Fantasy Hero: Unsigned Legacy Review (PS Vita)
Fantasy Hero: Unsigned Legacy seemingly released from out of nowhere, or at least I’d not heard much about it until I had it in my hands.
The first thing that caught my attention was the cute chibi art style and that the combat proved to be a mostly solid affair but, sadly, the story progression is both poorly planned and frustrating; some missions are a handful of minutes long whilst others can last up to around 25 minutes with multiple lengthy frays, boss battles and no sign of a checkpoint anywhere – boy, do I love losing all that progress!
The story revolves around four characters – who you’ll name – banding up to take back their monster-infested village with the use of their newly-acquired ‘Hero Artes’- accessories that give them access to great power. There’s actually more dialogue than I expected there to be and the story is interesting, if not relatively simple, and the cast of characters have unique personalities and mesh well together despite how different they are individually – I mean c’mon, it’s not everyday a normal teenager, a genius child, a bird-man and a luchador get together to vanquish evil.
The meat is in the gameplay which is enjoyable and gives you access to lots of customisation, stat-building and weapon enhancement options, and with a story that’ll take you the better part of ten hours and plenty of side-missions, you’ll find yourself with loads to do. Sadly, the difficulty spikes are random and will force you to play the side-missions to the point I felt that they might as well have been included as part of the main missions, although you can take up to four items with you at a time which gives you better chances at surviving.
Although you’ll have four characters at any given time, you’ll only be able to control and play as one – nope, there’s not even AI to help you in battle. I played as the young teenage swordsman and the child genius who specialises in robots and despite the swordsman having better base stats, I felt that robo-girl was both better and more fun to play as. Each character has their own individual skills, so play around with each to see who you fancy although you can tell what they’re like at a glimpse, making it easier to begin with your chosen hero. In short, they each cover all-rounded, intelligence, range and brute strength – I’ll leave it up to you to guess who fits which description!
You’ll spend most of your time on the battlefield fighting various monsters and even though there are roughly a dozen skills at your disposal, you can only equip four at a time which applies to items too; I was a tad annoyed to find that guarding was a special skill rather than a standard one, as that takes up a much needed spot for something that all four characters should be capable of doing from the beginning. You can also upgrade your stats, moves can be upgraded up to three times each, you can create and enhance your weapons and change the colour of your character; there’s plenty to play with and you’ll want to ensure that you’ve got the best gear possible for those random difficulty spikes!
The art style is appealing and the animations are explosive, but the performance slows incredibly when you’re fighting a large number of enemies and the environments are bland and repetitive; I was sick of seeing the opening forest a few missions into the game and was glad to be able to go elsewhere after mindlessly slashing enemies and retreading familiar path to progress the story. The character models are lively if not detailed and the visuals inspire nostalgia as they remind me of RPG’s that would’ve been at home on the PS2 and Gamecube, but it still looks nice for a Vita game even if it won’t be included on any of the ‘visually best Vita games’ lists.
With only Japanese voice-over available and a lot more dialogue than I expected, an English Dub would’ve been appreciated but the Japanese voice-actors and actresses do their job well with the characters sounded exactly as you’d expect them too; you could say it’s stereotypical of those roles, which fits Fantasy Hero’s inability to stand out. The subtitles are easy to read and will only forward if you press a button, meaning you won’t miss any text. The OST is forgettable and as I sit here writing this, I can’t even think of a single note from the game. Not even one. You can listen to the main theme here though and whilst it isn’t bad, it isn’t memorable either.
I can’t say I really enjoyed my time with Fantasy Hero: Unsigned Legacy. It doesn’t do anything particularly bad or worth complaining about, but what it does do is stunningly generic and repetitive. It’s only £7.99 so you can’t knock it at that price but even then I think I’d wait for a sale before picking it up. The artificial difficulty plays against it, causing frustration at the games inability to give you a real challenge as it insists on throwing large numbers of enemies at you instead, and the lack of checkpoints is appalling. My fantasy of becoming a hero isn’t fulfilled in this game and if you’re looking for an RPG on Vita, then there are much better choices to choose from.
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