Class of Heroes is a series of grid-based first-person dungeon crawlers -- a genre that used to be popular (think Wizardry, Might & Magic, etc.), but has largely fallen by the wayside in the West, though it's still kept alive somewhat in Japan. One such Japanese series, maybe the most famous, is Etrian Odyssey, but that's not the subject of today's Gaming Corner. Today we're talking about a lesser-known series: Class of Heroes. The first Class of Heroes was released in the US by Atlus USA in 2009, and the sequel Class of Heroes 2 was brought to US audiences by Gaijinworks in 2013. A remaster of the first two games in one package was recently released on the Switch (and probably Steam but I don't have a Steam account) which prompted me to replay these games after over a decade.
The Class of Heroes games are a bit of an odd bird. They draw a lot of inspiration for their mechanics from old-school Wizardry games, but aesthetically they have a very cutesy anime artstyle, and the premise is that your characters are students at an adventuring school, studying how to explore labyrinths and fight monsters. It's all very light-hearted and the games rarely take themselves very seriously, although the second game gets surprisingly dark at a few story beats.
The character designs are very cute if you don't mind anime-style art
You start the games by putting together a party of student-adventurers, randomly rolling their stats (these games are oldschool), then choosing a race, class, and portrait. Gameplay-wise, Class of Heroes feels a bit archaic in some ways, especially in the first game, which entails (admittedly often tedious) inventory management on a per-character basis, item identification, semi-randomized level-ups, a system where characters can permanently die when revival attempts fail, and lots and lots of dungeon crawling and fighting random battles. A lot of the random battles can be fought pretty mindlessly and completed quickly by just holding down the A button to have all your characters attack, or occasionally entering another command like having a character raise a magic barrier. Considering the sheer number of random battles, being able to complete most of them quickly like this is actually a blessing.
The faculty and fellow students are the adventuring schools are a true cast of weirdoes
Another oddity of the first game is the boss battles: unlike in a typical RPG where bosses are big bags of HP so you can have a drawn-out fight with them, bosses in CoH1 can very often be taken down in 3, 2, or even 1 round of sustained attacks, but where their deadliness comes into play is they hit back just as hard, often being capable of killing multiple characters with a single attack. Boss battles are therefore often a matter of which side can borderline insta-kill the other first rather than a lengthy, strategic engagement. They also tend to be very RNG-heavy, and some boss battles are basically just a matter of fighting the boss over and over until the gods of random numbers decide to favor you with a win.
The monster designs in Class of Heroes are truly bizarre
Story feels like a secondary consideration in Class of Heroes. For a decent chunk of the game, it hardly seems to have a story at all beyond "Mysterious labyrinths appeared out of nowhere and schools were formed to train adventurers to explore these labyrinths. Your party of adventurers is one such group of students and your objective is to explore the labyrinths, and perform lessons (i.e. quests) which generally entail entering the labyrinths and fighting monsters, finding items, or rescuing lost or fallen adventurers on behalf of your teachers."
The game does eventually develop a plot as you discover a mysterious adventurer named Nina who seems to be trying to protect the labyrinths, artificial "Life Dolls" that try to obstruct your explorations, and an evil sorceress named Demorea who seems to know more about what the labyrinths are about and intends to plunder their secrets for herself. Surprisingly given the simplicity of the story, the game raises some interesting questions about the true nature of the labyrinths and their real purpose, although ultimately it ends up never delivering on these mysteries and leaves them largely unresolved.
There are lots and lots of labyrinthine dungeons to explore
All of that probably makes Class of Heroes sound like a tedious chore to play, and by rights it probably should be. A lot of players would likely find it to be. But for reasons that are almost hard to quantify, I find the whole a lot more enjoyable than the sum of its parts. Exploring the vast labyrinths filled with devious traps and hazards, watching my characters grow, interacting with the silly and quirky NPCs, and watching the story -- such as it is -- unfold together make for a surprisingly fun and addictive experience despite how archaic and rough around the edges the game is.
The second game is fundamentally pretty similar to the first, but improves on it in numerous ways. The inventory system is completely overhauled and is a lot less tedious to deal with. The labyrinths are far more varied, featuring a lot of actually rather beautiful outdoor areas, whereas in the first game every single explorable location was a subterranean dungeon. Whereas the first game lacked any real battle animations, the second game gets some pretty spectacular magical explosions for the attack spells.
Eat necrotic death, witch scum!
The boss battles are done better, with some of them feeling more like proper bosses that can take some punishment and engage in a proper slug-fest, although a well-built party can trivialize a lot of the boss battles until the postgame that unlocks after defeating the final boss, where you can find challenges to threaten even a powerful team. The story is also more fleshed-out, has some interesting beats, character development, and some surprising plot twists, so it's an improvement over the bare-bones plot of the first game -- though it still has a lot of unrealized potential, raising interesting mysteries and plot threads that it never bothers to resolve and leaving some aspects threadbare. Overall, the second game is better than the first in almost every way, but fundamentally it's still the same gameplay at its core, so anyone who hated the first game probably wouldn't be won over by the second.
Personally, I enjoy these games more than is perhaps justified. The combination of light-hearted, cutesy anime presentation, quirky sense of humor, and old-school grid-based first-person dungeon crawling gameplay just works for me. There is a third game, and there were plans to release it to the West, but those fell through due to the first two games' lack of popularity. I find it unlikely the third game will ever be available in English, even unofficially, and that's a shame because I'd definitely be up for playing a third entry in this rough yet lovable series.
