Adam Perry had two games in mind when making Do You Want to be a Hero?; 7th Saga for the SNES, and The Wizard's Bomb, an OHR game by Camdog released earlier this year. This game was entered in the 2009 Halloween Contest on Castle Paradox, but that's not really important, because it really doesn't attempt to be a "Halloween game" in any way.

If you've played 7th Saga, you'll know what to expect from the battles in this game. Battles are balanced between carefully choosing skills, defending (which raises attack power on your next turn), and choosing who attacks and when. You're not going to survive this game holding down the attack command; there's a lot of strategy involved, as well as a lot of trial and error. You're going to die, and you're going to die often, until you've learned the game's mechanics well and figured out just how far you can push enemies before they end up eating you.

The game is divided into a series of stages, where the goal is to clear the enemies that block your path and reach a crystal being protected by a boss monster. Like The Wizard's Bomb, you have a time limit on each stage, and battles and map exploration happen in rapid succession. The game is more similar in design and tone to the recently released PSP RPG Half-Minute Hero, in that every stage is a distinct puzzle, as opposed to The Wizard's Bomb, which offered a more open-ended environment. I prefer the puzzle game elements of Do You Want to be a Hero? to the exploration of The Wizard's Bomb, but this is entirely subjective and your mileage will vary based on what kind of games you like to play.

The timer makes things exciting, but is, unfortunately, my biggest problem with this game. I made it through the first two stages without running out of time, but had to restart the third when I was seconds away from completing my objective. This didn't bother me much, because the stage was relatively quick to get through again once I knew what I was doing, but when I ran out of time on the fourth stage, which has a twenty-minute time limit, I didn't have any desire to retry. You can't save mid-stage, so your first twenty minutes in this stage will be spent learning the stage layout, learning about your new hero (Your main hero changes each stage, by the whims of a frighting god creature that seems to have a blue, upside down butt for a head), and dieing. Your next twenty minute escapade will go better, but by that point you'll probably be wishing the stages were a lot shorter.

I have no issue with the game's battle difficulty. For the most part, the battles are clever, and your heroes are very distinct from one another. My issue is that in a game where I'm being pushed by a time limit, I expect to fail and lose progress, but losing twenty minutes is a bit too much to ask of me. I might be getting old, but I'm not really willing to spend that much time repeating a single stage, and I expect the later ones to only get longer. If you could save mid-stage, I'd be more willing to give it another shot (You CAN save, but doing so resets you to the beginning of the stage you were on), or if you didn't lose 100% of your progress when the time limit was up. Let me keep a fraction of my gold, a few of my levels, anything! Even the most punishing game I've played recently (Demon's Souls) is more forgiving when you fail a stage.

I really like the core game here. I'm a fan of 7th Saga myself, so I had a lot of fun with the battle system, but I kept wishing that both the stages and battles would be shorter. In Half-Minute Hero, battles take a mere couple of seconds, whether you win or lose. That fits the format of a time-restricted RPG a lot better than the fairly standard battle pace of Do You Want to be a Hero? and The Wizard's Bomb. I like what I see here, but with some alterations to the game's pacing, we could have a true classic.