Legend of Heroes has an interesting premise. A teenage boy named Forte from the land of Weltluna is apprenticed to McBain, his traveling troubadour grandfather. (What’s with the grandfather’s name? It sounds like a 70’s police drama. “Next week on McBain—Detective McBain subdues a gang of hoboes who are obstructing the stairs of a local branch library!”) This cross-generational duo along with Forte’s flute-playing friend (and love interest) Una, and Forte’s dog Jan go on a musical tour of the surrounding provinces while seeking to restore an ancient musical piece written by McBain’s hero, a legendary musician named Leone. The piece is of great historical significance, but was lost to the world when Leone inexplicably broke it into parts and secreted these parts in various locations.

The reasons for this at first are vague but quickly, Forte and McBain find out Leone’s musical masterpiece is not just of historic interest—it contains powerful magic that has heretofore been lost to the world. Unfortunately for them, this secret is fairly well-known. The power of the lost melody is of particular interest to various political organizations who are vying for dominance and their agents will stop at nothing to get their hands on it. As the troupe discovers the pieces of the melody, they gain unique magic abilities both defensive and offensive, which help them defeat the many enemies they encounter on the road.

Ultimately, the saving of not one, but two worlds depends on the musical ability, ingenuity and combat skills of McBain and Company.

The gameplay and controls will be familiar to anyone who has previously played a RPG. Your characters encounter monsters, engage in combat and so gain money and experience; they then level up and become more powerful with each level gained. Equipping them with weapons, armor and healing potions bought from vendors in towns also makes them more powerful and enables them to go back out and fight bigger and better monsters. Nothing new here gameplay-wise but hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Your characters’ most powerful abilities are magical ones and originate from the pieces of Leone’s melody--trinkets called “Resonance Stones”. When equipped, they enable the character to execute powerful elemental (earth, air, fire, water) single and AOE attacks or heals by playing musical phrases. When distributed strategically among the characters, these phrases can be combined to execute Ensemble Magic attacks--even more powerful combo AOE’s.

This Resonance Stone mechanic is fun but a bit confusing. At first, Resonance Stones are equipped automatically when the stones are found and the player has automatic access to their attacks; later on they must be equipped manually so players might not even realize they have certain attacks at their disposal.

That said, for the most part the turn-based combat system is fun and easily understood. The game has an easy control scheme that should be accessible to anyone. Character abilities and equipment can be viewed and scrolled through with the left and right triggers. Characters are moved with the analog stick and selected with the left, right, up and down directional buttons; items are bought and sold and attacks are performed with the X button; finishing moves are performed with the square button.

The characters all have unique, useful abilities which encourage the player to use them strategically. By carefully choosing characters’ equipment, Resonance Stone abilities and positions in the combat queue, the player can greatly alter the troupe’s effectiveness. Additionally, throughout the story, new acquaintances join the McBain Company temporarily, thus giving players more strategic options and adding variety to the gameplay.

All of this will be familiar to RPG fans. Regrettably, what’ll also be familiar is a common RPG offense—making the player grind for experience. To some degree, the game forces your advancement by throwing monsters in your path as you travel between cities, but there are times when you'll likely find yourself losing a boss battle repeatedly and resigning yourself to doing a backtrack-grind in order to reach the level necessary for victory. The best-designed games make leveling incidental, something that happens behind the scenes as you’re enjoying the game. By contrast, less-well-designed games frequently bring the game to a halt while you of necessity, go on an xp-gathering run.

Legend of Heroes III isn’t the biggest offender in terms of grindage but it’s definitely guilty of inflicting it on the player. (Developers out there--you listening? "Grinding=tedium") What also gets old is watching both the player characters’ and the enemies’ magic attack sequences again and again during combat. There’s no way to skip these and they contribute to the game’s 50+ hour epic length.

The game's UI is attractive and for the most part, does its job. Effort was made to design it with nice little themed touches throughout, but the designers might have served players better by spending more effort on practical concerns rather than aesthetic ones. Most bothersome is the lack of objective tracking. Since there’s no way to reference current or past objectives, if you put the game down for a while and come back to it, you could end up wandering around longer than you want to, trying to figure out what the heck you’re supposed to be doing.

Also, (and this is common to many Japanese games) the UI is a bit obtuse and hard to interpret and the manual fails to cover it all, taking it for granted players will either guess how to access the multiple UI layers or not mind randomly trying button combinations until one of them works. Maybe they're thinking of it as the game equivalent of the child-proof cap? If you can’t figure it out, find a 10-year-old who’ll do it for you.

Not surprisingly since this is a Namco game, the art is Anime-style, of the most attractive variety. The characters are distinctive and well-designed—at least as represented during the close-up dialog sequences when they appear as static portraits. These close-ups during the story sequences are essential in conveying the characters’ personalities and helping the player care about them. Without them, the characters would be nothing more than nondescript, squatty little bobbleheads.

The environments are as basic as the bobble-head characters, using many stylized and obviously tiled textures. These sometimes get monotonous and make navigation confusing when too many environments look the same. However, some of the interior environments with fire and water are very well done—within their graphic limitations—and the visual effects are adequate and in keeping with the art direction’s simple, cartoony approach.

Legend of Heroes III has good, if unremarkable sound design. There are no voiceovers since all the character dialog occurs in print. Everything is conveyed through musical cues, which works particularly nicely in a game about music and musicians. And so what if the “moving” musical pieces played by the McBain company sound like midi versions of Yanni tracks? Here it fits.

While the quality of translation is certainly something that can add to or detract from a game, it’s not often that poor localization actually adds entertainment value. The goofy “Engrish” translation of LoH III, which goes from bad to worse as the game progresses, adds some unplanned hilarity to it. Not as noticeable in the beginning but fairly embarrassing from middle to end, it gives the impression that the translator spent too much time carefully translating the first 10% of the game and then realized he only had a week left to do the rest so he raced through it, word choice and grammar be damned.

Overall, Legend of Heroes III is a good entertainment value at easily a 50+ hour playthrough time. It can be made even longer if players take the time to collect every item and unlock and complete every bonus level. Measuring strictly on these terms, it’s the best $40 you’ll spend this year on a handheld game.

However, measuring by all the other factors: originality, gameplay, aesthetics, story, controls—it’s an average game. Entertaining and amusing, but unsurprising and extremely time-consuming. For people with an obsessive-compulsive collecting disorder, people who enjoy RPGs, Anime, turn-based combat and Engrish, or for people who need something to fill their morning commute, it’s ideal. For anyone else, especially members of the A.D.D. set, you’d be better off digging out the Mario Kart DS.

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