Played Dragon Quest Heroes for the first time tonight. This has to be the slowest-paced musou game, in terms of getting all the various game play elements, that I've ever played. It took a solid hour for all of the mechanics to be introduced and initially I was pretty bored with the game. You start out killing a few enemy types with a very limited moveset and then mindlessly slash away at a dragon boss after a few levels. But as various systems started getting introduced, things got a lot more fun.
You start off by selecting either a male or female main character. These appear to be essentially the same characters; the male character has flame-based attacks and the female has ice-based attacks, but the combos and spells appeared to be essentially the same.
After things start opening up, the game plays like this:
-You have typical Koei musou game-style combos.
-You can dodge-roll with R2. X is jump. Some air combos are possible.
-R3 is a lock-on, but only for boss or general-type enemies.
-R1 brings up a spell list. You can have up to four spells at a time. Spells can be done off of combos.
-L1 is guard. however you cannot move and guard at the same time.
-The familiar musou gauge is available. Right now It's just one bar that takes longer to fill up than other musou games. I've only seen the main female's musou-- she powers up and her hair changes, Dragonball-style, and gets stronger attacks, then finishes it off with a super move. It looks pretty cool!
-You can switch between your party members with L2. It looks like it's possible to do multi-character combos, assuming the party members are close enough to the same enemy/enemies.
-When enemies are killed, monster coins will sometimes be dropped. You can pick these up and then use them, just like using items in Samurai Warriors games, to summon these enemies back to fight on your side. You can summon multiple monsters at the same time to assist you. This is fucking awesome.
In between levels, you go back to a camp and can talk to NPCs, buy/sell items, upgrade your skills, and all that good stuff. I'm not sure how much of this is like Dragon Quest but it was pretty easy for me to get a handle on everything as a seasoned musou game player.
Visually the game is impressive in that there can be a large amount of characters on screen with minimal frame rate drops and no enemy pop-in, but the environments I've played in have all been pretty small in scale so far. One level was a giant open field with a large hill. There's a lot of attention to detail, like cloth moving in the background and even enemies relaxing when they're out of range, but the game still reminds me a lot of an "uprezzed PS3 game."
I'm liking this game right now, but I was definitely more impressed with Hyrule Warriors in comparison and so far Hyrule Warriors has this game beat in terms of boss battles. I also miss being able to run or summon a horse. The characters in DQH move just a bit too slow. Maybe another mechanic will be introduced for this.
