Little Town Hero is the other game released last month by Pokémon developer Game Freak. It’s a little bit like a board game, a little bit like Dragon Quest, and a little bit disappointing, at least in our first playthroughs. However, despite feeling cold about it right now, I think it’s definitely the game that Game Freak needed to make in this moment. Let’s dig in.
In Little Town Hero, you play as Axe, a child laborer young adventurer trying to escape his secluded village in the mountains. Along with your friends, Pasmina, Matock and Nelz, you pull pranks, do various chores and jobs in the village, work in the coal mines, and train to become a soldier under the tutelage of Angard (pronounced “ON-guard”), an exiled fighter and tavern frequenter from the nearby castle on an errant mission to prove that monsters exist.
It’s a pretty charming conceit to a game, and it’s one that largely works well with the visuals and the Toby Fox-composed soundtrack, both of which are very cute. Unfortunately, the game is far too pushy for its own good. If you’re given a main story quest, it doesn’t matter if you have side-quests or want to explore the village – you HAVE to do the story quest. You’ll be essentially chastised for wanting to deviate from the beaten path; Axe will think to himself, “Oh, I have to go do this task.” The screen will go dark, and you’ll “wake up” facing the right way to your objective.
I’m three hours in, and I feel like I’m still deep in the tutorial for the game, but I keep finding myself losing motivation to play just for the simple fact that I can’t really do anything because the game doesn’t want me to.
Honestly, Little Town Hero feels less like a fully-realized game to me, at least right now, and more like a showcase for someone at Game Freak’s new turn-based strategic combat system. It has some really interesting ideas – literally – but my main obstacle in each battle I’ve performed at this point is the speed.
To break down the battle system, any time you face off against someone you get a hand of Red (offensive), Yellow (defensive) or Blue (effect) “Izzits.” You have a certain amount of power you can spend each turn to turn those Izzits into “Dazzits,” fully-actualized ideas that can face off against your enemy’s actions, also called Dazzits. Each Dazzit has an offense and a defense, and will cancel each other out in an action called a “Break.” If you Break all of your enemy’s Dazzits, it’s called an All Break. If you All Break and have leftover offensive Dazzits, you can attack the enemy directly. Otherwise, you’ll get battle points that allow you to refresh or swap Izzits in your Headspace.
(Now that I actually write this all out, I think the most specific analogue to this game would be any number of deckbuilders out there.)
In some battles, you will get to roam around the town on a game board based on a d4. Some board spaces have effects called Gimicks that work with offensive Dazzits to do enhanced damage on an enemy. Others feature your friends in Support roles where they’ll do things like reduce the amount of power your Izzits cost, break the enemy’s Dazzits or deal extra damage to the enemy directly.
It’s a neat system with some good ideas. The problem with this system is how long everything takes, and how easily RNG can mess you up if you make even one wrong move early on in a battle. One battle I fought, against a monstrous sheep, took 18 turns and lasted an entire hour. Losing would have forced me to start over. Luckily, as I fight, I get “eureka points” that I can spend to make my fighting more effective, a la Final Fantasy XV‘s Ascension system. These seem to come in pretty reliably, win or lose, and it seems I can maybe reduce the amount of time I spend in battles, but right now, everything is taking way too long.
Is Little Town Hero good? I don’t know. I don’t really think so, even though there are a lot of elements I like by themselves. Toby Fox’s soundtrack is amazing and there are moments of inspiration in the battle system, but overall I feel like Game Freak maybe missed the mark on this one.
However.
I’m absolutely thrilled to see Game Freak make more and different games than what they’re known for (namely, the Pokémon main games). Aside from Little Town Hero, they’ve put out some interesting titles, like Giga Wrecker and Tembo the Badass Elephant, in recent years. If that helps them gain new inspiration for Pokémon, or saves them from burnout, or even gives us an indication of what a post-Pokémon Game Freak might look like, I’m all for it.
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