Mystic Heroes

Mystic Heroes was not a fun game, well I did have fun with it for the first couple stages, but after that it just got so boring and repetitive. By stage 3 I was dreading the whole game. Fighting some bosses was a long and painful process, rarely hard, but just annoying. The platforming elements was frustrating and just about everything else annoyed me about this game. The only positive thing I can say is the graphics were awesome, but the cutscenes were really short, almost to the point where they didn't make any sense at all. You can play this game 4 times and get a different story, but one was enough for me. I doubt it will sway my opinion, it will probably make it worse. There's a co-op mode and a Survival mode add to the length of the game, but it's still short and most of those modes are worthless.

----------Battle System----------
Mystic Heroes is a 3rd Person Hack and Slasher with some slight RPG and RTS elements. At the start of the game you get to choose between 4 different characters, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Each character will start off with their own special magic abilities (called Runes) that relate to different elements. Within battle your characters can pull off 4 different magic attacks, but only before and after battle is the time when you can customize your Runes. When you want to customize, you can pick between 2 sets of Runes (each ranging from 1 to 4 magic attacks) and mix and match into one Rune that you can use in battle. Some Runes give you a stat boost aswell.

Within battle you'll find various chest type objects that can be destroyed. You'll find health and magic within them, but on occasion you'll find new Runes, or even upgrade items that boost your max HP and MP or even your attack and magic powers. This is the only way to get stronger is by trying to find all the special chests in the game, some are hidden, but most are obvious. Enemies drop health as well, but rarely upgrade items.

When you go into battle you might get a party, depending on the stage. Each party will be lead by one of the main characters, and then they'll have 3 nameless / faceless soldiers follow them for backup. You have no secondary controls over these characters. The AI is VERY dumb in this game, so they'll run after a group of enemies and stand around for 10 minutes, slowly attacking each other. This reminds me of fight scenes of old 70's films where the main good guy is taking on a group of people beating the crap out of them one by one while the rest of the gang just stands around aimlessly. Within this time I'm running around the entire battle field taking on various groups of enemies and then have to run all the way back to help finish off their original group that they been working on for 5 minutes with little progress. If one of your groups happen to take a beating before you can support them, then they'll retreat to the start of the map and sometimes regenerate new allies.

Before battle they'll lay down what you need to do to win, either defeat the boss, get to the exit, or defeat all enemies. The lack of variety is very weak, there's really no puzzle solving at all in this game, but there is some platforming. To bad that the platforming in the game is completely frustrating. During the game you'll be fighting with the camera most of the time. The controls aren't very responsive, and while your character might jump very high, he doesn't have a good jump distance. So the platforming in the game is pretty much awful.

----------Characters / Story----------
The story is about as uninteresting as you can get. The editing is terrible, it seems as if they cut out large parts of the story because most of it doesn't make sense. The story just moves so fast that you won't understand most of it. The biggest problem I had with it is there's no story within the stages, just before and after. I would try to tell you about the characters and about the story, but none of it made sense to me.

----------Graphics----------
The character models look great. The battlefields are huge and contain a ton of enemies on the screen without any slow downs that I've noticed. The cutscenes are all made with the game engine, but they look very polished, probably on par with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. The special attacks aren't spectacular or anything, but some of the bosses look awesome and can be extremely huge. There's really nothing bad that I can think of with the graphics.

----------Sound----------
The voice work is pretty bad... really bad actually. All the characters talk in a slow, pause-y type way like a stereotypical Native American would sound like on a cheesy 70's tv program like Bonanza or whatever. The music is forgettable and hardly worth mentioning. When one of your team mates is in trouble they'll scream out to you. They'll compliment you during battle, which is very annoying because it's the same catchphrases throughout the entire game.

----------World Map----------
The game flows with chapters, with separate stages within the chapter. Before you move into a new stage you'll get an overview of the map, a brief look into the story, and you can change up your Runes, check your stats and save.

----------Time to Complete Game----------
Time: 4:20:44
Enemies Defeated: 1977 KO
Allies Defeated: 55 KO
Best Combo: 111 Hits
Total Points: 89451 Pts