory pose. You can get pretty darn clever with this. During our demo, we were shown a car that would open its doors as it walked and pop its hood while attacking. Sharing your custom characters is easy, and if you already played the game in Japanese, you can import your creations into the American version. Don’t feel like creating your own hero? That’s fine too, the game ships with a ton of pre-made characters, including some new ones like a Santa Claus. After designing your hero, you get to choose a character class – the Legendary Hero, Royal Heir of Dotnia Kingdom, or the Wandering Scholar. The Hero is a melee-heavy, the Scholar is the mage, and the Heir falls somewhere in between.

3D Dot Game Heroes is filled with fantastic easter eggs for gamers that grew up on the NES and SNES. The dialogue, which is pretty hilarious, is peppered with references both obvious and obscure, and the game world is full of visual homages. If you look hard enough, you’ll even find a cave full of the game’s developers. Talk to these guys, and in a scene reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, they’ll tell you about the development of Heroes. The loading screens are another genuine treat. Each one (and there are over a hundred) is a parody of the art from an classic box. We got to look a a bunch of them, and just guessing what game they are from is almost as fun as playing 3D Dot Game Heroes. A few of the ones spotted lampooned Castlevania, Double Dragon, Lemmings, and Street Fighter 2. The US version of the game has an optional install, but enabling it eliminates the awesome loading screens. First time that waiting for a game to load is worth it? Perhaps. After viewing a screen for the first time, the art will be unlocked in a gallery that you can access at any time.

While there are only seven dungeons to play through, there is a ton of side content to pad out the game. NPCs dot the map with side-quests, and you can beat enemies with a book to log them in your bestiary. There are also three minigames that you can play to earn in-game rewards. Blockout is pretty obvious – a 3DDGH import of Breakout. You smack a stone with your sword to smash it into some blocks, then you move from left to right in an attempt to keep it moving. There are five stages of increasing complexity to play through. The second game, Dash Circuit, is simply a race from one end of a maze to the other. You can earn treasure by beating your previous records.

The last game, and the most complex, is called Block Defense. Basically, it’s a version of Tower Defense. You get a certain number of towers to place, and you must defeat all of the enemies before they reach the exit. Your character is also present on the stage. Enemies drop money, which you can collect to enhance your towers. You can also move in and attack yourself if an enemy gets uncomfortably close to an exit. The catch – standing still earns you experience points, so you don’t want to move too often. Different NPCs will give you different stages to play, with nine different levels in total.

For a game so rooted in the past, it is an impressive audio-visual treat. The graphics look fantastic, making excellent use of lighting, shaders, water effects, and motion blur. You can adjust the saturation level, ranging from “Call of Duty brown” to an “oh god, my eyes are burning” level reminiscent of some NES-era games. The music – and I can’t stress this enough – is probably my favorite part of the game. It’s really quite incredible. Picture a soundtrack combining many of the best 8-bit tunes, then picture it being pumped out by a jazzy orchestra. It immediately reminded me of my favorite game-related album, Mario & Zelda: Big Band Live (go hunt that down, those tunes will get stuck in your head for weeks).

I know that 3D Dot Game Heroes has caught a lot of flack on the Internet for being a “Zelda clone,” but it really is more than that. It’s a celebration of our childhood, more of a love novel than a simple love letter, and I can’t even begin to describe how much this excites me. I can’t wait to get some hand-on time with the game as we get closer to its May 11th release date (oh, and for the Europeans in our audience, the game will ship the same week for you). No word yet on bonus content (I’m hoping for a soundtrack cd), but the game’s $40 price may be enough of a bonus.

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