Adventure games have always been my cup of tea because I like following the story of a hero, and these sorts of games can really do a good job of creating a character you love. It’s true though, that adventure games can be thin on the ground on the iPhone, so it’s always a joy to find a fun game with an involving story and a protagonist with whom you can really identify.
NCSoft’s recent title My Little Hero brings back all of the nostalgia of playing adventure games on early Nintendo consoles while injecting a fresh artistic sensibility to the genre. Swashbuckling sword fights and feats of daring do to save your comrades from evil are the order of the day in My Little Hero.
Set off for Adventure
The game begins when our protagonist is being tucked up in his bed by his mom and she rather creepily warns “My Little Hero” to look out for the Boogeyman. No sooner is she gone than an evil presence fills the room and his stuffed animal companion and best friend is whisked away by the very Boogeyman the little hero’s mom had warned him about.
The little hero has his helmet and sword and is ready for adventure.
And this is the point where my own mom got stuck. She thought she was supposed to follow the Boogeyman into the closet, which you do eventually, but first you have to grab your sword and helmet, of course! What hero can sally forth to adventure without his tools of the hero-ing trade? Before setting off, if you peek in your toy box, you’ll see all of your other friends have been kidnapped, too, and are at the mercy of the creepy Boogeyman.
The Business of Being a Hero
Getting around in the game is fairly intuitive. Your place your left thumb on a symbol that functions like a traditional video game controller directional pad, the cross or circle on game controllers that moves you around. You can make your little hero do the basics of back and forth and diagonal movement, but you can also do quick spins and about-faces, as well. Just walking around can get pretty hairy though, as the control is pretty small, and your thumb is likely to be a bit larger. Movement can be hard to manage, especially when you’re trying to avoid enemies or are in the middle of a swordfight.
A creepy plant attacks the protagonist.
There’s a single action button, controlled by your right thumb. Most of the time, it will look like a little explosion but it will switch shapes as your available action changes. With such limited screen real estate, it’s nice to only have one button to control, and things would become very confusing quickly if you had to manage too many buttons in the middle of a battle. Still, if you stand near too many action items at a time, you have to be conscious that your thumb is doing what you want it to do, as the action button may change without you realizing it.
The gameplay is a lot of fun and reminiscent of Zelda, but on a much smaller scale. You chop at grass to replenish your “hearts” and gain currency — buttons in this case. The difficulty builds with each stage, and enemies are added to test your swordfighting skills. Most of the combat really just devolves into button mashing though, requiring you to do little more than repeatedly press the action button until the enemy is dead.
A Stitched Together World
The game looks fabulous, and the stitched-together friends and enemies seem to fit perfectly inside the imagination of a little boy exploring the recesses of his closet. Checkpoints are nightstands, as if our hero is safe once his bedside light is flicked on. However, the environments quickly become repetitive. I could only wander around in the forest for so long before I wanted to go underwater or up to the sky or to another sort of forest.
The environments and the enemies really look like they're out of a little boy's head.
Each stage really is a little puzzle. Beyond slaughtering enemies and collecting buttons, you’ll have to work out how to move your little hero through the sometimes maze-like forest to reunite with your friends, the stolen stuffed animals. The big hurdle is making it past the various obstacles thrown up in front of you. Picket fences are placed in your path, and you have to figure out how to remove them to make it out of the area and to the next stage.
Things that Didn’t Work
I found as I played through My Little Hero that I ran into some problems with the movement and button mechanics. He was sometimes just a pain to move around and would go any direction but the one I’d planned. I often found my hero running straight into danger when I wanted him to do anything but, or he would suddenly attack a tree when he had three enemies, my intended targets, at his back.
My hero is on the wrong end of an enemy's sword.
If I stood too close to something I could pick up or open while I was in the middle of a battle, I would pick the item up and get clobbered while my hands were full and couldn’t use my sword. While I don’t see an easy fix, the single button that switches so easily among actions caused my hero to get creamed while I held onto bolts or opened doors instead of swinging my sword.
Conclusion
The puzzles in My Little Hero can be challenging, but not excessively so. The graphics, while repetitive and even monotonous, are charming and provoked a feeling of nostalgia, as did the old-school adventure gameplay. The controls could use some work, but with the caveats that this little hero sometimes goes where he wants to regardless of what you had planned and that the scenery plays second fiddle to the rest of the game, I would recommend this game to any iOS adventure game fan.