You’ll feel that familiar surge of excitement every time a town has a new weapon for sale. They’ve trimmed away everything but the heart and soul of it. It’d be pretty cruel if it wasn’t so damned clever. You’ll have to make furtive, guerrilla-style raids two spaces away from town to kill a single monster before scampering back to the Goddess of Time, gasping, with a twentieth of a second left on the clock. During Three Second Hero the time you spent with a whole thirty seconds to spare seems like an idyllic, slow-paced romp.

Now it’s three seconds, max, on the clock. Beat the game and unlock Three Hundred Second hero, which seems like a pretty generous time limit until whole continents start sinking every sixty seconds. In this time you will parley with a king, buy a sword, rescue a lumberjack’s daughter from a cave, rebuild a bridge, meet a friendly dragon, and, finally, slay the evil, anthropomorphic coelacanth who is hell-bent on world destruction because the witch of the swamp won’t be his girlfriend. Realistically, most quests have enough resources to buy you about ninety seconds. Averting world annihilation is a costly business. She waits in every village and has the power to reset the clock… for a price. That’s why you have the Goddess of Time on your side.

The world is going to end in thirty seconds.Ī thirty second time limit sounds mean, but it’s okay! The creators understand it’s difficult to level up, buy equipment, and complete sidequests in only thirty seconds.

Would that all RPGs had that ambition! It’s the manner in which it does it that makes Half-Minute Hero so weird. “But that’s an admirable goal,” you say, “not quirky in the slightest.” And you are right. No more grinding next to a save point before you can fight the next boss. No more spiky haired youths talking about their feelings. Half-Minute Hero cuts down on the bloat that makes your average RPG an unbearable slog. That is why when a game is as fun as it is weird we need to sit up and take notice. Even the ones who exude limitlessly bizarre charm ( Deadly Premonition) mire themselves in gameplay that vacillates from boring to unbearable. Eccentric games with quirky conceits are everywhere and they are almost unilaterally terrible.

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