Old-School

Class of Heroes 3 Remaster is a school-themed dungeon crawler JRPG with elements of first person dungeon crawling, turn-based battles, levelling and synthesising all thrown in for good measure. The game has somewhat of a cult following in Japan being exclusive although the first two games have been remastered for western audiences most recently.

The general premise of the game is you pick up to six characters who can be pre selected through enrolling at the school although you’re able to assemble your own team yourself, you can pick a name, race, class, portrait, hair colour, voice and extra skill points which can be distributed to boost a characters strengths and/or weaknesses. It sounds rather cumbersome but the character creation is rather basic and while there are a few races to choose from some are identical such as the Gnomes and Khulaz and Celestia beings have wings where the Diaboros race has devil horns, Dwarves are just stocky cat like creatures so are not the typical short fantasy characters you might expect, the races do however have an effect on the initial stats before stat point distribution comes into play.

Once you have your team you are able to learn about alchemy and get used to other features like how quests work, although there is the initial bit of text to get through the game wastes no time in teaching you the basics and you start exploring the first dungeon quite quickly.

Dungeons take place in a third person view and controls are pretty standard and if you have played other dungeon crawlers you will know what to expect, a hilarious touch is that if you bump into any walls you get a funny stunned reaction from your character portraits who is currently in your party

Battles occur at random and once you are in one you take command of your characters who are in the front and back, characters in the back are only able to use long range skills while those on the front line can freely attack, enemies are generally weak although it is very easy to get overwhelmed if you are not prepared. Enemies can come in packs as large as 18 from what I have seen so far and once you defeat the front row of enemies the pack behind will come forward and so forth, battles can be longer and slightly tedious early on because of this.

While the game does teach you the basics to begin with a lot is not clearly explained early on if at all, for example when I was creating my team it was only until later on I realised you can reroll characters if the bonus points you get to distribute is too low, after battles you will receive exp also but are sometimes advised that surviving members have made progress in their course and have tried to see what this meant in terms of characters progressing their classes but I was unable to find anything regarding this.

Class of Heroes 3 Remaster is a simple game with some features that are better searched for than explained as the game doesn’t always tell you, if you come looking for a solid story then Class of Heroes 3 is not the game for you, Class of Heroes 3 is a game about building a team of high school mercenaries to the highest potential, the gameplay loop is a grind of levelling, synthesising and can be an addictive gameplay formula for many. Graphically the game is nice and polished in places but suffers slightly in other areas, music and sound is nice but nothing outstanding, it isn’t repetitive though so there is that. If you come into Class of Heroes 3 Remaster looking for the same sort of quality as Stranger of Sword City, Labyrinth of Refrain or Etrian Odyssey then you will likely not find that here.

Overall I enjoyed my time with Class of Heroes 3 Remaster, I liked the gameplay loop and some of the quests are entertaining but some parts of it definitely feel dated such as the overall layout and certain backgrounds are noticeably worse than others. It is a remaster of a PSP game so a lot of it does not translate well over, the overall design of the game can be best described as being comparable to a fan made JRPG, the first dungeon room has small birds as enemies and not much else and while other enemies do come and the variety becomes more plentiful later on first impressions are everything and depending on if you’re a hardcore dungeon crawler type player or not may impact your first impressions of the game. While it is a game with many class and race combinations to explore with I would still say the overall replay-ability is very low.

A Nintendo Switch Code was provided by PQube.