Heroes of the Seasons Reviews

The combat is pretty fun, with lots of unique playable characters and equipment, offering quite a lot of replay value. The music in the late game is epic, too.

Extremely goofy game. Some of the characters are very entertaining (shout out to Stan the Crusader, showing up and stealthily trying to convert all these good Christians celebrating the birth of Our Lord to some heathen Goddess-worship) Character abilities are densely packaged and use a lot of features of the engine, so they might take some time to figure out, but they allow for a fair amount of turn-by-turn optimization. Haven't played past Normal Mode yet, but so far I've definitely gotten my money's worth.

[h1]An Actual War on Christmas[/h1] [h2]Story[/h2] The basic premise is that Utania Village has to hire mercenaries to protect their festivities from the Goblin King Frinch, who hates Christmas enough to wage war on a small village that celebrates it. We don't really get a reason from him other than how he finds it annoying. Things escalate when it turns out that [spoiler]Frinch's assisstant, Gobi, reveals that he's just using the king as dumb muscle and starts hiring other Christmas-haters to join the war effort. The next hater is Lord Aldwol, an evil lovecraftian alien who hates Christmas despite being from another planet. Then we get Matria, the BlueSkies setting's Satan equivalent, whose reason for hating Christmas is a little more understandable since it's associated with her rival goddess. Eventually, Gobi himself becomes the boss of the final campaign, where he reveals that he actually has a very understandable reason to hate Christmas: Vyena's Holy Order slaughtered his people on Christmas day while hypocritically seeing themselves as the heroes. That is indeed a sad story, but there is quite a bit of whiplash considering that Frinch and Aldwol hate Christmas for much pettier and comedic reasons. Regardless, it is heartwarming when the party manages to make peace with Gobi and get him to celebrate Christmas alongside them.[/spoiler] I do worry that I'm missing a lot of context for this setting, since it's supposed to be a spinoff of the BlueSkies series. The Christmas part of the story is mostly self-contained, but [spoiler]Gobi is actually the apprentice of a major character in previous game[/spoiler]. [h2]Gameplay[/h2] Your mercenaries will always get reset to level 1 at the start of a campaign. While this is to make it so that players won't feel compelled to overlevel and stick to one team, it does end up creating a meta based on who has the most useful skills at an early level, which could make it hard to use late-bloomer characters that don't learn essential skills until way higher levels. The game uses a weakness triangle system like RPS, but it also splits characters into three general roles: nuker, tank, and support. However, this means even if you build a balanced team, that means whatever type your nuker is bad against will likely stay on the battlefield the longest. I ended up going with a tank + double nuker strategy so that my two nukers will be able to cover each other's type weaknesses, even at the cost of non-item healing from support character. Fortunately, if your DPS is high enough, you can probably kill most bosses before you run out of items (each one has its own cap). In higher-level gameplay, you'll also get a lot of powerful skills with the instant property, which encourages you to buff up and deal devastating attacks in the same turn. This, along with how high the base damage of enemy skills are, made the game fit the Rocket Tag Gameplay trope in that both sides are trying to burst each other down ASAP. The idea is that if you can thin the enemy numbers quickly, you won't have to endure as many powerful attacks, which makes offense the best defense. Adding to the weakness system, I feel like the meta favors characters that start with both single-target and AOE options over characters whose skills hit random targets. I personally don't want to rely on RNG to hit type weaknesses, thus my preference for single-target skills I have full control over. This is especially important when enemies have counterattacks and reflect states, which can make random-targeting skills backfire. You can buy items in the village, but it usually takes a lot of story progress to get the inventory to change, except for decoration updates which are more frequent for some reason. The good news is that all campaigns are perfectly beatable with whatever equipment tier is available to them during your first try, but it does feel weird to unlock the 10k armor at the same time as the 150k armor. After I beat the game, the dev added more consumables to the gift shop, which can help with the inventory management aspect and give the player a sense of progress. On the flip side, having a longer gap between equipment tiers does mean the player will waste less money on equipment that could quickly become obsolete, so it does make shopping easier towards the end of the game. [h2]Verdict[/h2] 8.5/10 Although the story has emotional whiplash towards the end, I still enjoyed Gobi's villain arc and I'm considering getting into the BlueSkies series just to see if he'll ever make a reappearance. I'm personally not used to boss rush gameplay and I mainly play JRPGs with a more traditional gameplay loop and sense of progression, but I think the game is balanced enough, even if it does seem to favor DPS. I did find the glass cannon party builds fun in their own way, since there is a dopamine rush when you manage to score a lucky crit with an AOE skill or permanently remove an enemy threat before it can do anything.