Blazing Heroes was my first Strategy RPG, my first 3D RPG, my first
Saturn RPG, and my first 32 bit RPG all wrapped into one. I have alot
of fond memories with this game, but I can't say it holds up to well.
Most of the problems I have with the game is the extremely aged
graphics, the bad loading times, the terrible storyline and annoying
characters. Outside of all of that, I still like this games battle
system. I like the leveling up system with the characters and skills.
Despite all the flaws, it's still a fun experience and luckily it's
short so it never over stays it's welcome.
----------Battle System----------
Blazing Heroes is a Turn Based Strategy RPG. The turns take place in
rounds, so your team attacks, then the enemy takes their turn, this
repeats until you win or lose. The goals in the game are almost always
the same, "Kill everything" or "kill boss" or "get to Point A". You can
only take a team of 6 characters with you in battle at a time.
Your characters don't gain experience for each enemy THEY kill
personally, like most SRPGs, but rather their whole team gets the
experience. The catch is they won't get that experience boost until
after the battle is over, and then they can level up. The players that
you did no choose to go into battle with you will gain about half of
what your other characters got though. It's possible to max out your
characters levels at 30.
The most interesting thing about this
game is how you build your characters skills. Each character will have
about 2 or 3 skills they can build over time. Each time they use a
skill within that skill category then they'll gain a small amount of
experience, and when they reach a certain level within that category,
they'll gain a new skill. Weaker skills will give you weak amounts of
experience and newer skills will give you high amounts of experience.
Each character has their own 'energy' level, this determines how far
your character can run across the screen, each step takes away Energy.
With less energy they can't perform certain attacks that take up alot
of energy, this is adds a bit more strategy to the game.
----------Characters / Story----------
I like the diverse cast of characters, but man, the storyline is awful,
the dialog is embarrassing at times and the pacing is way off. I
certainly wasn't playing this game for the storyline though.
----------Graphics----------
Ugh, the graphics have not aged very well, I can say this for most
early 3D gaming though. Blazing Heroes was my first 3D RPG experience
though, so when I first played this in 1996 it blew me AWAY. I'm not a
more experienced gamer and can see so many flaws, shortcuts and other
basic problems with the game, but I can't fault it to much since it's
so early.
----------Sound----------
I like the music quite
a bit, it's nothing ground breaking, but it's enough where you remember
it. The sound effects are annoying at times though. There's no voice
overs or anything close to it.
----------World Map----------
The world map is very non-linear for the most part, so that's a huge
thumbs up. The map is separated into 4 sections or "Countries". Each
section has a couple dungeons or towns. Towards the end of the game you
gain a flying ship, but it's only useful for advancing the storyline,
otherwise the world map is so small you can walk across it in under a
minute.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
15:59
This was the last save before the final boss fight, so the time does
not include that and the ending, so maybe add 45 minutes to that.
Otherwise, the only worth while thing noting about the ending was the
10-15 second CGI cutscene, and it sucked.
