Class of Heroes (PSP)

Class of Heroes (PSP)
Acquire / Atlus

Review by Anthony

So, a popular Japanese game comes out in America, and immediately both consumers and reviewers are confused. Call it unintentionally misleading packaging, or just plain bad journalism, but Class of Heroes basically got lauded or utterly hated depending on what the player was expecting. So, let’s be clear: Class of Heroes is a modern recreation of dungeon crawlers such as Wizardry ala Etrian Odyssey and The Dark Spire. It is not a modern RPG. Just as that fact didn’t inherently make The Dark Spire or Etrian Odyssey bad games, neither does it for Class of Heroes. But it does, however, mean that the game has an extremely limited audience.

Class of Heroes is a more relaxed take on the dungeon crawler genre. The game follows you as students of Particus Academy, who must explore dungeons and travel to other lands and Academies to perform tasks and aid others. Six adventurers from a wide array of ten races and fifteen jobs can be taken along at once, though you can register multiple teams and rosters as you see fit. The storyline progressions through the completion of classes that begin as instructional, but eventually become fetch quests, item trading, and monster hunting.

What’s good:
- You can create a party from either gender of Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Felpiers, Sprites, Erdgeists, Diablons, Celestians, or Drakes. Depending on allocation of stats and alignment, these can become Warriors, Monks, Samurais, Rangers, Thieves, Ninjas, Kunoichis, Valkyries, Paladins, Alchemists, Clerics, Wizards, Devouts, Evokers, or Psychicers. Not only is that a pretty impressive lineup considering a six-member party setup, but the balance among these is excellent. Although it’s a good idea to have staples like healing or thievery, the combination of equipment, stat, magic, skills, and affinity differences means you can make your way through the game a myriad of ways.
- Exploration through the game’s maps, though necessary, is also well-rewarded. Though each dungeon and its labyrinth have set maps, the multi-tiered paths between each have various recurring maps that can be explored. Exploring these maps can be fun, as they can net you some nice money, items, and allow you to unlock doors with a “magic key” that in most cases, allows you to exit the map near-instantly upon entering it in future runs. This means your method of exploration speeds up and you get important items along the way; it’s a smart design.
- Every trail map has one or more points that allow you instantly warp home for free if desired. This can be an absolute lifesaver in a game such as this.
- Item handling is done quite well here. As your inventory fills up, unwanted items can be dropped, which makes them instantly available from inter-connected recycling bins located in every dungeon. That way, worthless items can be set aside to sell later, or it can even be strategically used to keep healing items available in all dungeons. And though it’s marked up, all shops keep items sold to them available for purchase later on. The dorm lockers hold an absurd amount of items too; storage is never an issue.
- Though rarely worth mentioning, Class of Heroes deserves credit for having some of the most creative and well-drawn monster designs I’ve seen in a game lately. Monsters look clean, well drawn, well colored, and have several unique takes on the types of creatures you expect in every RPG/dungeon crawler.
- Though dungeon crawlers may have among the most limited audiences this side of nudist motocross games, Class of Heroes may be as accessible as you’ll find within the genre. The early courses explain the game’s mechanics in good detail and with useful advice, item/equipment information is laid out with tons of detail, quests have adequate information for completion, and until late/post game, you’re rarely thrust into situations where specific monsters are overpowered to other inhabitants. This is all atypical for the genre, and may be a sign of modernizing the genre to new players.
- Being able to power up virtually all weapons and armor in the game with materials dropped from monsters in battle was a cool idea. It was pretty satisfying to get a good drop, then use a wad of hard earned cash towards turning a weapon into a weapon+9.
- There’s an unusually high amount of additional exploring and questing to do post-game. It’s not much different than the main game, but this could easily become a “desert island” game in how much time you could potentially spend with it.

What’s bad:
- Whether by design or not, Boss fights are plentiful and always anticlimactic. Every Boss I fought in the game was defeated typically in one turn by me using the party “Gambit” ability, in which your entire party teams up for a variety of functions. If a Boss isn’t killed instantly, they’re also unfairly strong, often easily wiping out one or more characters in a turn, with some having huge evasion and resistance. This may have been an attempt to make sure you create a party with good affinity to each other in order to unleash more Gambit attacks, but regardless, it made the Boss fights way too fast, regardless of the victor.
- Though the alchemy system in augmenting and upgrading items was great, the alchemy system in creating new items from Junk was lacking. The idea was good - you find a Broken Talwar in battle, you fuse some cheap iron into it and you have a repaired Talwar. The problem is, many of the junk items have ambiguous names, and without paying a bundle of money for crafting recipes, you a) won’t know what the junk item makes and b) won’t know what materials are needed to create it. And without the crafting recipe, even if you have the materials to make the item, you can’t see what jobs/races can equip the item until you’ve paid the money to make it. The result? The average player will hightail it to an alchemy guide/FAQ or do a whole lot of resetting to save cash. I doubt most players would be okay with just throwing money away to make items they won’t use, but the game seems to foster that.
- Though it’s a well-made game all around, there was really no reason for it to have a higher-than-average price of $40 as a PSP game.

What to be aware of: (I’m foregoing the “neutral” section for this review because these items are indicative of the genre but highly unusual for the average player)
- Not only is party member death a serious concern in that revival items are extremely rare and only the highest level white magic can fix it, but the longer a character stays dead, the more difficult it is to revive him/her. Although I never ran into the situation, permadeath and/or losing one’s entire party and starting over is a possibility.
- Without functional thieving skills, progression in the game will be more difficult due to many beneficial items being in trap-rigged treasure chests. Even then, bad luck can mean your entire party being brutalized or wiped out by a chest’s trap.
- Dungeons can be tame and straightforward or uncompromising chores depending on the layout. Some maps are laden with warps and tedious “find the right door” mechanics. Many have shock-tile traps that can seriously damage non-flying members of your party. Though a levitating spell fixes the previous issue, many dungeons have “anti-magic” zones that not only prevent spells from being cast, but instantly remove any spell effects you have active. You will be given the feeling occasionally that certain maps were designed just for the sake of being cruel.
- Aside from time spent in shops/labs working with items or managing your party, basically the entirety of the game is one big grind. There are very few puzzles, which are normally a common aspect of dungeon crawlers. To make it through to the end, you will be fighting hordes of monsters again and again, and for the most part, your tactics aren’t likely to change much from one group to the next. Repetition is a factor.
- There’s really no storyline of interest. Being a member of Particus Academy is akin to being asked to do several tasks, and eventually destroy an evil person along the way. A few modern references and silly bits of dialog can keep it more interesting, but the storyline is as basic as it comes.
- Stats will raise and lower somewhat randomly depending on your character’s race and job. This will sometimes make it very difficult to gain access to jobs with more restrictive requirements outside of doing so during character creation.
- The PSP’s ever-present lack of a “Load Game” option mid-game makes it not quite as ideal of a system for the genre, compared to the DS.

So we have a well-made game here that has some serious difficulty finding an audience in North America. Players expecting an RPG will likely be disappointed in what they find. Hardcore dungeon crawler fans may find the design too bright and forgiving in comparison to other titles. The niche here is somewhere in between. Class of Heroes is great for someone with a passing interest in the genre, as well as those who want a more robust and open-ended approach to the genre. There are less horrifying threats and challenges as in a game like The Dark Spire/Etrian Odyssey, and Class of Heroes comes with greater diversity in how you go about solving your challenges.

In my mind, this fits a nice mold in proving that dungeon crawlers don’t have to be only for the hardcore, text-based computer game aficionados. Sure, it’s still about little more than trudging through dungeons and cutting a swath through hundreds of monsters. But choosing the best way to build your party, putting them into action, and getting excited for a particularly good drop is quite addictive. If Class of Heroes can’t spur your interest in the genre, then stay very far away, because probably nothing will.