Fantasy Hero: Unsigned Legacy Review

Fantasy hero is a JRPG where you play as one of four characters who are fighting back against an alien race called the Decoders. Humanity has been driven into hiding by the Decoders and only a few heroes dare to come out of hiding to gather items and take the fight to the Decoders. While the idea behind the game sounds awesome the actual game is a bit of a let down.

As I started the game and saw the title screen I got excited, remembering all the awesome JRPG’s I’ve played over the years and then after choosing a character and sitting through the long but normal intro the game finally started. I chose to play the female character option because she had a robot and who doesn’t like robots, but as the story started to unfold I found out that she isn’t going to be the main character but instead one of the other choices was and this was the first of many disappointments.

At the start of the game I liked the simple combat but as I spent more time with the game it became clear that the combat wasn’t going to evolve. Sure you unlock new abilities and skills but these are all alike and don’t change up the gameplay. I kept going with the game hoping that maybe like other games in the genre it just takes time to open up these skills but no just the same hack n slash combat with various groups of enemies.

One of the things I did enjoy about the game was its colourful low poly graphics. The graphics are nothing to rave about, this level of graphics is common place on the vita but they fit perfectly in this game. The same could be said for the sound track. It’s your standard JRPG sound track but it works so well here that it along with the colourful chibi graphics are high points of the game.

A JRPG should have a good engaging story but the story here feels tacked on at the end so you have a reason to go out and kill the jelly monsters and sentient mushrooms. It was the same with the levels, they just seemed to be very basic and not very imaginative which made me wonder exactly what this game was trying to achieve.

It was around hour five that I worked out exactly where this game fits in. It’s a game to be played on the train or bus, nice quick levels a story that doesn’t really matter but is there if you want it and the combat is simple and doesn’t need a lot of focus. This game in that setting is awesome for any JRPG fans that just want a nice bite sized game that can be picked up and put down quickly and have a little bit of fun to pass the time.

While playing the game for review I decided to go look at the game in the PlayStation store because I was given the game and DLC packs to review and didn’t have to get them individually and I don’t think that will be how most people buy the game and I came across the usual stuff for JRPG DLC extra costumes, a few different colours for your hero and some extra missions but I also found that one of the pieces of DLC is a character licence. A character licence is used to have more than one save slot in the game and given that while playing through the game I made one of every class to try them out and found that I really liked playing two of the classes I started to feel annoyed that someone would have to pay £7.99 for the base game and then they would have to pay extra for each character they wanted to try out or they would have to delete the character they have already made and start the game again. DLC for things that add to the game are cool, that’s what DLC’s are for, a developer makes the game and while its being tested and certified they make cool pieces of content to add to the player’s experience but making the player pay for something like extra character slots when they only get one to start with is just stupid and brings the game down and turns me off other games from the publisher.

Fantasy Hero: Unsigned Legacy has a great concept and could have been an awesome JRPG experience on the Vita but with its simple repetitive combat and tacked on story it just fails to deliver on its potential. Add the poorly handled character licence DLC and there just aren’t a lot of good things to say about this game.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation Vita code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.