Every once in a while, a game comes out that provides a giant step forward for the industry. Pong, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Gran Turismo, Resident Evil, and Grand Theft Auto III all mark significant moments in gaming history. For modern gamers, these historic titles are more than just games that belong in some dusty old book; rather, they are our classics. For anyone who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the 8-bit era is easily a front runner in providing us with that ‘warm ‘n-fuzzy’ gaming feeling.
If you long for the days of insubstantial narratives, pixellated visuals and an overall old school quality to the proceedings, you’ll be happy to know that 3D Dot Game Heroes is retro to its core – and we mean that in both good and bad ways. We’ve been playing this PlayStation 3 exclusive, developed by Silicon Studio, for a little while now, and we have come to question what constitutes as theft and what constitutes as homage (but, that’s for another article).
3D Dot Game Heroes is everything we loved about the retro, 8-bit era of gaming. But, to say it bears a striking resembled to The Legend of Zelda is a strong understatement. In coverage of 3D Dot Game Heroes, you will likely hear numerous comparisons (and some questions) to Link’s epic adventures.
In case you don’t understand where these comparisons come from, here’s why. You play as a hero in the Dotnia Kingdom, where an evil bishop has stolen an orb that holds the Dark King Onyx. As the hero, you are tasked with finding different orbs throughout the land, discovering the legendary sword that doomed Onyx into his orb, and saving the world – easy enough? This is a bit of a play on Link’s search for the Triforce, but the story is only a small reason why this game is drenched in Zelda nostalgia.
Yup, the main character gets a boomerang. Yup, you’ll get a bow ‘n arrow, a candle, rings, a sword, a shield, hearts, a grappling device, little green bottles of magic, and you’ll explore several dungeons filled with familiar enemies and the classic “step on this” or “push this block” style of puzzles.
We’ve played through the first three dungeons and are happy to report that, despite the game feeling like a reboot of The Legend of Zelda, it’s a ton of fun to play and will get any retro fan excited. The game looks and sounds charming, and the combat is simplistic, but the enemies can actually be tough, making you pine for an extra slot of hearts.
As we stumbled through our first dungeon, we felt like we had been here before. But the last time we remember playing this level we were wearing Chuck Taylors and listening to MC Hammer. No, in truth, our first walk through 3D Dot Game Heroes’ dungeon felt quite familiar, but it was fresh enough to make us want to venture forth into the next one.
Just by chance, we happened to show this game to someone too young to have spent hours with friends playing NES as a kid – that is, when our only gaming options were SEGA or Nintendo. This retro-virgin was actually impressed, but for very different reasons than as to why we enjoyed the game. You see, 3D Dot Game Heroes is the kind of game anyone can jump in and play, without having to do all that much to make the experience enjoyable. Whereas the games our loyal readers are familiar with, modern FPS, RPGs, racing and sports games all require at least a general sense of gaming, 3D Dot Game Heroes is enjoyable even if you are not a huge videogame fan.
The good news for us who love gaming: 3D Dot Game Heroes is addicting, adorable, fun to play, and will probably bring a lot of people back to a simpler time. You’ll have to wait until May 11 to get your hands on Silicon Studio’s retro-fabulous action-adventure game, but until then, stay tuned for more coverage of the game here at PSU in the coming weeks.