The 2011 Wishlist Marathon #3: Glory of Heracles

In 2011, I made a big wishlist of DS RPGs that I knew I would get to eventually. I just didn't think it would take me fifteen years. This one is the third on this list that I am getting through at a snail's pace.

Okay, Delita.

Glory of Heracles is an interesting turn-based RPG centered on Greek mythology, fifth in a series but the first and only entry that was ever released in English. I vividly remember seeing the boxart of the game in the Electronics department at Walmart around the time of its release in 2008 (I don't have an insane memory, I just worked there for years) and despite being curious about it, I simply didn't have the funds to buy every DS RPG. I certainly tried, though.

A tale of Greek mythology

You're led to believe that you, the protagonist, are the legendary Heracles, until you come into contact with a lot of other folks who also claim to be Heracles. The main plot of the game will center around unraveling this particular mystery as well as the backstory of the other immortal characters you recruit along the way. 

The protagonist, who I named Athan for no particular reason, but will from here on refer to simply as "the protagonist"—he's a blank slate. He's your classic JRPG silent protagonist, a trope that I have pretty mixed feelings about. I think even in some of the best games in this genre, I don't care for silent protagonists, and Heracles certainly did little to change my mind. More on that later, though, because the characterization and vehicle for the plot comes from the characters that join your party. First, there's Leucos, a woman pretending to be a man for mysterious reasons. She's also immortal, and much like the protagonist, isn't exactly sure why. Later, you'll encounter Axios, a tired womanizer trope of a character and yet another immortal. You'll recruit Heracles himself later, who is definitely the real Heracles. Your final party member is Eris, who is just... a little girl. She's immortal, too.

For the most part, these characters are simply there. Each character has maybe one defining character trait and that trait is absolutely worn thin over the game's runtime. Leucos is not doing a very good job of pretending to be a man. Axios is a creep around women and that's just hilarious. Heracles says "wahaha" a lot. A LOT. Eris is a little girl and kind of mean. It's not until much later in the game that these characters become at all interesting, but that's more an artifact of the plot, not of the likability of the characters themselves.

It's worth noting that the Heracles series was helmed by writer Kazushige Nojima starting with the second game on the Famicom. He is probably most recognizable for being one of the principle writers behind Final Fantasy VII (along with Yoshinori Kitase). For instance, he was responsible for the story surrounding Cloud's memories. Considering that Glory of Heracles features an almost entirely amnesiac cast, it's clear it's a concept he's interested in. For further proof, you need only look at the third entry in the Heracles series back on the Super Famicom, which also plays with the amnesia trope.

Maintaining a large party

Initially, I was impressed by the five-character party, a welcome aspect of the game that has unfortunately become less common over the years. I loved games like Suikoden, Final Fantasy IV, and even Etrian Odyssey for their larger parties, so it was nice to see a game that trusts the player to manage it. Unfortunately, the party size is directly at odds with the long, drawn out animations of just about every attack in the game, particularly the spells. This is exacerbated by maybe the game's most notable feature, which is the ability to enhance your spells and abilities with touch screen commands.

To be clear, I think including timed button presses or little mini-games to enhance the effect of your actions in a turn-based RPG is almost always a good idea. It even works well here in Glory of Heracles in that there's eventually a great variety of different touch screen actions you can take to make you feel involved in the combat. Broadly, this is a good thing, but it takes maybe 20-30 seconds to power up a spell and then you have to sit through another 30-second long spell animation, often multiple times per battle. If all that wasn't enough, there are also little animations that play for every passive effect that procs on each character individually. This could be something like Boon that restores a little MP, or Vigor, which does the same thing for HP. Each of these passive skills will play an animation on each character in combat, individually. When you have five party members and might be fighting up to eight enemies, you can imagine how tedious this might become. The further you get in the game and the more elaborate the spell animations (and power-ups) get, the more this problem creeps in. I found myself using Sibyl's Balms (basically Repels) to avoid encounters more and more as I approached the final dungeon simply because every random encounter took five minutes or more. When you're traversing eight floors of a massive dungeon, this is simply not palatable.

Much of the game is maintenance. You have a five-character party, all of which have weapons, sub-weapons, several pieces of armor, and different items they can equip. Each of these pieces of gear have the potential to imbue your characters with different active or passive skills, so you're constantly changing your loadout. You might think this give you a lot of strategic choice, but it's generally most effective to upgrade to whatever is strongest when you get it, meaning you might lose access to a skill you've grown to rely on along the way. I found myself wishing it worked more like Final Fantasy IX, where I'd have the opportunity to learn the skill permanently before moving on to something else. 

You can learn new spells and abilities permanently, of course, but not just through leveling up. The way you acquire these abilities is a little peculiar, actually. In most towns, there's a Sorcerist, which sells various different magic items that I mostly did not use at all. However, in the basements of these establishments is an altar to a Greek deity. You can pray at these altars to learn new skills. In fact, this is the only way to learn new skills. These altars are accompanied by a fairy who will teach you new ways to power up your spells and abilities (IE, the touch screen minigames). Weirdly, you don't even learn these abilities until you've gained one more level after using the altar. It's also quite easy to miss some of them since there's very little in the way of backtracking in the game and there are a lot of basement altars as well as standalone temples with altars. I think I only missed one of them, but I'm still annoyed by it. 

Combat strategy

For the most part, I didn't have to think too much about strategy for probably the first 85% of the game. It's that last 15% that starts to mix things up a bit.

During these later stages of the game, I started to pay more attention to aspects of the combat system that I had previously mostly ignored. I've already touched on how you can boost the effect of your spells and abilities through touch screen commands, but there's also a complicated system of resource management for the usage of these spells. Spells consume MP as you might expect, but also ether, which is sorted into five different color-coded types. Fire spells cost red ether, wind spells cost green ether, and so on. These elemental spells also generate dark ether, which can be spent by dark spells, which generate small amounts of elemental ether in turn. One might ask "what happens if you have enough MP to cast a spell, but not enough ether" and the answer is not as simple as "you can't." You can choose to cast a spell without enough ether if you wish, but then you'll be subject to reflux, which damages you in proportion to the amount of "debt" you go into to cast the spell. You can use this strategically when you have almost enough ether and know the spell won't kill you. Alternatively, you can simply let it kill you and resign yourself to reviving the character—even within the same turn!

Since all actions within a turn are decided before these actions take place, you can choose to revive a character you know will die prior to it actually happening. This actually opens up some interesting strategic options that I absolutely made use of (abused?) in some of the final battles. To be clear, I think I made the final areas of this game much harder than they otherwise would be by being quite underleveled. I consulted a guide and saw that I was at least five levels below where one might expect to be—and I certainly felt it. Most bosses could comfortably take out any of my party members in one shot. Considering these annoying bosses seem to be able to take 4-5 actions in a row, this made things pretty tough.

Glory of Heracles - was it good?

Ultimately, though, I think what I'll remember most about this game is that combat system. It's way too slow for its own good, but it has a lot of interesting ideas. There are so many mechanics that are very cool in isolation, but often tedious in practice. It's sort of interesting to be dragging, clicking, and tapping during spells, but it wears thin when you have to do it for every single random battle. It's interesting in theory to have enemies that must be overkilled to remove their body from the field and prevent their revival, but it becomes extraordinarily tedious when you have eight enemies in combat and you have to kill each of them twice. That particular mechanic rears its ugly head in a fearsome way during the final encounter.

Though absolutely a flawed game, I'm glad I played Glory of Heracles. It's an interesting relic from the Nintendo DS era and an interesting snippet of a defunct RPG series. Many of those early Heracles games have fan translations now, so I may well try them out one day.

provided without context