Heroica: The LEGO RPG You Forgot

so here's a question for you how many of you remember Lego games not Lego games Lego games for those of you who don't know Lego games was a series of sets made by Lego that were manufactured and released from 2009 to around 2013 the sets were well exactly what they sound like board games made out of Lego now of course that in itself isn't really a new thing LEGO had dabbled in board games before this point but those had really been sets based on pre-existing games like chess or tic-tac-toe when it came to the actual Lego games theme these were completely original their own Concepts made by Lego themselves the central addition to these sets found only in the Lego games are the dice and micr figure pieces the dice was this six-sided rubbery block that you could stick pieces onto and it makes it resemble a die pretty simple the micro figures as well were also used as the game pieces probably the most iconic parts of these sets and yeah these things are pretty small too you know kind of makes sense given the name they're like Min figures but mro I remember having a few of these sets when I was a kid as I was practically the perfect age for these things around the time although when it comes to the basic games the only ones I remember having though were the one that was like a big pyramid uh and I'm pretty sure I also had The Hobbit one cuz that was one Lego was also coming out with a bunch of sets based on the Hobbit movies however when I think about this line of sets as a whole those aren't the ones that immediately come to mind amidst the dozens of different games within this line there was one set in particular that stood out one that dared to be more ambitious than any other Lego game I am of course referring to Lego Heroica Lego Heroica was itself a sub theme within Lego games and what immediately makes it stand out is the fact that it wasn't just one game rather it was a series of games all of which were meant to be connected together to form a larger hole and I really do mean that this was the most ambitious of these games it had a large cast of characters an ongoing storyline and a list of varied gameplay elements that made each set stand out in their own ways but so what right what's so special about Lego heroa well in my personal opinion hero is one of the most unique series Lego has ever done with its ultimate fate being equal parts fascinating and unfortunate and amongst the dozens upon dozens of themes that have been all but forgotten by The Lego company I think heroa is deserving of being remembered as one of its most special so let's put the pieces together ourselves and see what's so special about Lego heroa grab some potions and get comfortable because this is a deep dive into one of the most unique series Lego has ever made okay the basics what even is hero what's it all about well if I had to describe the game in one sentence I guess you could consider it kind of like a really simplified Dungeons and dragon Lego heroa takes place in the Kingdom of Enon a realm which has fallen under the control of an army of monsters led by the evil Goblin King players take control of one of eight different characters Each of which wish to free the Kingdom from its dire predicament so that's the basic setup and for the sake of just playing the game it's really all the story you need to know but what makes it a lot more interesting is the amount of lore that the game actually has but a lot of this lore you're not going to find within the actual sets themselves no for that we have to turn to Hero's official website now of course this being a Lego series that's been discontinued for about a decade now the official website for it has long since been taken down thankfully though we have the fancy schmancy Wayback machine which luckily for us is a good enough way for us to check out the site before it was taken offline so here we are the official heroa website and wow this brings back some memories right here for the purpose of this video we're going to be taking a look at this book of lore section this gives us all the info on the game's world and it's actually pretty extensive more than you might think for a Lego board game of all things each character has their own little bio there's a full list of all the monsters included in each set and a full map detailing the different locations of the Kingdom now maybe it's just me and my Nostalgia for these Legos but the amount of detail put into creating the backstory of this world is just really Charming to me because it's the kind of stuff that the Casual player probably isn't ever going to know about like they saw the ads and thought it looked cool but never went any further than that so having all this stuff in a place not a lot of people are going to look is really cool you know heroa actually had a fair bit of marketing behind it back in the day I remember this commercial that I used to see all the time on TV and if you search up the game on YouTube one of the first things that'll show up for you are some of the official videos Lego made to advertise the game I remember watching these videos all the time back in the day and revisiting them after so many years was a trip and I mean that in a good way some of these promotional videos also include these little animated shorts basically giving us the story of the game each short follows the wizard and Barbarian characters as they basically go through each location in the game and help out other characters in fighting the monster Army these two right here are really the closest Hero has to main protagonists as one or both of them will appear in each individual set the shorts themselves are actually in the sets simplified as these wordless Comics that come with each one I still have these comics from when I had the Legos from years ago so that's kind of cool I'd completely forgotten about these all right but that's all the background stuff it's it's about time we get into the actual physical sets we got five of them here total so let's go through them one by one and see how they stack up I just want to mention before we go any further that I've been describing heroa as only being a five set series which isn't entirely true as there actually is a sixth set in this series titled Gan rash it's one of those small poly bags with only a few pieces in them making it by far the smallest of them all and I really wanted to see if I could try and find it for this video you know just to really complete the collection problem is this set was exclusive to Toys R Us in Canada for some reason and because of its limited availability it's basically impossible to find for sale online believe me I tried as many sites as I could think of to find this one Lego set it's just not there as such it's the only set in the series I won't be covering I just wanted to bring that up here really quick so that I can avoid the potential flood of comments telling me I forgot something all right I don't need something like that again I know I pronounced his name wrong it was a mistake stop bugging me about it dry to Bay is the first in the series and it definitely feels like it not only is it the smallest of the main five but it's also the most simple with its layout being basically a simple rectangle so the actual game is fairly simple roll the dice move your character along the board but the goal usually being to get to the boss monster on the other side of the board and so what gives the game depth are the objects and obstacles on the board and how you interact with them each character comes with their own individual color-coded inventory complete with a place to put items and your health bar yes this game has health bars and that brings us to the monster angle of this Lego board game on the board you can see a group of Little Green Goblin guys basically when you run into one of the Goblins you enter a battle the dice is kind of cool in this Regard in that it has a series of symbols on each side and depending on what you roll the symbol will determine the outcome of the battle the skull means the monster attacks you causing you to lose health and the sword means you win the battle and defeat the creature one of the sides of the dice however is a bit different as instead of a number it just has this Shield icon and that brings me to another neat little mechanic like a typical RPG the type of character you play as gives you specific abilities each of the eight characters in heroa has their own special power like defeating monsters from several spaces away or defeating multiple monsters at once they're not game changers these abilities but the fact that they're here is a cool little touch that makes you consider which character you want to go with going back to the actual board there's not much to say about it as its Simplicity makes it fairly unremarkable at least compared to the remaining four Walder Forest is the first full-sized set and now that we're dealing with the bigger ones here I begun to realize that the game mechanics themselves while fun aren't without their own weird little problems since players have to use a dice for nearly everything that means a good portion of what you do is completely based upon what you happen to roll and because so much of the game is left up to chance it leaves little in the way of strategy or planning and the reason I bring up that factor at all is because of how in-depth the game tries to get like if you're going to try to incorporate a whole battle system into the game maybe make winning or losing a little more up to the player you know and this applies to the concept of each character having their own special abilities you can't just use them whenever you want you have to roll a special square on the dice and it makes it so that a player very rarely has the chance to actually use their special ability efficiently because it's not just reliant on rolling it on the dice but also your exact position on the board I'm just saying a game with as many elements as this maybe shouldn't have left almost every action up to chance I mean to be fair it's a kids game so you know it's it's really not that big of a deal as we're now looking at larger sets this is the first one to give us more of the different components that are prevalent throughout the game this being a fantasy Adventure there is of course plenty of treasure to find on each board one of which is a series of multicolored potions Each of which have a different effect you know restoring health moving a few more spaces that sort of thing but another type of collectible are the gold pieces which essentially act as money each set comes with this little rack of weapons this is the shop where players can spend three gold pieces to buy a weapon of their choice at any time and each of these individual weapons actually has the special ability of one of the characters so for example if you chose to play as the Druid but you wanted the special ability of the Ranger then you can spend your gold pieces to buy the bow and get to use his skill whenever you want pretty neat another element introduced here is the fact that a few of the sets not all of them have their own little gimmick you know to make that specific game stand out a little more for wal Derk Forest there are a couple of blue buttons on certain spots of the board passing over one of these buttons allows you to move these little gates to dark gray spaces on the board either to get them out of your way or just to screw with other players but yeah for the First full sized set it's pretty good the caverns of nathus is the second Med mediumsized set and honestly there's not much to talk about here with this one the official layout of the sets you know the one that's always shown where the four are connected up it always has nathus and wal Derk kind of side by side and that makes it so that if you're linking them up in that specific way and you're just going from one end of the board to the other you could completely skip either of these two if you wanted so I don't know just kind of an observation something else I guess I could mention here is how each separate board comes with its own special item you know an exclusive object that you can only find in that set but what's kind of funny is that it feels like the guys making the rules of the game couldn't really think of as many cool ideas as they needed to make these items worth using like okay just as an example the dry to Bay set has the special Crystal of deflection which lets a player come back to life immediately if they lose all their health walri Forest has the Chalice of Life which lets you restore your full health if you rule a shield on the dice the nathus set on the other hand has the scepter of summoning which lets you put a defeated monster back on the board which like why would you do that like I guess if you wanted to mess with another player but you see what I mean right like how some items are clearly more useful than others Castle foran comes in as the largest set in the collection being set in the Fortified stronghold of the goblin army the main gimmick of this area is that there are certain locked doors which can only be opened by finding Keys given the size of this set I think this is a good point to talk about the customizability of of the game one thing I find interesting is how the instruction manual encourages you to play the game Your Own Way outside of the basic game it even gives you a couple of alternate rule sets to make a playthrough a bit different and this extends to the actual sets themselves they're constructed in a way that they're very easy to reconfigure into different layouts you have all the rooms and such and then all the corridors that connect them it's a simple process of connecting them in different ways and again the instructions encourage this each set minus drida comes with with these little Maps giving you two or three ways to connect all the pieces together I think this is a pretty cool feature really taking advantage of the fact that these are Legos it's a toy that's meant to be creative with and letting the player decide the shape of the game is a cool angle to go at it from the final of the five the ilon catacombs wouldn't actually release at the same time as the others in fact this one came out a year afterwards and as such it doesn't really link up as cleanly the official layout just kind of has it sticking out of the side of foran it's a little weird but whatever it works the main boss of this area is the vampire lord and he sticks out amongst the other boss characters in other sets because he kind of has two different phases there's the standard encounter with him towards the end of the board but after that players have to contend with his big bat form big enough that it's the only enemy in the game to come with its own health bar the vampire lord is the closest I feel that this game comes to having any kind of like final boss like the toughest fight at the end of the adventure you know and it's kind of fitting him being here considering how this series comes to a close so how does this all end we've established that this Series has an ongoing plot so how does the story of hero come to its conclusion well therein lies the problem because it kind of doesn't let's go back to that website for a minute if you go to the map that shows off all the locations you'll notice that of the nine listed only only five of them have actual sets leaving the remaining four without anything it's my belief that these remaining locations the site points out were intended to get their own sets at some point kind of in like a second wave so it' be like you have the first four as the first wave and then the second which would have the remaining sets and we did kind of get that as about a year or so after the first four the ilon game would come out the other four however never got anything and it leads me to believe that heroa was cancelled halfway through okay you may be thinking but maybe that wasn't really the plan maybe there never was an intent to continue past these first five well to that I say I've got more evidence about this cancellation Theory and for that we have to go back to those animated shorts the final of these videos ever released was of course the one based on the ilon catacombs game at the end of the short the heroes find and free the captured king of Enon the king explains that elsewhere in the Kingdom there exists a portal to another world where the true leader of the monster Army resides the only way to stop Stop The Invasion for good is to collect a series of golden relics and the heroes with this new information head out to go collect them and that's where the story ends we never got anything past that now you could argue that the ending to The Adventure was supposed to be up to the player these are Legos after all you can just Build Your Own Ending but given how much story and lore was created for this game I really doubt the creators would get lazy here and be like nah you figure out how it ends so if that's the case then why can't the rest of the heroic align well we can only really go on assumption here because from what I gather The Lego company never really shares internal information especially when it comes to sales but I would have to guess that it was due to low sales that we wouldn't see another completed set I mean the last Hero set released in 2012 one of the final years of the Lego game's theme as a whole before it was discontinued the long and short of it here is that heroa was a series that never actually saw a proper conclusion and that's a real shame in the years since the small fan Community has built up around this series and there have been plenty of fan-made mocks that have been floating around the internet the ones I've seen are pretty nicel looking and again it's a shame that we never got to see anything like these get made but of course that begs the question is it possible for hero to make a return in the future well I'd like to remain optimistic about it but at the same time I'm trying to be realistic the fact is that when it comes to IPS that Lego makes themselves like heroa very few of them are ever Revisited once their original run is complete and given how long it's been since the Lego games theme as a whole was discontinued it's very unlikely that this will ever be a series that gets a proper continuation of any kind but still though even considering just what we have hero is still something that stands out amongst most of LEGO's endless catalog of sets because it really is oneof a kind it's an ambitious attempt at making a proper Epic on a small scale and even if it was never properly finished the fact that we got as much as we did is deserving of it being remembered as something special if you're like and you enjoyed these sets a lot when you were younger then I hope this was able to bring back a few fond memories for me when it comes to Lego this is one of those things that brings back a lot of nostalgia like it's this and like Ninjago oh my God you guys remember Ninjago dude I used to watch that show all the time back in the day how many seasons did that have anyway hold on let me look it up 15 and it's still going what the Spin and then jump back to it again ninja ninja come on come on we're going to do it again we just jump up kick whip around and spin

Channel: Aididan

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Id: 7hdmNXxcEVQ

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2024