Half Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax Ultimate Boy

It feels like someone zipped up an entire adventure into a tiny file and hit play.

I have anxiety and awful reflexes. You’d think those traits would lead to an awful time considering this is a Speedrun game but I’m going to assume the fact that I actually really enjoyed my time speaks for its quality. I guess all you need to do is really make me want to punt a goblin of a man for a majority of the run time…

Not quite the ribbing of the genre I was hoping for, but still fun.

Half-Minute Hero is a really different sort of RPG. It has all of the hallmarks - maps to explore, towns and villages with NPCs, randomly-generated battles and different equipment to find, purchase and equip. But this game doesn't have time for meticulous planning or turn-based battles - you have a 30-second timer counting down to the end of the world at the beginning of every stage! Okay, maybe that's not entirely true. Whenever you enter towns, the timer stops ticking down. This means you'll spend a portion of your time fighting monsters for gold and XP on the map, and then retreat to villages to heal up, buy supplies, and plan on what you'll do upon returning to the map. There's also goddess statues in certain towns that you can pay a fee to reset the 30-second timer again. But every time you use a goddess statue, the cost of doing so again will increase! Many of the game's stages have some special gimmick or feature, and there are usually multiple different ways you can beat a level. You'll probably want to replay stages, too, because they often have different titles you can earn depending on things you do or don't do in the level. You can also only get certain pieces…

anyboy else be reaching climax in 30 seconds or is that just me

I 100% the game on PSP back in the day and I liked it quite a bit. I wanted to play the game again on PC, but the quality of this port is low. Specifically, the controller support is abysmal. If the game is launched with the controller (I tried it with Dualshock and Dualsense), the game map is centered on the top right corner and there is nothing you can do about it. You can launch the game with controller unplugged, then the map will behave, but the game will not detect the controller when it is plugged back. You can kinda play with the broken map, but it is quite irritating. When you add complicated buttom remapping and unsupported glyphs for Sony controllers, not to mention non-existing save game management... Simply put, playing a PSP emu version is just a better experience.