Hundred Heroes is a classic “pretty-ass” story, except it’s about an entire army instead of one or two characters. I had no idea what my team would eventually become when I began recruiting more than a hundred unique characters, but as more and more warriors became my companions – from a dual-personality healer with a violent side to a magical girl with a hero complex – this unpredictable journey gradually took shape.
With each chapter, the story grew bigger and bigger, involving more and more countries and characters, and eventually my ragtag group of troops became a real army. The large cast of characters and a large number of side content can cause some bloat, and there are some unfinished and slow elements, such as some highly random battles. But for players willing to stick with it long enough, Hundred Heroes will eventually ignite an amazing fire after a slow start.
The story of Hundred Heroes unfolds from the perspective of a new guard, Nova, who is tasked with launching a joint operation with the Imperial Special Forces. This could have put him in conflict with the Imperial rising star, Sheen, who leads that team, but the two of them form a friendship, which sets the tone for the entire storyline well – opposing camps can reach a compromise, rather than necessarily ending in conflict.
At first, the story structure may be very similar to the standard “Hero’s Journey”, but after gradually peeling off its outer layer, you will find that the protagonists are actually more complex, and you will also begin to understand what they are fighting for.
Unlike the horizontal action game of the prequel spin-off “Hundred Heroes: Rise”, Hundred Heroes is a turn-based RPG. Players control a team of six characters, and can change the participating characters before and after the battle. Each character has different attribute values and skills, which make them different from other characters. For example, “Lian” is a warrior with high attack and low defense; while “Gar” is a solid meat shield, his attack power is also good, but he cannot use magic.
Players need to weigh these pros and cons when building their team, but Hundred Heroes has so many characters to choose from that most of them can be completely ignored. This is an interesting design from a game mechanics perspective, but it also means that some characters have so little role in the plot that they feel like extras.
As the name Hundred Heroes suggests, there are more than 100 characters in the game, and they can fight alongside you or take on some kind of role in your base. It’s a bit like a soldier version of Pokémon, but each character has different joining conditions if you want to complete the collection.
Some may join as soon as the conversation begins, while others require you to find them after you become stronger. Some of these allies will fight alongside you, and some will eventually manage some kind of facility in your base. I had a lot of fun looking for new members who appeared and disappeared between story chapters. In the process, I not only gained valuable materials, but also learned more about the world.
Sometimes, a chapter will force a specific character to fight for the plot, forcing players to try out these new members. Some characters can also team up with certain teammates to perform “hero combos,” which can do anything from dealing more damage than either character alone to attacking all enemies and buffing teammates.
The exact effects vary depending on the character, but I found that my team compositions tended to converge. I usually used high-attack characters to take down strong enemies, survivability characters to deal with strong attacks, and healing characters to keep them alive, which resulted in many unique characters that felt more like gimmicks than necessary tools.
You’ll probably have a solid team that can handle all the battles by the middle of the 50-hour or so playthrough, but you can swap members out at will to change things up. Hundred Heroes doesn’t share experience, so alternate players can’t keep up with the main players in your team.
Hundred Heroes does have a peculiar leveling system, though, which allows low-level characters to level up quickly after defeating much higher-level foes. This means that after just a few battles, their levels can catch up to their higher-level teammates, which is a bit confusing, but it’s still a thoughtful design that makes it easier to try new characters and new combinations.
In addition, “Hundred Heroes” also incorporates SRPG gameplay. SRPG segments will appear after the main battle in the plot breaks out. They are mainly used to fight against enemy generals. Players need to control troops on a grid map and order them to attack enemy legions. The main characters will serve as legion commanders. They have special abilities with significant effects, such as reducing the enemy’s defense or health before the fight, so as to gain the upper hand in the battle.
My favorite strategy is to siege the enemy, quickly reduce their health, force them to retreat, and then redeploy my troops elsewhere. There are also special events that may occur in these battles, such as enemy generals suddenly joining the battle or defecting at the last minute, which adds variables and fun to the battle, but often makes tactical decisions simpler and more straightforward. Although they look complicated, I can always deal with them calmly without much preparation.
At key plot points, you also need to engage in “duels,” which are usually one-on-one confrontations between a main character and a nemesis or villain. In a duel, you can choose to “attack” to cause damage, which will accumulate a small amount of “tension” value, or “counterattack,” which will reduce the damage you take and accumulate more tension. Your goal is to reduce the opponent’s health as much as possible until the health reaches the “break” mark on the health bar, and then you can use a more powerful strong attack to defeat the opponent. Or you can unlock equally powerful attacks after filling up the tension gauge.
However, there is no pattern to whether the enemy will choose to attack or counterattack, which can make people feel too random. This resulted in me only winning about half of the duels, and the rest of them would have my losses explained by the plot. In the end, I basically just attacked mindlessly and tried to consume as much health as possible. Although this is a simple strategy, it is still a strategy. Fortunately, this randomness does not have a big impact, because even if you fail, there will be no major losses and no need to duel again, but it is still unpleasant to lose because of luck. This makes these duels feel more like a plot device than a true challenge.
Turn-based boss fights can also feature special mechanics. Most are obstacles that require special handling, such as having to free up a character to trigger a secret weapon between turns. But there are also some highly random mechanics that may increase difficulty but don’t make it more interesting or strategic.
One early battle asked me to choose between two hammers, which, if I chose correctly, would allow a character to deal triple damage to the boss. The boss would appear on the left or right side, and only the hammer closest to it could hit it. If you chose the wrong hammer, the character would waste a turn and the battle would be dragged out longer. But like the duels, there was no pattern to the boss’s location, making the difficulty of this battle more based on luck than strategy.
Hundred Heroes takes about 40 to 60 hours to complete, depending on how much time you spend recruiting characters, upgrading your base, and playing mini-games – including a spinning top mini-game reminiscent of Beyblade. Some side quests are easy to complete, like defeating specific enemies and collecting loot for potential allies to get them to join you. Others feel like endless puzzles, like finding a lucky fish for a fisherman friend. The main story doesn’t force you to complete specific side quests, though (you may be encouraged to recruit a certain number of allies before you can move on to the next chapter).
Although 100 Heroes was ultimately enjoyable to play, the slow start was a bit of a letdown. In the early stages, I often had to backtrack a lot to get between destinations, which didn’t leave a good impression, especially when my journeys were interrupted by mines and enemies.
100 Heroes also lacks guidance in its puzzles, sometimes requiring me to walk through every inch of a town until I stumbled upon the answer. I didn’t unlock fast travel until I was a full 15 hours into the game, and I did so entirely by accident, and it would have taken me longer to discover it if I hadn’t been wandering around a large city. From that point on, the world feels open and free, and I can easily teleport between towns and recruit new characters, but the wait before that is still too long.
The wait is worth it, though, as Hundred Heroes ultimately tells a fascinating, twisted story of multiple nations uniting to fight against a tyrant. There are some plot twists that I struggled to understand, but there are also many that made me want to cheer loudly. The main villain is a relatively stereotypical character who simply craves power with no deeper motivations, but the people around him are much more interesting. Some characters are torn between loyalty to their country and the pursuit of justice, which provides interesting internal struggles, and others originally want to stay out of the matter, but are inspired to take action after seeing your team’s efforts.
Although “a group of lovable aliens unite to overthrow a corrupt ruler” sounds like a common setting for a kingdom-based RPG, there is an interesting balance between the characters’ personal struggles and the war that runs through the main story. The plot contains some weak links and occasional pacing issues, such as a major faction that doesn’t surface until halfway through the story, but overall the story has enough foreshadowing and sacrifice to make each victory feel satisfying. At the beginning, I felt like I was fighting for strangers, but by the end, I had developed enough feelings for the characters to make me eager to see them triumph.
Summary
After getting through the slow beginning, Hundred Heroes generally succeeds in weaving the stories of multiple countries and characters into a grand epic. Its turn-based combat system is smooth, but other modes, such as the SRPG Legion Battles, may encourage players to adopt simple strategies instead of thinking hard. Although the process of collecting and trying out more than a hundred heroes is fun, having so many characters share a limited plot time, which makes it difficult for players to get to know most of them in depth. That said, rich and interesting side quests and base building are enough to fill these gaps, and ultimately make Hundred Heroes a worthwhile journey.