G’day, mate!

Why was it called Astralia? And why was it awful!?

Nekketsu Tairiku Burning Heroes might go down as one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Its final score will be less than middling, and there certainly are worse games I’ve played. But this was, perhaps, the most frustrating one. The repetitive, unrewarding, and bland gameplay, without any redeeming qualities, made this an absolutely miserable experience. 

The music is perfectly fine. There are four different overworld songs depending on which of the eight characters you’re playing as, but they’re not exactly memorable. Town themes are… whatever. You don’t spend much time in these places, so they leave no impact. Dungeon tracks are accompanied by the same puzzles, so your brain is turned off while you listen. 

The graphics are of a similar quality. Playable character sprites look interesting, but you quickly realize they’re just borderline palette swaps. Many of their battle sprites stand and sway the same way. And I feel there’s only about six (unnamed) NPC world sprites. They add a cloak to a few in one town! Even a few generic bosses share the same knockoff Gilgamesh model. And that includes the most important one. Considering the lack of variety in towns and the limited number of dungeons, there’s no reason for this. Dungeons at least look different, but you visit all of them four times, so it doesn’t matter. They could be Tales dungeons, but you don’t want to do any of them more than you have to. 

Gameplay doesn’t wow you either. You only control one person in battle. “Okay!“ I thought before playing this. “I played Emerald Dragon and loved it! This is fine.” If your person is a warrior, then all you can do is attack or use an item. “Atrushan could only attack, so NBD!“ Burning Heroes is a traditional turn based rpg… No skills, no options, no fun. Mages have access to eight spells, but there’s no memory cursor option, so it’s more efficient to just spam attack and hold down your fast forward button. The one thing to note is that you can change your battle formation. This noticeably changes your stats. Certain forms give bonuses to attack, magic, defense, or hit percentage. These would be interesting if your attacks didn’t miss so often, forcing you to only use accuracy forms, or if enemies telegraphed big moves, giving you a heads up to go defensive. Defensive forms also nerf your attack stat so much that it’s not worth it. You also can’t manually move your five characters around in the formation, but they love to randomly move themselves when they level up. This leaves you with your mages taking the front line. I don’t know if being in front means anything, mind you, but it feels wrong. But, hey, there’s a sort of limit break mechanic, which is nice. 

But here’s the worst part of the game. It’s the story. You play as one of eight people (four are unlocked) as they roam around the world, fighting evil, uncovering ancient mysteries, and killing a wannabe god. Sounds cool, right? Live a Live was an amazing game because of that narrative route. Treasure of Rudra was hella rad when they all came together at the end! So Burning Heroes is gonna… No! Burning Heroes doesn’t tell one story from eight perspectives. It tells eight stories about one thing. It’s like those Bob’s Burgers episodes when the kids tell their side of the same story, but with hilarious differences that don’t make sense. However, they’re just too funny, so everyone forgets about why they’re in trouble in the first place and moves on. Burning Heroes is like that, but without the humor. The stories don’t even properly interweave between each other. Your playable character always beats the boss, no matter who showed up first. And sometimes that boss is another playable member who’s now failed in their mission. Sometimes characters even die in other stories. So there is no secret ninth chapter that introduces a proper final boss to wrap everything up nicely, like Live a Live. It isn’t even eight totally different stories like the SaGa games. It’s eight contradictory stories about one villain, with one of three evil side groups thrown in to mix it up. No idea what happens to the other two evil groups in other stories, by the way!

And it’s a shame. The stories themselves are interesting. Naga had some cool beats, Rouga had a heartwrenching moment, and Shen had a neat face turn. Each character gets a lot of loops and twists in their two hour long missions (if you remove random encounters, boost exp, and grant unlimited money). But they’re so short and poorly written. Each character has nearly the exact same personality as the other seven: they’re all hot heads who read the thesaurus. Two are different, so shoutout to Shen and Mevis. And all the enemies shout the same tired insults. In fact, the writing/translation doesn’t help anything, and this is the worst written game I’ve seen. And it takes something truly terrible for me to even notice a poorly written game. I’ve mentioned that everyone has the same personality, but there’s no consistency. Some enemies speak to other MCs differently than others. They shout insults at one, but fall in love with another for no obvious reason. And in another story, they’ll be a bumbling idiot. There’s also a lack of proofreading here. Sometimes the villain is called Project D, but they’re also referred to as Project 8. WTF is that 8? Towards the end, the team just gave up and left in spelling mistakes and garbled text, or didn’t even bother writing anything once. A part of me wonders if the translators knew this game sucked, so they had a lark with it or something. It’s also downright offensive in a few areas, which you might just chalk up to being 2012 humor. A dark time, that was. 

The idea of a sparsely told story about warring factions (from twenty years ago), a demon from space (seven years ago), and a trifecta of boss groups (presently) being controlled by an evil demon as revenge from Earthlings on the current planet (unknown) fighting over a plot of land in space named Astralia sounds fun! But the gameplay is so boring, the story is so awful, and the writing offends you multiple times over. And why do the characters who fill out each group get zero reason to join you? There’s an idea of something when they ask you to bring them on, but it goes nowhere. A part of me wonders if leaving free spaces in the group will change the story into something competent, but I don’t care. I’ve wanted to drop this for four days. But I was hopeful that there’d be a proper wrap up. There isn’t. This isn’t even the worst game I’ve ever played, even though it feels like it should be. Nekketsu Tairiku Burning Heroes gets 21 out of 50 points. Its weighted score is 61.17, making it the fourth worst. It can’t even suck properly. 

Being on Deathwise. I embrace him at this point.