Hero Seekers by developer Vanguard and publisher KEMCO—PS5 review written by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Welcome to
the New Year everybody. It’s time to kick off with a new Kemco title: Hero
Seekers! A story set in a world of heroes who battle against the evil demon
king to protect humankind. This is a turn-based retro style RPG with a blend of old
Kemco title mechanics and some interesting twists, so let’s take a look at what
Hero Seekers has to offer.
Our story follows Lunette, a girl who fought the Demon King along with her two companions. Unfortunately she awakens afterwards to discover the Demon King is alive and history has changed. As the only one who remembers the past, Lunette sets out to recover the forgotten past and to bring down the Demon King for good.
Hero
Seekers is a fairly traditional turn-based RPG setup, where you have a party of
up to four frontliners and a reserve unit that you can swap out in battle.
Battle is done through a turn order based around unit speed, and every
character can act once per turn, although enemies can have more than one
action. You have your standard attack, skill, defend, and item options, but there
are also some quality of life additions to combat mechanics. There is an
autobattle feature as well as a speed of battle toggle where you can vastly
increase the pace of combat, making those grinding sessions a little easier.
Hero
Seekers takes an interesting twist as you explore the land trying to figure out
what is going on with the Demon King and how reality is different than what
Lunette remembers. She will discover former heroes trapped in a prison of
memory, and then summon them forth to aid her. Yup, you can summon heroes in a
sort of quasi-gacha system. In various chests, as well as occasionally from
battles, you will get memory stones. Ten memory stones can be used at a
monument to summon a hero of the past.
When you
summon heroes, you can get multiple of the same hero, increasing their stats
and passive abilities, as well as improving skills or letting you learn them
earlier. Thankfully for me and anyone else with poor luck, the hero pulls are
from a limited pool, so you can burn through the common heroes to get the rare
ones. Furthermore you can select a hero to “aim for”, increasing the appearance
chance, even if you haven’t gotten a copy of them yet.
The basic
overarching gameplay will consist of Lunette and her party visiting a town,
deciding to help out with something, and then going off to find a dungeon on
the world map to get through, all the while getting into random battles. Pretty
standard fare, and if you’ve played a Kemco game in this style before, you’re
pretty sure about what you’re going to get. Equally fair warning where it’s
due, a lot of the assets in Hero Seekers you can find in other more recent
Kemco titles as well. They aren’t bad, and they do have a dynamic style to
them, but they definitely are reused from other games. The music too. Unlike
some of the other Kemco titles, there is no “shop” for special weapons or
items, although there is a merchant who will trade memory stones for items if
you’re so inclined. This means you can’t turn yourself into a chapter one
walking nuke, but I think I prefer this to rolling a post-game strength weapon
in the “store” and then rolling over all the enemies.
I say this
to let you know that Hero Seekers is a pretty generic title, but that doesn’t
mean it’s bad. I was actually quite fond of the storyline, and found the unique
aspect of the Demon Lord’s power, how it’s applied, and the struggles of the
past heroes to be rather well presented. While the theme around what most of
the past heroes struggled with isn’t exactly unique, I’d say it’s often either
underplayed or not utilized enough in most literature or media, so it was a
refreshing experience.
I should
warn you that some of the bosses can be pretty tough. When they do a sizable
chunk to your health per hit and can take multiple actions, if they focus on
one character you’re in for a bad time. You may need to pay more attention to
the turn order that also indicates what the enemies will do in order to prepare
yourself.
Overall
Hero Seekers is a pretty fun title with some interesting themes about heroes
and their struggles. While certainly not award winning, Hero Seekers also
doesn’t fall flat in any major areas either. The hero lottery is surprisingly
reasonable, the combat system is pretty fluid with some nice quality of life
aspects, and the sprite and music is decent, although somewhat reused from
other similar titles. Overall, I’d recommend picking up Hero Seekers if you’re
looking for an older style RPG that doesn’t require heavy investment.
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