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Please, oh please let this be the last RPG Maker game I have.
One Way Heroics is a good game. It’s not a great game but it’s good. I’m finally okay with seeing assets in the game being default RPG Maker supplied. Why? Because I think for the first time, someone took the RPG Maker shell and made an actual game with it. They didn’t make some convoluted fan-fiction story that the world desperately needed. They didn’t make a “done-a-thousand-times-before RPG,” with a dozen talking heads that chitter back and forth and pretend like they have character traits. One Way Heroics isn’t an RPG Maker game, it’s a game that happens to wear the mantle of RPG Maker.
Once again, I need to state that this isn’t a game that will blow you out of the water, but it works like this. The world is being corrupted by a darkness. The source? The evil Demon Lord. The game begins with the king asking you to save the world as best you can and handing you a bunch of herbs, in traditional RPG fashion. The catch? The world is literally being consumed by darkness. If you don’t keep moving to the left, you’ll get consumed and die. What’s harrowing is that as you are fleeing, everything that gets swallowed to the left of you is devoured. In pain. You can read their screams in the text box. It’s kind of awesome.
Uh, right, you also have a Fairy named Iris who helps you out when you need it. She’s actually pretty useful and adds a bit of levity to the game. As she says, the world is filled with death but its part of the adventure “so don’t let it bother you too much.” If you die, you get a chance to come back to the world and try again–your character even mentions that they remember dying, but their memory is hazy. Thus, it is intended that you use your memory of your past lives to help you progress even further. It’s sort of eerily cathartic, meeting the same people over and over, watching them die, finding familiar landmarks as you travel alone…
There’s a slew of mechanics but they aren’t terribly complicated. I could break them down as I usually do, but I feel they aren’t what’s important to the game, so I’ll briefly sum it up by–choose a class, choose your skills, equip stuff, eat stuff, and push “enter” to attack. It’s a benefit to the game that these principles are simple, as you’ll be repeating them a lot and their simplicity makes it move faster than other traditional RPG alternatives. Speaking of classes and death, each time you die, you are graded and you earn “Hero Points” that you can spend on all sorts of things like unlocking new classes, buying new perks and storing items permanently in a “hero vault.”
The game can also be played online, by joining other people’s worlds and trying to beat their current high score but I didn’t mess around too much with it. I’m not even sure how to “win” the game. Maybe it’s by beating the Demon Lord that pops up every now and then to antagonize you…
There’s also… characters or a plot or something… it all feels rather dreamlike the way people pop up and talk to you when you’re dead.
Mechanically, One Way Heroics intrigues me. I’ve never quite seen something approach gameplay mixed with storytelling in a way like this. The entire time you play, it’s almost like you’re getting a drive-by view of what’s going on before going “splat” against whatever brick wall you run into, only to start at the beginning and try again. Try again you certainly do but this time filling in some of the gaps you missed before, whether by talking to a different NPC or finding a different item. I suppose that is why they call it “One Way Heroics.” I think if a game that wasn’t so interesting that was produced of the same level of quality as this, I would say it’s not worth your time. After all, OWH is not particularly polished, is a bit simple at times and sometimes ends up being a game about pushing the right arrow key for a minute. In spite of that though, I admire those who try new things which leaves me placing this in Tier 2.
Oh, and before I go, I’m not entirely sure how to make heads or tails of this one. When you die, you get a narrative of your death and then can choose a parting message for anyone who checks your death record in that world. The phrases usually include variable data names of items you had or what killed you etc. That being said… I cannot figure out what the heck this one means.
I’m going to start a cult and this is going to be our mantra.