A great game with some big port problems
Hot on the heels of Hyrule Warriors, Koei Tecmo released Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below. It takes the long-running and well-loved Dragon Quest series of JRPGs and throws them straight into a Dynasty Warriors game.
The Warriors hallmarks of massive hordes of enemies, a wide range of playable characters, and ridiculously long combos are introduced to a world and cast that Dragon Quest fans would be familiar with, and on the whole it manages to pull it off pretty dang competently.
Heroes released in Japan back in February of this year, and eventually it managed to make its way west in October for the PS3 and PS4. Almost two months after the western console release, at last the game’s hit Steam with Dragon Quest Heroes: Slime Edition.
Unfortunately while the game itself is pretty great, there are problems with the port that make me cautious to recommend it.
Rig: AMD FX-8320 3.50GHz Eight-Core processor, 12GB of RAM, AMD HD 7970, Windows 10 64-Bit. Framerate measured with Raptr. Game played at the “High” graphics preset.
First up, the options available leave a lot to be desired. Initially even finding some of them was a challenge, as while the basic settings like resolution and some limited graphics quality settings are available both in-game and in an external application, other settings like camera sensitivity are nestled within a maze of menu screens found once you’ve loaded up your game.
While Heroes has settings for some less familiar settings like ambient occlusion and even what languages character speak in, it manages to entirely miss some of the more crucial and needed options. The two largest offenses are there being no way to control vsync, and anti-aliasing seems to be completely absent.
The result is that while on a TV, the game looks perfect, but when you look at it up-close on a computer monitor, the jaggedness of the characters and environments is incredibly noticeable. Other than the anti-aliasing problem, it’s gorgeous: great lighting effects, a fantastic art style, and high-quality textures. The game otherwise being so pretty makes the masses of jagged edges all the more disappointing.
Framerates above 60 appear to be impossible. You’re given the option of locking the game at 60, 30, or strangely 20 FPS, but there’s no option for a truly unlocked framerate. While on most configurations locking the framerate to 60 will achieve the same effect vsync would, good luck getting anything out of your expensive monitors with a higher refresh rate.
In other words, if you want more control over the graphics, you’ll want to see what settings your video card’s control panel has available. While Heroes’ options aren’t exactly lacking, they aren’t comprehensive and often aren’t the settings you’d most like to have control over.
As a positive, the game does have key remapping, which is nice. There’s also the ability to bind some of the usual keyboard functions to mouse buttons instead, which for some people would make things a lot easier.
Despite the generous remapping capabilities, I heavily, heavily recommend you use a controller if at all possible, because the controls are by far the biggest issue with the port. Playing it with a mouse and keyboard is uncomfortable at best, and almost impossible at worst. For starters, none of the menus can be controlled using the mouse, but require you to use the keyboard instead. It’s a massive pain considering just how many menus, maps, and dialogue sequences there are. The map even relies on you positioning a cursor over the location you want, so no mouse control just feels lazy.
A bigger problem is that all the input icons show the Xbox controller buttons as opposed to keys — even when you don’t have a controller plugged into your PC. Last time I checked, my keyboard doesn’t have a right bumper, so the tutorial telling me to dash using it is a total waste of time. The only way you’ll have any luck playing Heroes with a keyboard and mouse is if you memorise the big list of key bindings.
I haven’t even mentioned how awful the game feels playing with a keyboard and mouse. The camera doesn’t stay rigidly locked to the character, so moving side-to-side will make them slowly drift to the sides of the screen, which means mouse control for the camera feels disjointed and fiddly and when in a hectic encounter, it can make you flat-out lose your character on the busy, cluttered screen.
Even once I’d played with the settings, the mouse sensitivity feels completely off. I found it would pick up even the slightest movements and judder all over the place, and eventually it made me feel slightly sick. It wasn’t a fun experience trying not to vomit, and I found myself fighting with them more than the masses of monsters I was meant to be focusing on.
After about two hours of trying to fight with the mouse, I gave up and used my Xbox 360 controller instead. The controller works far, far better and my queasiness instantly went away, so if you do decide to pick up the game, make sure you plug in a controller too.
As far as optimisation and performance go, Dragon Quest Heroes ran incredibly well for me. It’s worth noting that my rig is getting on a bit now, so I’m only slightly above the recommended settings. Even then with all the settings at the highest possible, I consistently had around 45-50 FPS. Everything ran smoothly even in busy and detailed environments with tons of enemies.
However, there is a huge caveat here. I’ve been playing on a system with an AMD card, but there have been complaints from some players that the game has much worse performance on Nvidia cards, especially in laptops. I’m unable to confirm this for myself as I don’t have the hardware to test the game on, but there are enough comments mentioning Nvidia performance problems for me to suggest being cautious when buying the game.
Overall, while the port for Dragon Quest Heroes leaves a lot to be desired, it definitely didn’t verge into unplayable territory for me. The biggest problem I found was the keyboard and mouse controls being pretty awful, but once I swapped over to playing on a controller, I found the port fine. For those who don’t like playing on a controller under any circumstances, the problems with Heroes will get very annoying very quickly.
I have a slight confession to make: this is my first ever Dragon Quest game, and I only have a little experience with Dynasty Warriors. I’m by no means an expert in either series, so I won’t be able to really assess how it stands up in comparison to its parents. Despite that, I did genuinely enjoy my time with Heroes.
You don’t need to have ever played a Dragon Quest game to understand the story, but those who are familiar with the series will probably get more pleasure out of seeing characters from totally unconnected games meet at last. I have no idea who characters like Yangus, Nera, or Alena are in their original games, but I don’t need to know to like their inclusion in Heroes.
Going into it blind, I was struck by just how charming the entire thing is. Heroes is at its core about a lovely cast of characters who are all voice-acted incredibly well, going on an adventure in a very traditional, colourful and beautifully realised JRPG world.
Compared to the few Warriors games I’ve played, Heroes appears to have a lot of influence from Dragon Quest’s JRPG foundations, insofar as you have to gather your party and manage their skills and equipment as they level up. Sometimes I felt like having to return to the base between every mission got in the way of the combat at the heart of the game, but ultimately it wasn’t too bad.
The combat is utterly fantastic, as I would expect from a Warriors game. Mowing down dozens of enemies in flashy combos and watching as the damage counters filled the screen was brilliant. The large roster of characters all play very differently to each other, so the combat never felt repetitive or boring to me.
One really neat feature is the monster coin system. Sometimes when you kill an enemy, they’ll be converted into a coin that, once used, can summon them to fight with you. Strategically collecting the stronger monster coins and redeploying them to get the tactical advantage over a wave of enemies gave the combat a bit more depth than just mashing the controller until everything died.
Unfortunately while the combat never gets old, the mission structure certainly does. Sometimes you’ll get a cool mission where you have to fight your way through a level, and the boss fights are absolutely awesome. They’re often huge, and require you to think about the encounter in a new and interesting way.
But after a couple of hours, you’ve more or less seen every type of mission the game has to offer, and most of them are simply variations on tower defence-plus-Dynasty Warriors. Even the progression through the chapters is often the same: head to a town in peril, fight your way through some enemies, protect a thing, and then fight the boss
When the missions are good, they’re really good and a hell of a lot of fun. So it’s a huge shame that the remaining missions that pad those awesome moments are often just keeping enemies away from that level’s MacGuffin until you win. Considering how many optional side-missions there are, I would’ve hoped there was a bit more variation in what it was I was actually doing.
I really like Dragon Quest Heroes. It’s colourful, cheerful, and is suitably camp for a Warriors game, and it also has genuinely involving yet accessible combat. It’s just a shame that after a few hours the missions began to feel repetitive, making playing for longer periods of time drag on a bit.
Either way, as a total newcomer to Dragon Quest, it’s definitely got me interested in trying out some of the other entries in the franchise, and for long-time fans of the series there’s bound to be enough to keep you entertained for a while.
[This PC Port Report is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
