Gamertell

Gamertell recently received the opportunity to take part in early registration at Class of Heroes’ Particus Academy, and eagerly dove back into the school experience. Atlus’ forthcoming PSP dungeon crawler takes place in a school setting, where players go through classes and take assignments exploring a labyrinth as adventurer training.

As I began my new school career, I decided to chronicle my first impressions of life at Particus Academy.

Class of Heroes starts with players being inducted into Particus Academy. You meet your homeroom teacher, Ms. Yuno, and listen to Principal Feinman’s brief welcome announcement. After that, you are sent to the Faculty Office to register your students.

Upon arriving at the Faculty Office, I saw that a nice selection of 10 premade students, four with advanced majors, were available to choose from. As a bonus, each of them were level two characters and came with 100 gold in pocket money.

However, when a game touts having 500 character combinations and lets you have 100 characters waiting in the wings, you don’t want to go with premade. I wanted to make my own! So, I decided to begin with a neutral, human female named Jenni. To keep things from getting confusing, I’ll refer to her as CoH Jenni.

Part of the creation process is deciding on a major for the character. I decided I’d go with a Ranger major. Stick her in the back row as an attacker. Once the Major screen came up, I saw that the game wanted me to divide eight additional bonus points to CoH Jenni’s six stats. I dumped them all into Strength, vitality, agility and luck, and pressed X.

Nothing happened. No majors lit up, and an annoying beep repeatedly chastised me.

I cancelled, and re-entered the major menu. “Something must be wrong with the game.” I thought to myself, as the chastizing beep returned.

It was then that I looked to the instruction book.

I then learned that Class of Heroes is one of those somewhat complicated games that requires you to read the instructions.

It turns out that each major has requirements to pick it. The Ranger major needed 12 strength, 10 vitality, 10 agility and 12 luck, as well as a neutral or evil alignment. There was no way CoH Jenni could become a Ranger with her starting stats and bonus points. I then decided to make her into a Devout, an attacker and white magic user.

I then realized that, during character creation, the “Choosing a Major That’s Right For You” and “Fundamentals of Affinity” sections of the instruction manual are required reading.

There are 10 different races in Class of Heroes, and they don’t all initially get along. As you attend classes or dungeon crawl together, the races can learn to get along, but initially there are racial conflicts. If everyone’s affinity is high and gets along, they’ll be stronger and better fighters. If it’s low, their abilities drop. For example, the Erdgeist earth spirit race gets along with everyone. On the other hand, the Diablos demon race only gets along with Erdgeists. Diablos don’t even get along well with other Diablos!

I wanted a wide variety of races in my party. Since CoH Jenni was a human, that meant that she’d get along well with Humans, Erdgeists, Halflings, Sprites, Felpiers and Celestians. I definitely wanted an Erdgeist monk in my party sometime in the future, as well as a Felpier kunoichi and a Celestian spell caster, so I immediately signed them up. So Yasu the good Erdgeist cleric, Reira the good Celestian wizard and Nana the evil Felpier thief joined the party. Even though Humans don’t get along with the Drakes, I wanted a dragon man in my party. Drakes get along with everyone except Diabolos, Humans and Sprites, so I figured it’d be fine if Takumi the neutral Drake warrior joined the group. To round things out, I decided that Ren the good Sprite wizard would also join the group.

I then (foolishly) thought it would be a good time to explore the Novice’s Road labyrinth area. It didn’t go well, to say the least. a group of about nine batsy monsters killed CoH Jenni. I didn’t know they were batsy monsters initially. When I first encountered them, they showed up as black shadowy figures. It wasn’t until two rounds later that they revealed themselves. My front row attackers Jenni, Takumi and Nana were the only ones who could perform melee attacks, since all characters come equipped with short range weapons. Yasu sat uselessly, defending, in the back row while Reira and Ren contributed fire spells to the battle.

Upon returning to the Infirmary, I found that it would cost too much money to revive CoH Jenni at the moment. So, I left her to rot and created another Jenni character (a thief this time) to replace her.

At this point, I realized the best thing to do was to go to the Library and take some classes/quests. Luckily, the first few one star assignments are designed to teach you about the different areas in Class of Heroes, how race affinity works, useful information concerning magic and skills and how to survive labyrinth exploration.

The most useful of the introductory classes was undoubtedly the Alchemy classes. In the Campus Store, weapons, armor, accessories, etc can get very expensive. Since most of the monsters I’d been facing in the novice dungeon only dropped one or two gold after being defeated, there’s no way I’d be able to afford 800 slingshots and 600 slingshot stones for my backrow characters, or swords to replace my front row fighters’ daggers. It turns out that, after a battle, monsters can drop materials or junk. If you have a cleric appraise these items (or pay the Campus Store clerk to), you may end up gathering the materials necessary to make the same weapons. So far, making the cheap weapons and armor usually costs about 20 gold, along with the items. It’s a great deal and encourages you to keep dungeon crawling.

So far, I’ve learned that Class of Heroes is the kind of game where you can’t just dive into character creating and dungeon crawling. You have to be smart about things. Read the instruction manual, take in-game classes, make quick initial trips into labyrinths, save often and pay close attention to your characters. I’ve gotten to the point where I can actually take a party into a labyrinth for a few battles without any characters dying, and even earned enough money to resurrect the devout CoH Jenni character.

Be sure to check back next week, when Gamertell reviews Class of Heroes!

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