Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes, PC Engine

The Legend of Heroes is the sixth game in the Dragon Slayer series, and the first in The Legend of Heroes franchise. It was developed by Falcom and released initially for the PC-88 – in Japan – in 1989. The PC Engine CD version was localised into English by Hudson Soft and released for the TurboGrafx-CD in North America by Turbo Technologies in 1991. That’s the version I’m showing here.

The Legend of Heroes is much more of a traditional Japanese RPG than previous Dragon Slayer games, which might please some people. It features tiny, cute characters, a scrolling overworld and towns, and turn-based combat against ever more difficult monsters. The story is split into six different chapters, with the current chapter shown at the top of the screen.

You begin the game as Prince Logan, the son of the King in the town of Exile. After a short prologue, the town is attacked, and Prince Logan escapes to solicit the help of his neighbour, King Drax. Unbeknownst to Logan, Drax is behind the attack on Exile and throws him into prison. Prince Logan is then rescued by Sir Ethan, and together they escape into the care of the local Resistance. From there, the adventure begins, with Prince Logan forming a party of up to four characters, fighting random battles with monsters, and ultimately fighting back against the forces of Drax.

The game takes place in a large scrolling world, comprised of a number of continents. Your quest takes you from town to town, through caves, across oceans, and into towers and dungeons. Monster difficulty – at least in the wilderness – is usually marked by bridges, but not always. Usually, crossing a bridge into a new area will result in new encounters, and these can be quite challenging. You need to constantly upgrade weapons and armour, and magic spells, to be able to deal with new monsters. And to do that, you need to earn plenty of money to be able to buy those upgrades (which you do by grinding battles and winning gold in the process).

The Legend of Heroes has some hand-drawn anime-style cut scenes, and also scenes that play out as voice-acted dialogue. The voiced scenes are not particularly well recorded or encoded, and they seem a little out of place compared to the rest of the game’s dialogue, which is text based.

The music in The Legend of Heroes is a mixed bag. Some tunes are okay, while others are tuneless Eighties dirge (some of the music reminded me of the ’80s chart pop artists Go West). Your mileage with the music will depend on your tastes, but you can turn it off if it bugs you.

The Legend of Heroes is addictive and fun to play, but isn’t very original. The combat is fast-paced and can be customised to play out automatically, with toggles on various combat styles (ie. whether to use magic during combat, or healing items). The game has three save slots, and you can also choose to manually distribute character points (into Strength, Intelligence, Speed and Luck), but this is set to automatically distribute points by default because it gives characters a pre-defined balance, and also saves a lot of time.

Overall, I enjoyed playing The Legend of Heroes very much – especially after the disappointing Dragon Slayer V. I initially played the MSX version of the game, but found the PC Engine CD version to be much better. The Legend of Heroes was also released for Super Nintendo, Megadrive, MS-DOS, FM Towns and X68000.