GamesRelay

Name: Half-Minute Hero

Responsibility is something that weighs heavily on most Japanese RPG player's minds. Often we are tasked to save the world against overwhelming odds and to invest days into the endeavour, perfecting and honing our characters to overcome anything these villains can put in your way. Half-Minute Hero takes a different tact – reduce all this labour into thirty second bursts, where your greatest nemesis is never your enemies, but time itself.

Half-Minute Hero is a parody, never taking its plot seriously. The game takes place in different centuries, with 100 years between each, all following the trail of a villain called Noire as he attempts to bring the world to destruction. Instead of weaving its own grandiose plot, it takes cues from the RPGs of old, taking firmly-instilled conventions about the stories in RPGs and poking fun at every opportunity. The fourth wall is also constantly being broken, with multiple references to the player and the pain that the developers felt in creating the game. Not only does the player take control of different characters during the change of centuries, but the game modes themselves are entirely different as well.

Hero 30 puts you into the realm of a typical JRPG, and can be considered the real meat of the product as a whole. Noire is teaching the Evil Lords of the world, or rather the ones with high MP, a spell that will lead to the destruction of the world in no less than thirty seconds. Now, conventionally, there is no way that an RPG can be played in thirty seconds, so the gameplay takes a dramatic twist. You play predominantly on a World Map, watching the time flick by as you fight battles to level up – necessary to prepare to take on the Evil Lord at the end. As you gain experience, you also receive gold coins, which can be given to a highly flirtatious Goddess of Time, who will use her abilities to increase the counter back to thirty seconds while retaining all of your experience and remaining gold. With this, you can buy equipment and health items to give yourself a better chance. These can be prohibitively expensive though, and every time you refresh the time counter, it costs more to use it again. This ends up putting a limit on your actions, even with the ability to reverse time, as you can only earn so much gold in those thirty seconds. Thankfully, battles are over in a moment, with all the action being completely automatic.

This all forms together into something that resembles an RPG, yet is entirely different. The strict time limit, even with the ability to reverse it, makes the gameplay extremely tense and frenetic. You'll be glancing at the clock constantly, trying to squeeze as much value out of the purchase of new time as you can, sometimes returning to towns with milliseconds to spare. It all culminates into a battle with the region's Evil Lord in his castle. The difficulty of this battle takes all of the above preparatory measures into account, as having a high enough level and equipment is key, but Half-Minute Hero manages to squeeze one more staple of the genre into the time limit: side-quests. While not necessary for victory, taking the time to complete them usually leads to gaining a second battle companion or receiving a new piece of equipment that can defeat certain enemy types, including bosses, in one hit.

All of this is spread over thirty missions, and,considering the brevity of the missions, means that you'll end up tearing through them pretty quickly. This is really something for completionists however, as the greatest pleasure is not from finishing all the quests, but to repeat them and gain the higher ranks. After each mission, you receive a scoring on how quickly you completed it and the amount of gold you gathered, and it decides upon a ranking from that. The only reward for this is your own satisfaction however, rather than any in-game reward.

Evil Lord 30 is a Real-Time Strategy mode set a century after the end of the first. In it, you play as a self-obsessed Evil Lord hoping to track down Noire to force him to return his beloved Millenia to normal, who had been transformed into a bat during the events of the previous mode. An identical thirty minute timer is imposed onto him, forced upon by the rising sun making Millenia feel weak. As an Evil Lord, you are able to summon monsters to fight in your stead, and this ends up being a rock-paper-scissors system where heavy-hitting Brutes beat quick-footed Nimbles who beat long-range Shooters who end up beating Brutes. The strength of your monsters depends on your upgradeable MP, and the rate at which you summon monsters. Bringing in too many at once will deplete your MP, and you must wait to be recharged automatically until you can evoke the big boys. The somewhat less flirty Goddess of Time returns to refill your counter, but now takes every coin you have, leaving it to strategic charges to leave battles with any extra cash to upgrade yourself.