Little Town Hero

Formed by the minds behind the Pokémon series, Little Town Hero is a turn-based JRPG that mashes board-game and card elements, making for some pretty mixed results. In it you play as a fiery-haired young adventurer named Axe, who - like his father - dreams of escaping the walls of his quaint little town. The only problem is that residents aren't permitted to leave, and the only way out lies beyond the other side of a heavily guarded castle. Axe's desperation for adventure leads him to cross paths with an elderly soldier known as Angard, and from here he's shown the ropes of combat and learns of the threat of monsters.

The rather clichéd trope of wanting to escape your hometown is thrown by the wayside pretty quickly, and the attention is then switched to dispatching the many attacking monsters while learning of their origins. Due to this, the central plot feels rather disjointed, and we wish that the developers would have picked one theme to focus on and then stuck with it throughout. That said, despite its issues with focus, the dialogue here is great, and we soon felt ourselves growing attached to characters, like our dimwitted and strangely optimistic rival Mattock, and our pushy and easily enraged mother called Ember.

The combat system is easily the most polarising aspect of Little Town Hero, as it's both inventive and problematic in equal measures. It's a little tricky to explain, but during each encounter you'll receive a handful of ideas which are known as 'izzits', and these need to be transformed into 'dazzits' to be used by spending energy points that you accumulate at the start of each round. There are three different types of izzits that can be used: red izzits are offensive, yellow izzits are defensive, and blue izzits have special effects.

Each dazzit comes with an attack and defense stat, and in order to break an opposing dazzit you need to ensure that your chosen dazzit has a higher attack stat than your opponent's defence. You can use defence dazzits multiple times, but attack dazzits can only be used once per turn, even if they haven't been broken by your opponent. To damage your opponent's health you need to shatter all of their dazzits and then use a red dazzit at the end of your turn. Once you have depleted all of your opponent's hearts, victory is then yours.

This sounds all very complex, and that's before even mentioning the various different effects that dazzits can contain, and the board-game-like map you weave around.

Let's start by focusing on the positives. The combat here certainly stands out as being unique, and it really requires you to plan out your strategy before committing to your actions. This is a huge move away from the combat we all know and love from Pokémon, and it's great to see the developer trying a hand at something new. The board game aspects work really well too, as at the end of a turn you spin a wheel to see where to move to next, and there are individual squares where a companion can join you or where you can inflict extra damage by using the right move on a cannon or barrel.

What we disliked was how much are victories felt hinged on pure luck. Each turn you are given a random handful of izzits and sometimes you can be dealt a hand where it's downright impossible to break all the opposing dazzits. Due to this, victory felt more based on chance rather than us having to be strategic and find a way to gain the upper hand. Fights can also take upwards of 20 rounds due to how buffed up your opponent's health often is (you usually have to damage six hit points on top of each heart), which we found pretty excessive.

If you're feeling burnt out from battles then you can also interact with the townspeople to take on side quests separate to the main story. These side quests are all well worth accepting, as they offer meaningful rewards such as unlocking a new character show up on the map in battles, and new eureka points that can be spent to enhance ideas within the skill tree. The issue we had was that many of these felt pretty dull. In one quest we had to round up a flock of sheep that we had accidentally spooked, and in another we had to stand and listen to an old man's ramblings as he talked us through a brief history of the town.

Toby Fox of Undertale fame provides the music for Little Town Hero, and we can report that his work captures the mood here perfectly, from the mischievous jingles played behind the interactions with our friends to the booming and intense score that accompanies all combat encounters. The visuals here are also up to par, but there were a few aspects of the presentation that really lacked polish.

For example, we would run into the same character models constantly, and there's only one animation to attack your opponents regardless of what move you use. We remember a moment too where the screen cut to black and we were told that we gave our mother a hug, instead of this very simple interaction being animated.

After consistently delivering great results over the past two decades with the Pokémon series, it's sad to see that Game Freak has stumbled when trying to branch out and deliver a new take on the JRPG genre. Little Town Hero feels overly cumbersome and luck-based, and we wish that the narrative just stuck to the one central theme. We wouldn't call Little Town Hero a bad game (it's gorgeous and certainly has some great ideas), it's just one we would struggle to recommend given the frustration that we endured.