4cr Plays – 3D Dot Game Heroes

3D Dot Game Heroes is a difficult game to sell. It’s not that its gameplay is particularly confusing. No, 3D Dot Game Heroes is a deceptive game. The visuals paint it as a complete and utter clone of the Zelda series. From the lush green vistas to the use of floating, crimson apples as a form of health, Heroes looks like a literal 3D translation of the very first NES Zelda game. Thus, with a single glance, many have dismissed this game as an even more brazen rip-off than 2009′s infamous Darksiders.

It’s a shame, too. While the Zelda comparison is absolutely correct, it is not the whole story. 3D Dot Game Heroes is no rip-off of Zelda, built by a lazy team of developers to cash in on the blood, sweat, and tears of Nintendo’s developers. No, it is a homage, a celebration of the “golden age” of gaming. Despite the gameplay comparisons to Zelda, 3D Dot Game Heroes is truthfully closer to Retro Game Challenge. It would be better to think of it as the second (well, third if you count the Japan-only Retro Game Challenge 2) entry in some entirely new franchise – just as there are movies that celebrate the history and art-form of the cinema and just as a DJ might climb onto a stage and remix the musicians of her childhood, games have begun to emerge that celebrate the history of the video game.

This is why 3D Dot Game Heroes is so deceptive – it is something that must actually be examined and seen. Look at a few screens from the overworld, and it is nothing more than a Zelda clone; listen to the music and hear a mix of overtures that are different, yet entirely similar, to those of the very firstDragon Quests and Final Fantasys. No, it only begins to make sense once you combine all of these elements. From all of the previews and glimpses that Atlus gave of the game I had an inkling of what to expect, but it was only when the King of Dotnia handed me a sword and told me “It is dangerous to go alone. Take this.” that I truly got it. 3D Dot Game Heroes is a game about games – a game about nostalgia for games – and it takes this role seriously.

Every facet of 3D Dot Game Heroes is dedicated to such nostalgia, and you have to both admire and be a little scared by the obsession that has gone into the development process. This much is obvious from the beginning – the King of Dotnia bemoans the lack of interest in 2D gaming and, by edict, forces the world to transform into the third dimension. Of course, a malevolent force is unleashed in the process and your character, the descendent of the legendary hero (stop me if you’ve heard this before), must find your ancestor’s sword and put a stop to the evil that plagues the land.

The dialogue, which in typical Atlus-style has been impressively localized, is quite funny and oozes with references to (and quotes from) 8-bit games. Many of the characters that pop up along the journey will seem just slightly familiar, even though few of them literally come from other titles. One of the touches that particularly blew me away was the collection of loading screens. Each one of these screens – there are over a hundred of them – is a recreation of the cover art of a classic game, redone in the 3D Dot Game Heroes style. You can install the game on your PS3 harddrive, but I never actually did so, just so that I could keep seeing those loading screens. Beyond that, there are an infinite number of tiny touches. Remember the room full of developers in Chrono Trigger? Keep your eyes open in 3DDGH for a cave full of guys from the development team (actually, an important subquest requires you to check in here, so you likely won’t miss it).

When the nostalgia really begins to set in, you’ll want to talk to every NPC and poke into every corner of the map. Fortunately, 3D Dot Game Heroes is a game that will frequently reward such exploration. Many characters will offer amusing little narrative events – refuse a guard’s request for help and the world will nearly come to an end, thanks to your defiance of typical “game hero” expectations. Others will give you side-quests and will reward you with new weapons and apple-pieces (you know the drill – collect four to permanently increase your health). Many of the inns throughout the overworld have NPCs that will let you play minigames, which offer an additional way to collect more health or other rewards. The minigames, based on tower defense, racing, and Breakout (each with three different levels), are actually a ton of fun. I must have spent at least five hours playing the tower defense levels instead of actually advancing the main game.

The developers don’t want to have all of the fun themselves, so you’ll get a chance to express yourself a bit too. This is where the character editor comes in. You can build whatever pixelated avatar you want within the confines of the cube they give you. Want to play as a certain green-tunic’ed hero? Go for it. Simon Belmont? Mega Man? Have fun. You can even play as a single block or a giant smile. Feeling uncreative? The game comes preloaded with about a hundred pre-made characters, some of which are pretty clever (I’m a fan of the car). You can also 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. The premade ninja character appears as a small pile of dirt in the walking animations, but pops up in the attack stance. Me? I wanted to dive into the game, so I took the premade gorilla, added a red tie, and called it “D. Kong.” A tad bit lazy but it leads to some hilarious interpretations of the story. I mean, how could a gorilla possibly descend from the clearly-human legendary hero? I don’t want to make any accusations, but…

What really brings the entire thing together is the presentation – the art and the music. The music, in particular, is something that I would like to devote some time to. 3D Dot Game Heroes has an incredible soundtrack. The composers have taken all of these bits and pieces of Famicom soundtracks and combined them, then they pumped them through an orchestra. The end result is bombastic and sounds glorious pumping out of a decent surround-sound system. Frankly, the soundtrack does more than any single other element to pull me into the nostalgia-fest and make me feel like a seven-year-old again.

The graphics, of course, are probably the single most distinctive element of the game for most of the potential audience. 3D Dot Game Heroes’ voxel-based approach is inspired; it is the most brilliant way to translate 8-bit pixels into the modern day. The amusing paradox at play here is that they have essentially taken a bunch of 3D pixels and smothered them in the most modern of graphical filters. You wouldn’t necessarily expect it – but 3D Dot Game Heroes works some magic with dynamic lighting, saturation filters, and motion blur (admittedly, they do a bit too much with the motion blurring). This game, a game based entirely on nostalgia for games that don’t necessarily look amazing, is one of the more visually-impressive Japanese titles that I’ve seen in a while.

If you think I sound a tad enamored with 3D Dot Game Heroes, you would be mostly right. I am completely bowled over by the presentation. The developers have thrown a nostalgia party and I showed up thirty minutes early. Observant readers will note that I haven’t talked about the actual gameplay yet, and that is the one aspect of this game that keeps me from unreservedly recommending it. Don’t get me wrong, the gameplay is good; at first glance, Silicon Studio has done an impeccable job of creating a Zelda game. Every aspect has been brought over – you move with the d-pad, strike with one button, use a secondary item with another, and lift your shield with one last button. You dash through seven dungeons, frantically grappling with monsters, and collecting new items and powers. You’ll push blocks, push switches, and collect keys (including a boss key), all with the goal of taking down a boss and collecting a sacred orb from a mystical sage. Heck, you even have a fairy that dispenses the occasional piece of advice.

However, the further you get in the game the more cracks that begin to appear in this doppelgänger. The developers have all of the pieces in place and they’ve created a fun game, but they’ve failed to recreate the same soul that goes into a Zelda game – that same level of polish and meticulous design. 3D Dot Game Heroes is an incredibly uneven game- a problem that has hit every one of From Software’s releases. At times you’ll sale through dungeons while at others you’ll want to throw your controller through a window. The middle section of this game is particularly frustrating. I had no interest in playing the game for a couple of days following the disastrous desert section. Picture a massive, sprawling area full of tracks – step on the wrong track and you’ll end up way off course – followed by a brutally difficult dungeon. Some level of challenge is good! The key is to offer some sort of satisfaction for overcoming such difficulty. Mega Man 2 did this well while Castlevania 2 did not, and 3D Dot Game Heroes’ harder sections take far more cues from the latter. When 3DDGH is good, it is fantastic, but the rest of the game rapidly oscillates from too easy to too hard without much in-between.

At his recent GDC talk, Metroid: Other M producer Yoshio Sakamoto called the upcoming Wii title a “Famicom Game Plus.” While this is nothing more than a bit of clever PR-speak designed to appeal to the pleasure-center of my brain, it is also the more appropriate way to describe 3D Dot Game Heroes. Every aspect of this game has been designed to take the games of our youth, the games of the 8-bit golden age, and directly pull them into the modern day. While recent releases like Mega Man 10 have asked, “What if a retro game was made by today’s developers?” 3D Dot Game Heroes asks the equally pertinent, “What if the developers of retro games had today’s technology?” This is a game that takes the gameplay, music, and art design of the 1980s and renders them with the latest in graphical rendering and surround sound technologies. Frankly, there isn’t anything else quite like it, and the target audience is probably not all that huge (how many Halo players would even consider picking it up?), but it is still an important experiment.

Yes, 3D Dot Game Heroes isn’t the best game ever made, but it is an important game nonetheless. At a time when the so-called experts are claiming that games are pop-culture trash, a medium without any claim to the artistic merit enjoyed by literature and movies, 3D Dot Game Heroes may just be the type of thing that this medium needs. Yes, gaming still needs its Citizen Kane – something that is undisputedly moving in every regard – and I am not even remotely claiming that 3DDGH meets this criteria. No, a medium needs something else. It isn’t enough for it to be culturally accepted, it must be culturally acclaimed. One could argue that video games are culturally accepted, but outside of our comparatively tiny, hardcore subculture, it is hard to argue that gaming is celebrated. Just as there are movies about the art of the movie, and paintings that make critical points about the medium of painting, we need games that use the form of the game to both celebrate and make relevant points about the gaming. When a video game can be used to make a striking point about video games, no number of Roger Eberts will be able to dispute the maturity of the medium. We’re not quite there yet, and we likely won’t be there for a few more years, but attempts like 3D Dot Game Heroes and Retro Game Challenge are the crucially-important first steps in that direction.

Whether you buy that argument or not, 3D Dot Game Heroes is a game that must be tried by any gamer that grew up in the 80s and 90s, any gamer that spent hours mapping out the depths of Hyrule or memorizing the first few Final Fantasy’s, any gamer that can still hum the soundtrack to Castlevania. It is a celebration of our childhoods, and as such, it does an incredible job of bringing back all of those memories. It’s a funny, charming, and beautiful title. The gameplay is a bit uneven and that may be enough to make the purchase questionable for someone just looking for a Zelda-like game. However, for those gamers that still dig out their NES on weekends, you need to give this a go. The sheer style and presentation will grip you completely until you emerge, bleary-eyed, from your gaming coma at three in the morning – just like when you were trying to take down the last of the robot masters with your best friend in the third grade. Some people would pay any price to experience that kind of feeling again.

Official Site