It feels like ages since I’ve played a proper Japanese dungeon-crawler. Back in the 3DS and PS Vita era, we were spoiled for choice – a new Etrian Odyssey entry was always around the corner, the Persona Q spinoffs were coming out at a steady clip, and there was a horde of dungeon crawlers to choose from on the iconic PlayStation handheld. As the visual and content expectations for modern games has grown, it’s kind of outpaced the lo-fi and scrappy nature of a traditional first-person dungeon crawler. The only reason I’m diving into a new one now, that title being Class of Heroes 3 Remaster, is because it’s an updated release and first-time localisation of a game that came out over 15 years ago. Diving into it now is a delightful blast from the past that I had no idea I was in such dire need of.
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Class of Heroes 3 Remaster is a dungeon-crawler RPG that’s set against a school-setting backdrop. When you boot the game up, you’re given three different schools to choose from for your playthrough. While the flavour text makes it seem like this is just an aesthetic choice, the ramifications here are surprisingly huge. Your starting school not only dictates your character uniforms, but it also entirely changes the region you start in, the teachers you train with, the roles your characters can take on, and the quests you’re doing.
These changes in quests and locations also inherently lead to major differences in difficulty across the 3 schools. It’s a surprisingly inventive approach to “difficulty settings” that feels akin to the way an MMO will give you different starting regions based on your chosen race – and it’s something I’m surprised more games haven’t done.
Once you’re enrolled in school, the loop of the game is deceptively simple. You’ve got some barebones narrative reasons for going out into an escalating series of dungeons. As you explore, you’ll level up your characters, get money and materials to acquire new gear, run into incredibly difficult monsters, and acquire more levels and more gear until those monsters are milquetoast. Much like the Disgaea series, this game is built around giving you a sandbox to grind in, a massive amount of gear and unlockables to grind for, and leaving you to your own devices. As a result, it’s an incredibly love-it-or-hate-it kind of game.
Some quality-of-life features you might expect from a JRPG, for example, are entirely absent here – but they’re kind of absent on purpose. Battles can be repetitive and lengthy, yet there’s no way to speed them up or automatically squash lower-level foes. For a masochistic dungeon-crawler fan, that’s music to your ears. But if you’re someone who ends up bouncing off that kind of purposefully repetitive dungeoneering, there isn’t much else on offer in Class of Heroes 3 Remaster to occupy your time or make those encounters any less taxing.
One refreshing feature is the ability to swap your character classes at any time. This doesn’t lead to any sort of exciting dual-class or skill-inheritance systems, though – you can no longer use abilities from your previous class once you swap to a new one. Still, it’s nice to be able to make the mistake of leveling a class that isn’t working out for you and have an instant way to remedy that without feeling like that character is useless now.
Additionally, there’s a fun relationship-chart system in Class of Heroes 3 Remaster that I appreciated a lot. As you build your adventuring party, you’re also tasked with setting up a connective web of relationships between all of them and deciding which characters like each other or dislike each other. These connections can lead to buffs or debuffs in battle, and often times one character liking a different one can lead to another person in the party having negative feelings for someone as a result.
It’s all framed like one of those relationship charts out of a bonus manga chapter, and I love how it helps add an extra layer of self-driven roleplay to the experience. One of my favorite parts of an open-ended dungeon crawler like this is getting to craft my own stories and personalities for each character, and the game giving me a tool to cook up inter-party relationships on top of that is so fun.
Ultimately, Class of Heroes 3 is an incredibly simple but dauntingly dense dungeon-crawler. There’s a massive amount of classes, enemies, gear, and skills to grind for and acquire. The grind to get all of those is going to be absolutely repetitive and mechanical, but that’s the kind of thing that makes a game like this so satisfying to dump time into.
