The first brand-new non-Pokemon RPG from developer Game Freak in more than 20 years is an exciting prospect, and Little Town Hero proves the venerated developer still knows how to get weird. The entire adventure takes place in a single town, with turn-based fights in its snaking streets as local villagers throw food, ideas, and chickens at you to help take down the intimidating monsters that threaten their peace. While overly slow pacing and some occasionally aggravating randomization had me questioning whether I’d made a huge mistake in picking it up initially, Little Town Hero soon recovered thanks to a charming story and one of the cleverest and quirkiest JRPG combat systems I’ve used in years.
You play as a young boy in an adorable village where no one is ever allowed to leave – so, of course, his one dream in life is to bail as soon as he possibly can. It’s a fairly typical JRPG story, full of monsters and magic shuffled together with quests about finding the right gift for your crush, but the dialogue is surprisingly funny and well-written throughout. As I said before, it truly is charming, plus the events in the last few hours of the roughly 15 it took to beat made me realize I’d become more invested than I thought.
You can flip through some screenshots from Little Town Hero in the gallery above!
Little Town Hero is fairly linear, with a handful of brief but amusing side quests to distract you sprinkled around. Quests usually consist of simply walking to different areas of town to talk to people or find objects, and there are no random combat encounters at all to slow down your progress between scripted battles. I liked that this made every fight feel like an event, with monsters positioned as proper boss fights tied into the story. However, that does mean there’s also a fair number of filler fights to break up all the talking, the bulk of which involve your rival, Mattock, abruptly challenging you to fisticuffs in the middle of whatever you are doing (sometimes multiple times in a row), adding a bit of needless repetition.
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Thankfully, the turn-based combat system Little Town Hero is built on is so cool that I was generally grateful for the added opportunities to play with it. It’s delightfully strange and unique: idea bubbles pop up around your character that you can spend energy on to solidify into the attacks they represent, and then you pit those attacks against your enemies’ own moves. Each attack (apart from the blue ones that are essentially spells) has a damage and health value, with options like beefy shields that can soak up hits, AOE moves to hit multiple enemy attacks at once, or mediocre attacks that provide buffs to your others when activated. If you can carefully plan out your match-ups and break all of your opponent’s attacks in a turn then you get an opportunity to hit their body for actual damage.
It’s a simple system with a whole lot of choice, and at times it could feel like doing math homework as I calculated the damage of my ideas and measured them against my enemy’s planned moves. But cleverly formulating a strategy that wasn’t immediately apparent, like activating one idea to raise the attack of another just enough to barely defeat a high-health enemy attack, was immensely satisfying. It’s all enhanced by the Mario Party-style board that most fights play out on too, as certain attacks allow you to move more freely around it instead of being bound to a dice roll.
The board adds an extra layer of both planning and flavor as you travel around different parts of the town getting special assistance like buffs or healing from your friends, some of whom you have to unlock through simple side quests. There are also objects like cannons or vicious chickens that can be extremely beneficial, but only if you plan accordingly by making it to them with the specific attack that will activate that object ready – for example, the fragile but powerful Destroy attack can be useful for breaking high-health enemy attacks, but if you save it for a space with an explosive barrel then it will let you do massive damage to every enemy attack and their body at once. In an already-weird combat system, the board has got to be the weirdest part, but I actually ended missing it during the filler fights that occasionally simplified things to a single location.
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It all moves at an authentically small-town pace, which is to say tediously slowly. A sluggish UI and ponderous animations can make otherwise-exciting fights feel downright sleepy at times. Indicators for how damage is dealt, what special effects have activated, or even what turn number it is all just slow things down. I already spent so long mathing out my turn that having to sit through the animations behind those choices afterward got on my nerves. I quickly longed for an option to skip these, or at least speed up what I’d already seen a thousand times, but neither is possible.
That’s not to imply the attack animations themselves are bad, they just take their sweet time. Little Town Hero really looks great, measuring up well against JRPGs that are much bigger than it. Its special mid-combat villager abilities especially standing out with one of my favorites coming from your best friend Nelz, who will fall asleep, be woken up by a lightbulb appearing above his head as he has an idea, then pluck that bulb out of the air and throw it like a weapon. The big monsters you have to face are all fantastically designed, too, ranging from a snarling humanoid beast with twisted horns to a giant spike-tentacled whale to a creepy possessed doll come to life.
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I enjoyed looking at all of it, but being held hostage by animations also makes a handful of punishing, randomized enemy abilities exponentially more frustrating. Bad coin flips against a giant carnivorous plant monster (easily the most infuriating fight in Little Town Hero) randomly disabled the one attack I needed to win during a turn multiple times, which just feels awful. Effects like this don’t undermine the strategy at play, but the prospect of losing half an hour into a fight and having to restart through no fault of my own is an excruciatingly daunting one.
Things smoothed out a little bit once I got deeper into Little Town Hero’s simple skill tree. While you never get new attacks, you can level up the ones you have in meaningful ways, like adding the extremely valuable Pierce effect to sneak in some extra damage. I also started thinking of each boss as a puzzle to solve: you have to drastically alter your strategy to play around each monster’s overpowered attacks – like an ogre with an entirely invincible move that’s only breakable if you land on certain spaces of the board, forcing me to save otherwise-powerful abilities until I could get there. But I did enjoy finding those strategies, even when I was waiting to play as much as actually playing.