On top of this, you can craft masses of different weapons by visiting a refiner or blacksmith and combining potions and items you've found. Whichever guardian you have equipped grows in experience alongside you, offering increasing numbers of skills. More interestingly, you get to choose two of three guardian types at the start of the adventure: fire, water or earth. Points won can also be manually invested in six different skills to build up your character's power, HP, agility and defence.
Taking on the low level creatures nearby can earn you gold and, more importantly, level you up. Around 80 different types to be exact.Īt the start, you have a basic sword and armour and are very much a rookie in the fighting department.
There are various towns, including his home town of Basto, where hundreds of characters can be talked to for information, then there are numerous realms outside of these safe areas, where dangerous creatures roam.
You begin playing a boy called Ronin – there are a further two characters to play as once you've completed his adventure – who finds himself embarking on a series of quests for various characters. The game will be fairly familiar to fans of this type of game. It's very impressive that so much has been crammed onto the humble mobile – although my eyes haven't looked so red after hours spent squinting at all the tiny text since I forgot to wash my hands after chopping up chillies and then put in my contact lenses. This is a nation of very dedicated RPG players.Īnd Heroes Lore is very much a traditional, hardcore RPG, of the old skool Final Fantasy variety. In fact, two years ago a Korean man keeled over dead after playing Starcraft in an internet cafe for 50 hours. Especially massively multiplayer ones such as Lineage and World of Warcraft – the sorts of games that don't so much enhance your life by providing light relief as take it completely over. But bear in mind that South Korea is hugely into its role-playing games. That's got to stand as some sort of testament to this game's quality, right? Not only is the Heroes Lore series a hit there, but the third episode in the series, Heroes Lore Zero, both shattered all previous game download records by selling 200,000 copies in a week and crashed networks through frenzied demand. And starring in a wizard spin-off penned by JK Rowling and new writing partner JJ Abrams. Judging by the PR hype, Heroes Lore is as big in Korea as, say, Harry Potter is here.