Heracles is the kind of game that's held together by string, a game where it just feels awful to walk around and enter buildings, which are barely telegraphed about where and if you can enter them. But this approach to its overall world design makes for an experience that feels truly open and free. Unlike it's contemporary Dragon Quest which put in a lot of effort into its map to stay open, yet direct the player through an intended route towards the dragonlord, Heracles meanwhile just kind of doesn't care!
It does my favourite thing ever for game premises, you're just given the task of defeating 12 bosses, representing the 12 labours, which then leads to the final dungeon of the Underworld and that's it! I enjoy it when an open-ended objective is just very easily readable like that, do XX thing and the methods in which you do it are down to you. Even when plaything this game with a walkthrough being able to adjust your experience by doing some tasks or grinding for resources in advance just feels very satisfying. I miss this approach to difficulty the further and further we stray from it, just makes the process feel like you're putting in the work to bend the world to the experience you want and even despite all of Heracles' technical hiccups, this STILL feels Gooood in 2024. It deffo elevates it from the other Dragon Quest clones of the time, to the point I actually bothered finishing it, which is an accolade a lot of titles from the time don't get. I think it helps the EXP exploits for grinding are very obvious and easy, whenever they come up, so it wasn't a drama unlike even Dragon Quest itself. It's neat! I'm excited to play the other games in the series.
