Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics Review
by Omar(@siegarettes)
- One Way Heroics
- Developer- Spike Chunsoft
- Publisher- Spike Chunsoft
- PS4, PS Vita, PC (Steam)
While the original Dragon Quest games have largely come to dominate the legacy of developer Chunsoft, the Mystery Dungeon series has provided a quiet historical counter-point. First conceived as a Dragon Quest spinoff, the Mystery Dungeon games arguably did for the roguelike genre what Dragon Quest did for the RPG. It took a complex, systems heavy western genre and stripped it down to its core appeal, creating a surprisingly fully formed console roguelike. In some ways, it feels like the culture of games has just now caught up with the work Chunsoft did on the Mystery Dungeon games. When the original Shiren the Wanderer game finally reached US shores with an port for the Nintendo DS, it still felt modern, despite its Super Famicom roots. Even now entries in the series still quietly sneak out, feeling perfectly at home with the current popularity of indie roguelikes. Spike Chunsoft is not ignorant to this either, if their work on One Way Heroics is anything to go by.
Conceived as a side series to the Mystery Dungeon games, Mystery Chronicles: One Way Heroics is a new roguelike that plays more with the format in comparison to the more traditional mainline series. One Way Heroics itself is an update to a Japanese independent game of the same name, one that saw some popularity among digital games stores such as PLAYISM and Steam. Even with the original release, One Way Heroics was surprisingly fully formed, with smart updates to the genre that address a lot of its issues.
Primary among these updates is the introduction of the Shine Raid, an ever creeping wall of light swallowing everything to the west of the map. A primary element of roguelikes is weighing the search for new resources against the danger of exploring, but at times it results in a crawling pace that’s prone to abrupt endings. By simply pressing you forward with the threat of annihilation, One Way Heroics manages to still maintain the balancing act, but prevent you from spending too much time in any one part of the map. You’ll never be too far from the next crossroads.
Traveling itself takes place on a turn-based grid, so despite the constant impending wall of death, you’ll always have enough time to plan your next move. As long as you proceed with a clear head, you’ll always have an idea of what is within reach, and what your immediate options are. Of course, a clear head is the first thing to go in a dangerous situation. In true roguelike style, I died plenty of times not to unexpected enemies, but to my own hubris.
One Way Heroics gives you plenty of opportunities for hubris as well. Best among these is Alma, the Fallen Angel who’s responsible for the creation of the Shine Raid that hounds you. She’ll periodically appear to attack you, oftentimes before you’re capable of taking her on. When this happens you can either test yourself, trying to at least wear down the layers of her barrier in order to deal real damage, or do your best to escape until a more opportune time, risking heavy damage from behind as you do. In either scenario you’ll need to make good use of your abilities for the most advantage. The most important of these is Awakening, a universal ability that gives you a few free turns without retaliation by enemies. Of course, each ability costs a resource, whether that’s burning through limited charges, using up physical strength, or degrading your weapon. Everything in One Way Heroics is an act of balancing resources that are perpetually ticking down, and you’ll perpetually be forced to compromise to make progress.
All of this carries a heavier weight than usual, as permadeath is in play. Die and you’ll be forced to start again, in a newly generated world. There’s a few concessions that make ease the sting, however. Each run will earn you currency, which will allow you to expand the Dream Vault, where you’ll carry over items from one run to the next. In addition, new classes and skills can be bought, giving you new ways to approach the game (there’s even some cameos by Mystery Dungeon’s Shiren and Naegi from Danganronpa). Granted, progress through unlockables isn’t a new concept for the genre, but here it puts an emphasis on preparation that avoids a common feeling within the genre of being unequipped for the job due to a dice roll.
That focus on preparation is at the core of what makes One Way Heroics feel fresh even among the influx of new entries into the genre. Plenty of roguelikes give you a similar feeling of variety, but often they turn finding a useful, or even practical, set of weapons and abilities into a waiting game. There’s a serious frustration in having a run ended because you continually ran into a combination of items that work poorly together. While you’ll be forced to make plenty of hard compromises in One Way Heroics, you can rarely blame failure on bad luck when you know how many chances you’ve had to prepare before a run even began. Each class has their own strengths and weaknesses, and while some will definitely fare better immediately, they’re always given weapons and abilities that will carry you through most situations. (Some of the later classes, especially the cameo ones, are arguably a bit too useful, but they’re also the most work to unlock). Even when traps and ambushes happen, it’s hard to blame the dice when you know you could have survived if you didn’t toss out that ranged weapon, or were less stingy with your abilities. There’s always another variable you could have accounted for, and you’ll have death to frequently remind you of it.
Beyond the core of combat and resource management, there are plenty of charming touches that hold up One Way Heroics. There are the loading screens that turn tips into short parables with lessons about the game. There’s sharp, fully detailed character art to complement each class, each with three separate variations. There’s the dialogue at the start of each quest that acknowledges the method of your previous demise, setting it up almost as a series of nested dreams. These details are innumerable, many of which were also already present in the original game, but are carried across here with more polish. In a lot of ways, One Way Heroics was from inception a genre refresh that immediately felt thematically and mechanically complete. So it feels appropriate that it would finally settle into a place alongside the Mystery Dungeon games, which did so much work themselves to update the genre. Hopefully it gets the attention it deserves a bit faster than those games did.