Who Knew Returning to School Could Be So Much Fun?: A Class of Heroes: Anniversary Edition Review

By Manuel

Players: 1
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PC

I'm a huge fan of the classic dungeon crawling RPG series Class of Heroes, and I was excited to hear that the first two games in the series were getting updated releases for modern platforms. Out now on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch by way of PQube Entertainment, we're going to be taking a look at both games as they are on the Nintendo Switch. This review is going to be for the first game, but I'll be getting around to the second one soon enough. Enough with intros, let's get into it!

No pressure at all...

The default party members aren't good.

Even though the name implies that the game is going to be in a classroom setting, I don't think most players will realize how literally the developers take that premise until they get into the game. Class of Heroes puts you into the shoes of a first year student in the recently-opened Particus Academy, and the goal of this Academy is to train young recruits into battle-ready adventurers. There is no main character that you play as, instead you seem to be a third-party student who assembles and leads various groups of other students into the dungeons that surround the campus. Class of Heroes does give you some basic characters to start with, but I found them to not be very optimized. That said, it'll take a long time for new players to understand the ins and outs of character creation, so you'll most likely be stuck with them early on. Even though the characters you play as are all something resembling blank slates, there is an entire roster of NPCs that make of the teachers and other residents of the Academy. These include the drunk dwarf healer at the infirmary, the always hungry Vice Principal Ryna, the somewhat hunky elf Dox who works in the Lab, and your cute classmate Sara. Fans of dungeon crawlers like the Wizardry series are most likely familiar with this story-lite form of gameplay, but it might put off players new to the genre. Rather than judge the game for not really revealing what it's really "about" until well past the beginning, I think it's worth looking at how well it integrates its premise into the standard dungeon crawler formula. Personally, I think it succeeds on that front, as you'll find that most of your quests come in the form of lessons from your teachers, and even the more advanced ones never forget that you're still a student in the academy. While this game will most likely never win any awards for its storytelling, it does a really good job with worldbuilding and in giving you reasons to care about the characters you encounter.

Sara is best girl.

An easy starting battle.

Before we jump into discussing gameplay, I have to get something off my chest right away. I loved Class of Heroes way back when it released on the PSP over a decade ago, and I put countless hours into it back then. It's a great game that I have lots of fond memories playing well into the night. This remake does do a great job of recapturing that magic, but it doesn't bring much else to the table. I'm not one to complain too much when a re-release doesn't add a lot of new content if it does a good job with the base game, but the problem with this release is that it's releasing at the same time as the remake of Class of Heroes 2. It probably goes without saying that Class of Heroes 2 is the far better game in the series, as it's essentially an enhanced version of this first game. (Owing to the fact that this series has always been more focused on gameplay over story.) This is made even more complicated by the fact that a lot of releases of this game come bundled with its sequel. Reviewing it on its own is a task I'm more than up to, but I find it hard to be unbiased when I know that there's a much better version of the same game just around the corner. Anyhow, I wanted to get that out of the way now since I'm sure I'll be referring back to how this game falls short of its sequel many times in the review, and I need readers to understand how similar the two games really are. I'll try to keep it to a minimum though, and even I have to admit that there are quite a few things that keep Class of Heroes unique from the other games in its series.

Taking quests is how you move the story forward.

Why so many monsters!?!?!

Discussing gameplay in Class of Heroes is both simple and complicated, as mentioning what it offers is easy enough, but every in-game system has a depth to it that you'll have to experience for yourself to truly understand. The entire game takes place in first person, with all the non-dungeon exploring sections being handled mainly in the form of menus. After you create your characters, or accept the ones you're given by default, you then assemble a party of up to six adventures with which you'll be doing all your adventuring with. Each character has a class, race, and alignment, with several of them being unique to this game. It'll take me far too long to explain them all, but rest assured you're getting far more than the standard Humans, Elves, and Dwarves here. Classes are also fairly unique as while you have standards like fighter, thief, and mage, they're also mixed in with more unique classes like the summoner and the valkyrie. All classes require a stat minimum to go into, so that means that some races are better suited to some classes than others. If you're dead set on creating a specific race/class type, then you'll have to spend time levelling up in an adjacent class until you hit the stat minimum. Oh, and I'm using terms like "character class" for simplicities sake, but the game refers to their class system as "courses". Each character has a set amount of money and equipment which you'll have to get used to as it'll take quite a while before you're able to afford any upgrades. With all that in place, you're ready to begin the extremely long journey of seeing your party grow strong enough so they're not wiped out from a single badly timed encounter.

The stuff you do in the Academy is pretty self-explanatory, and mainly things one would do in any town in any other RPG, so I'm going to focus a bit more on the dungeon exploring here. This makes sense of course, as that's what you'll be doing the most of in-game. Each time you enter the dungeon, you have a chance of coming into it via one of several entrances. This is important as some of these entrances offer far easier challenges than others. There's no readily viewable automap in game, but there is a spell that brings one up temporarily if you have the character class that's able to cast it. Random encounters can happen with each step, but some battles happen on pre-determined spaces indicated by crossed swords. Combat is usually taken in waves, where only the frontlines of both the party and the enemies are able to attack. In terms of your own party, the frontline are the first three characters in line that you'll see on the left side of the screen. The back three characters act as support, and they can only use ranged attacks or magic if they have them available. These same rules apply to large groups of monsters, though they have the ability to change rows in the middle of combat. Since this game leans heavily on the uber-hard gameplay style of the Wizardry series, don't expect battles to simply go your way if you keep up with your strongest attacks. Strategies are often needed for even the simplest of monster groupings, and you'll find that you have to run back to the Academy to rest after every battle or two. This latter point is made even more troublesome when you realize that healing your characters directly is prohibitively expensive. Instead you're going to want to have your priest heal you with their spells and then rest for free (or for far less if you're outside of the academy) to regain their spell slots. This plays a lot like old school Dungeons & Dragons, right down to the lack of an MP system. By the time you survive several battles, you'll start to notice that you don't get a lot of rewards for beating battles. That's right, experience and money are both in rather short supply, with the latter basically being limited to selling off found loot for the entire first section of the game. While this does make Class of Heroes a rather difficult game, it isn't without its own brand of fun.

The world of Class of Heroes.

This is the easiest class in the game.

I probably scared away a lot of potential players by laying out the game's brutal difficulty and unforgiving nature, but make no mistake, Class of Heroes doesn't pull any punches and I'm not exaggerating in the slightest. Things cans actually prove to be so difficulty that you can actually get yourself stuck in a dungeon, without enough resources to properly find your way out. Thankfully (I guess?) there's an entire mechanic that centers on retrieving lost party members by creating and sending in an entire second team. This was something I was very familiar with during my time with the game on the PSP, and I'll admit that I had to do it early on when I lost my initial party (made up of the default characters) in the second dungeon of the game. While this may sound like anything but fun, there is a sense of accomplishment once you realize that you've built your party up to the point where they're crushing monsters that formerly gave them trouble. Let's not focus on the fact that it'll take several hours of gameplay before you get to that point. That's actually one of the biggest problems I have with Class of Heroes versus Class of Heroes 2, the time it takes for you to be in the "tutorial" part of the game. Depending on how you play, it can take between 5-10 hours just to get strong enough to finish the initial batch of quests, courses, and dungeons. It's all very slow going and it won't be until several dungeons in that monsters will start dropping enough money and loot for you to even upgrade your equipment, or even think about playing around with things like the alchemy system. There are some quirks that can speed the process along, but it really should be marked as a detriment of the game that one of the best ways to get through the early sections is by essentially cheating. There's a very deep game here for those willing to put in the time, but the question is whether anyone is willing or able to.

These coordinates are so hard to follow.

Ominous? Maybe.

Even though I have some misgivings about playing Class of Heroes in a modern setting, there's no denying that this is a great looking game. The monster and character designs are all on point, and the anime style is the best the JRPG genre has to offer. There's even some unique touches to the world that are easy to miss early on. While the game offers a cat-people race in the form of the Felpurr that I'm sure everyone will love, it also has a dog-like race in its take on dwarves. They're not the only one to be different than what you'd expect either, as the gnomes are actually doll-like automatons, and this send-up of classic fantasy tropes can be seen in several of the monster types too. Admittedly there really isn't anything in the game that could count as animation, but it looks so great that you probably won't notice that most of it is made up of static images. Speaking of static images, one of the coolest things included in this version of the game has to be the image gallery that's available from the options menu. This gallery features tons of concept art, manga panels, and all sorts of promotional pieces taken from various points in the game's life. I spent so much time perusing the gallery, and my only gripe with it has to be that I can't just save the pictures to my hard drive so I can have them accessible outside of playing the game. Since I feel like I'm raving about the game's visuals a bit too much here, I guess I can point out the only real issue I had with them in general: the lack of variety in character portraits. For a game that all but requires to create several party members in order to complete it, I found it very odd that you're only given two portraits for each race, one for male and one for female. There isn't even any variant for classes, even though all the portraits seem to show them in their "default" one. That's not really a big issue though, and it's one of the few that's shared with its sequel.

The sound design in Class of Heroes is a mixed, as I feel it's somehow one of the strongest aspects of the game, yet also one of the weakest. Going for the positives first, the game features a very robust soundtrack that doesn't have a single bad track included. The school themes are relaxing, the dungeon themes are ominous, and the battle themes get the blood boiling. There's even a cool song for the opening cutscene. I have no complaints at all when it comes to the game's music, and that same sentiment extends to the sound effects too. Sound effects are often overlooked, but Class of Heroes has some thwacks and bangs that really make it feel like damage is being done to whoever is on the receiving end of attacks. There's even some monster battle and death cries that live rent free in my head even now. Simply put, there's a lot to love about the sound design but it does have one big flaw: a lack of voice acting. Let me start by pointing out that there are indeed some vocal bits here and there, mainly in the form of battle cries and the like, but the game is pretty much silent for most of its runtime. I know it's unfair to keep comparing it to Class of Heroes 2, but it's so jarring to experience that game being fully voice acted, and then coming back here to nothing but silently scrolling text. Back during the game's original PSP release, I didn't notice nor care that there wasn't any voice acting, but seeing as these two games are being released simultaneously, I can't help but feel that it's yet another aspect that makes the first game feel inferior to the second. The lack of voice acting is by no means a deal breaker of course, but I can't help but wish the developers went that extra mile for this re-release.

My all-new rescue party.

I did remake Alavic a few times though.

If you're planning on picking up Class of Heroes on its own, you're looking at a very long game. It may not seem like it'll take a long time to complete the core questline, but you'll quickly realize that much of your time will be spent making refining and retooling your party. Class changes will come and go, and you'll probably end up shuffling between a dozen characters. I bring all this up mainly in regards to the game's longevity. Even if you speed through the game, you're looking at a very old school-esque time of about 50+ hours. You can easily spend more time on the game than that of course, and I'm pretty sure I logged upwards of 100 hours back on the PSP. This leads me to what I'm sure is my last point of comparison between this game and Class of Heroes 2: its gameplay loop. If you're looking for a hardcore dungeon crawler that is tough-as-nails and gives no quarter, then you might enjoy this game more. If you want a far more balanced experience, that feels like it's more aware that your time is precious, then you might want to skip this game altogether for its sequel. One can argue that you can just play both, but these aren't story-rich games, there's really no reason to play one over the other beyond preferring their gameplay styles. No matter how you look at it though, this is quite a long game and it's very much worth its $19.99 asking price.

Joru is my favorite.

We know what we're all here for!

If you're a fan of dungeon crawlers, and want your games to be a bit more on the old-school Wizardry side of the difficulty spectrum, then you're going to want to grab Class of Heroes: Anniversary Edition. It's a great game that offers up a very challenging gameplay experience. If you're looking for something a bit more casual though, then you're probably better off picking up Class of Heroes 2 instead. This all of course only really applies if you plan on purchasing each game separately, as there are physical and digital collections that bundle them together. Maybe go with that latter option and get the full Class of Heroes experience. If you choose to play the first game though, be sure to clear out your week, because you're going to be here a while!

Check Out Class of Heroes: Anniversary Edition on Nintendo Switch:
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/class-of-heroes-anniversary-edition-switch/

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Story: B
Gameplay: B-
Graphics: A
Music/Sound: B-
Value: A

Overall: B

Pros:
+ A great chance to revisit a classic PSP dungeon crawling RPG on modern consoles.
+ Lots of character customization and creation options in terms of stats and abilities.
+ A challenging, difficult game that feels rather unique even in its own series.
+ Excellent art design, visuals, and music make this game pleasurable to all the senses.
+ Lots of content at a very reasonable price.

Cons:
- Is somewhat hard to recommend picking this one up on its own when Class of Heroes 2 is also available.
- There are some gameplay elements, like the class change mechanic, that feel a bit too complicated for their own good.
- Difficulty spikes are all over the place, and it's easy to get yourself stuck in a dungeon.
- The lack of voice acting really stands out here.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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A man after my own heart!

#ClassOfHeroes