A party immersed in the river Lethe
I am fourteen hours into Glory of Heracles and still waiting for the plot to arrive. The festivities were kicked off by my JRPG young knight tromping around ancient Greece in full plate armor and getting hurled off a cliff together with a thief who, in battle at least, looks, fights, and talks like Giovanni from Angelique: Six Knights of Dark Love. Both survive the fall, from which Giovanni concludes that they're both immortal and have amnesia (well, she must've concluded the latter from previous experience or lack thereof, but anyway) and therefore must journey to Mount Olympus to discover their true identity and purpose and what the hey. Shortly afterward, JRPG Knight is informed by some nymphs that he's actually the great hero Heracles, but we later meet a strapping Johnny Bravo-type who also claims to be Heracles and, admittedly, looks, fights, and acts much more like the real deal. More Plausible Heracles soon joins up, so we have two characters with the same name in the party.* In my last play session, a third Heracles showed up, this one an older general, and I'm wondering at this point if we're going to end up like one of those FF6 playthroughs where some smart aleck decides to name all of the playable characters "Kefka." Were the game reasonably clever, I'd expect these to be three aspects of Heracles in different stages of life, separated through some manner of Olympian trickery. I have no expectation that this will be the case.
But back to the lack of plot: while the amnesia thing is mildly puzzling, there seems to be no conflict that needs my party's intervention or pressing peril from which the heroes must extricate themselves. Mount Olympus itself offered no answers, merely branding our merry band as "unforgivable" and sending us on our aimless way, but that pronouncement seemed to be because we couldn't remember who we were, not because of any horrible unknown deeds from our past. The compatriots we've collected seemed perfectly happy in their presumed ignorance of their origins, leading comfortable, unquestioning lives womanizing and dine-and-dashing and what have you, yet throw in with our aimless non-quest nigh-instantly upon our arrival without a query or moment of doubt. There is a heck of a lot of urgency and a heck of a lot of going out of one's way expended in our continuing effort to go nowhere and accomplish nothing.
Meanwhile, there's an anime Trojan War going on, and my group is currently escorting a princess to a meeting with Achilles, though Achilles didn't really make it clear what he wanted or planned to do with the princess once he met her. My party's full of Greeks, I assume we're on the Greek side, but we've also come in conflict with a villainous General Nestor, who is using glowing Companion Cubes to bring the dead back to life and create a zombie army. That seems inarguably evil, but the mythical Nestor was a Greek, and this game isn't exactly complex enough to deal with the horrors of war as fought even by pseudo-sympathetic combatants. My party's charging relentlessly forward with the utmost confidence despite its complete and utter ignorance of where it stands in this world, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to feel, think, or do about anything. But there's a giant mecha Trojan Horse, so that in part makes up for it.
* - To their credit, both guys seem pretty laid-back about the whole imbroglio. The others do, however, insist on giving Main Hero a temporary nickname for sanity's sake, and one suggests "Pit," which is rebuffed for being not suitably Hellenic. Then I get to the ENTER YOUR NAME screen and discover any attempt actually to name my main man "Pit" is auto-rejected. C'mon, Nintendo.
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But back to the lack of plot: while the amnesia thing is mildly puzzling, there seems to be no conflict that needs my party's intervention or pressing peril from which the heroes must extricate themselves. Mount Olympus itself offered no answers, merely branding our merry band as "unforgivable" and sending us on our aimless way, but that pronouncement seemed to be because we couldn't remember who we were, not because of any horrible unknown deeds from our past. The compatriots we've collected seemed perfectly happy in their presumed ignorance of their origins, leading comfortable, unquestioning lives womanizing and dine-and-dashing and what have you, yet throw in with our aimless non-quest nigh-instantly upon our arrival without a query or moment of doubt. There is a heck of a lot of urgency and a heck of a lot of going out of one's way expended in our continuing effort to go nowhere and accomplish nothing.
Meanwhile, there's an anime Trojan War going on, and my group is currently escorting a princess to a meeting with Achilles, though Achilles didn't really make it clear what he wanted or planned to do with the princess once he met her. My party's full of Greeks, I assume we're on the Greek side, but we've also come in conflict with a villainous General Nestor, who is using glowing Companion Cubes to bring the dead back to life and create a zombie army. That seems inarguably evil, but the mythical Nestor was a Greek, and this game isn't exactly complex enough to deal with the horrors of war as fought even by pseudo-sympathetic combatants. My party's charging relentlessly forward with the utmost confidence despite its complete and utter ignorance of where it stands in this world, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to feel, think, or do about anything. But there's a giant mecha Trojan Horse, so that in part makes up for it.
* - To their credit, both guys seem pretty laid-back about the whole imbroglio. The others do, however, insist on giving Main Hero a temporary nickname for sanity's sake, and one suggests "Pit," which is rebuffed for being not suitably Hellenic. Then I get to the ENTER YOUR NAME screen and discover any attempt actually to name my main man "Pit" is auto-rejected. C'mon, Nintendo.
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