Was The Cruel King and the Great Hero Worth It?

Set off on a storybook adventure to become a great hero! Was The Cruel King and the Great Hero worth it?

Full disclosure: We received a review code for the Nintendo Switch version of this game. Rest assured that this will not affect the quality or candor of our review.

Background

The Cruel King and the Great Hero is a cute, fairy tale-esque RPG. Aesthetically, it is identical to the Liar Princess and the Blind Prince, but is a turn based RPG instead of puzzle-platformer.

What does The Cruel King and the Great Hero do well?

Aesthetics

The artstyle is adorable and it’s clear that care was taken with design. There are plenty of clever little details like the Dragon King smiling when I win a battle or the playable character’s weapon changing when you adjust their equipment.

Narrative

The story is very cute and heartwarming at times. It feels very much like a bedtime story. However, don’t expect it to subvert your expectations: the game gives away the central conceit very early.

What could The Cruel King and the Great Hero do better?

Speed, Pacing, and Random Encounters

Kids have short legs and walk slowly. I don’t want to replicate that experience in a videogame. Yuu slowly plods through the dungeons, which becomes excruciating with the high random encounter rate.

There is even a point later on where she has a setback and is dejected. During this time, Yuu can only slowly trudge though the rooms.

Random Encounters

It’s not unusual to face 2-5 random encounters per room, and there’s no way to speed up battles. The battle music lost its whimsy and became a high pitched whine that I was dreading.

I checked the in-game monster encyclopedia at one point near the end of the Princess quest: I was able to determine that I had fought over 110 monsters in this area. Battles generally had 2-4 enemies (though sometimes it was only a single mob), so I estimate that I went through 30-50 battles, possibly more. I grew to hate long rooms because I knew it would be a slow, tedious procession of battles.

Can’t you just use repels?

You can buy Monsterbane (repel items), but it’s hard to tell if it is filtering out any mobs when you’re still hitting 2-4 battles per room. The description states that it doesn’t repel “strong monsters”, but when enemies are showing up that I can one-shot for less than 10 exp, I think it’s more an issue of the item not being properly implemented. At least the game is kind enough to ask if you want to use another Monsterbane when it runs out, though again, there’s the question of whether it was working in the first place.

Grinding and Balance

I was consistently concerned about being underprepared for boss fights. You don’t have a good sense of your own strength since regular mobs are robust enough to give you trouble at every point in the game.

Leveling and equipment isn’t impactful: you can’t see how much experience you need to get to the next level, and a new weapon or armor will only give about a few points to the relevant stat. Your stats permanently go up as you level, but for every level that gives you a decent selection of stats, there are two levels that only give you a couple points of HP and defense. There is also no way to know if or when you’ll get a new skill.

In a midgame quest, a guest character joins you at level 1. This means that you have to suffer for a while until she catches up to Yuu’s level. This is also totally unnecessary, since later in the game you’ll be given the option of using different party members, whose levels have been scaled up since you last used them.

Don’t get too excited about rolling deep with a full team though, you can only ever have a single party member alongside Yuu. Enjoy getting punished by the action economy in nearly every fight!

The Magicant/Persona Section

If you’ve played Earthbound or Persona, then you know what I’m referring to. The protagonist has to go within her own mind and face some personal demons. The visuals are washed out, blurry, and mildly nauseating to look at. It’s another thematic element, but it isn’t particularly enjoyable.

However, that isn’t the worst part of this section – you are forced to do previous dungeons again, essentially, but by yourself, and now there are enemies in the random encounters with one-hit-kill spells. I can forgive the palette swap enemies, but having to reface the same bosses is tiresome, and it feels like padding. It gets even worse later, when it makes you go through the end dungeon twice.

Performance

There were multiple instances where I thought the game froze, often upon entering a battle. At one point the game was unresponsive for over ten seconds and I was genuinely concerned that something was wrong with my Switch.

Boss Text and Typos

Text boxes in boss fights aren’t properly kerned; text bleeds over into the background. I also noticed some typos: fairing instead of faring, “grude” instead of grudge, etc.

Is The Cruel King and the Great Hero good value?

This is a very short story. What stretches out the runtime is the slow pace at which the protagonist travels and the sheer number of random encounters. Even with some idle time, I finished the game in 15 hours. From what I could tell, there is no new game plus or ability to play after defeating the final boss. There are side quests and in-game achievements, but they are optional and the ones I completed were fetch quests. Of the time I spent playing the game, an overwhelming percentage was random encounters, so keep that in mind. Cutscenes and story content probably accounted for less than an hour of the total experience.

Was The Cruel King and the Great Hero fun?

It starts off fun but the cuteness wears off as it rapidly turns into a slog. I soldiered through so that I could thoroughly review it.

Was The Cruel King and the Great Hero worth it?

The Cruel King and the Great Hero is a cute story that didn’t need to be a JRPG. The story is cute, but the barebones JRPG aspect isn’t developed enough for the amount of time you have to spend in battles. The Cruel King and the Great Hero could have been any other genre and would have benefited from less downtime between major story beats.

The Cruel King and the Great Hero was not worth it. The art style is great and the story is passable, but that isn’t enough to offset everything else.

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