Occidental Heroes 12+

Just Wow!

While I love pixel games, it is hard to captivate me with the more simplistic styles of play. But I have always had a soft spot for text base games where your choices matter and this one is the best so far. The best part is: it is challenging and requires you to be very strategic. You can’t accept every single quest all the time. You can’t spend your whole game instigating all the fights possible until you are strong enough. Plus there is n incentive to retire your seasoned fighters and train up characters you meet along the way. I just found this game today and have probably played it for 7 hours. I can’t stop! The commercials pop up just infrequently enough that I don’t feel unvalued as a customer. It actually makes me want to pay to support the game without feeling like I got baited and switched (some free games are impossible to enjoy without paying). Really hope this game keeps expanding or that the dev makes another game that is similar. UPDATE: There does seem to be a glitch where I can no longer view the top bar when I go into town. Kind of hard to make informed purchases without access to that info.

Developer Response ,

You can swipe down the part of the screen where it tells you the current location. Just make sure to swipe from low enough (like where it says the sublocation like The Fight Pits or The Piazza) so it doesn't swipe down your phone's notifications. I'll disable the swiping functionality in the next update, it was made with 4" phones in mind and those are rare these days.

Masterpiece in developing

The game is fenomenal, the art atyle, the stories, the choices, the map, everything hit the the right spot for me. The mechanic is extremely easy to understand and get into, your choices does have weight to it which directly affect the outcomes, which in turn help each run unique from another. Though as it is still in developement (I hope) the game is quite "short" as once your team pick up the xps and upgrades, they kind of snow ball almost everyfight as the AI leave much to be desires. I only found this gem ~2 days ago and I already racked quite an embarassing amount of playtime already. One last grief I have with the game though is that once your party all finished their goals, you have to depart with them to recruit new ones to do their quest line which in turn drop the fire power of the team tremendously as the new guy not only is underlevel and geared, but the enemies are stronger as well.

Great game, but too punishing

This game has great gameplay, good story arks and brilliant dialogue. It is a jewel of a game. BUT…it has one massive flaw. Occidental Hero’s is way to punishing. If a character drops to zero they are permanently gone. While this may not sound like a massive problem, as this is realistic, it is crushing to constantly have to replace your party members makes advancing impossible. And yes, I know that there is a chance to revive a fallen member if you have a fencer with the army surgeon background, but fencers are almost always the first ones to die in a fight, so the surgeon can’t revive themselves because they are dead.

I think the best way to fix this would be giving the character a major penalty due to injury when they drop to zero HP, but not killing them unless the whole party falls to zero. The surgeon would now have a fifty-fifty chance to now have an injury. Maybe an injury would give a character a 50% penalty to all stats, for 20 moves, or something like that.

Thanks for reading my comment. I hope it proved useful to both devs and potential buyers.