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308: Historical Hero Author: Skull Release Date: February 14, 2010
"I'm so shocked that I'm not acting like a n00b as I usually do."
It's a lot of effort to make really long D-Mods, so people stopped doing it. This is the first "epic" I've covered since 2005's "The Scourger," and that had yet to receive an update with new areas when "Historical Hero" came out, so it was still considered a "quest" at the time. That'd make 2004's "Cloud Castle 2: Scarab" the last epic at the time, ignoring "Apex," which was demoted to a romp after I wrote about it anyway. "Historical Hero" took me about five hours to complete, certainly an impressive length from an author who'd been making D-Mods that take a minute or two to finish a few years earlier.
When I first saw the title, I assumed this was going to be an adventure where Dink travels through different periods of history or something. In fact, it has nothing to do with time travel or history. I guess the title is just a different way of saying "Legendary Hero."
For a significant portion of my playing time, I would have had trouble telling you what this D-Mod was supposed to be about. There is a story involving King Daniel trying to take over the world using a doomsday device (and you think you know a guy...), but it doesn't really come together until more than halfway through the game. At the start, all you know is that Dink has bought a new house and it doesn't live up to his expectations.
Ewww.
After wandering around the starting village for some time (the house you need to visit to advance the plot can't be entered at first, without so much as a "the door's locked" for explanation), you do learn a major plot point: Dink's father, an apparently cowardly soldier named Nathan Smallwood, was captured by goblins back during the war and is still alive and being held captive at a goblin stronghold known as Castle Glamour. This is a solid motivation for Dink to press on, but Dink's dad isn't mentioned again for hours of game time. Even Castle Glamour isn't mentioned again for almost as long. Most of "Historical Hero" consists of Dink plodding around similar-looking villages doing seemingly random favors for people. Rather than being driven to reach the castle and rescue his father, Dink just seems to be killing time. Dink actually says at one point, "Well, I still don't have anything else to do, so ok." Come on, man. Quest-relevant NPCs also have an annoying habit of giving you no leads. They'll tell you to go get something, Dink will say, "Where is that?" and they'll say they have no idea. That's not usually a big deal because you can go around and ask other people, but on several occasions, a conversation between Dink and an NPC ended, I had no idea what to do, and it turned out that I just have to talk to them again. How was I supposed to know to do this, and why do the characters stop talking right before getting to the most important part of their conversation? Good thing there's a walkthrough.
At least Dink has plenty of ways to kill said time. There are lots of little things to do in "Historical Hero," and they're quantified for you in terms of a percentage that you can check at "Town News" bulletins posted in various buildings. The main plot doesn't seem to go toward this percentage - instead, each time you do a little chore for somebody or find one of a few kinds of secrets, it goes up by 1%. Telling players what percentage they've completed is a good way to motivate them to see and do everything, but this D-Mod misses the mark by making some "percentage points" permanently missable, making it into more of a motivation to stick to a walkthrough like glue, which I couldn't be bothered to do. Nevertheless, I did manage to get 100% completion. I only had to go back and look for 3% I'd missed at the end, and none of them were of the permanently missable variety.
A scene from the 100% ending.
Some of the tasks Dink does are simple and rather boring - "Go get a book for me" and similar errands. I don't mind fetch quests, but these have no twists at all and are dull as a result. Other tasks are more interesting, like a guy who wants you to get rid of a guy who stands on top of a cliff and yells at him. You can make this guy walk right to his death by taunting him!
Other "percentage points" are gained by finding little yellow "honorgems" and rocks that you can break with a skill called "mage fist" (you'll be examining every rock you see). The most fun I had playing "Historical Hero" was scouring the map for secrets, of which there are many. All of the powerups I found in this way came in handy in the more difficult later section. There's also percentage in buying houses. Dink can buy an awful lot of different houses in this adventure, most of them for dirt cheap. Each House of Dink contains a save point, and all but the first few have a bookshelf where you can read little books you buy in a certain shop (I guess they magically travel from house to house). For some reason, every single time you buy a house, the game boldly declares "YOU JUST BOUGHT A HOUSE" and runs slowly through the same explanation of what you can do there. HH has a knack for unnecessary tutorializing. At the end of the intro, you have to sit through a S-L-O-W series of instructions on what every button does in Dink Smallwood. I get it, thanks.
But hey, speaking of houses, there are a lot of houses and other buildings in this D-Mod.
It's a whole Dinky subdivision.
In most Dink games (I say it this way because the original game is a prime example), towns tend to be pretty skeletal because it's hard to keep coming up with new ideas for NPCs and dialogue. "Historical Hero," by contrast, is pretty stuffed with them. In addition to all the NPCs, the author has shown a rare commitment to handing out unique scripts to just about every item of furniture in the game. No qualifiers here: EVERY D-Mod of much length at all that I've ever seen runs out of steam at some point in terms of talk and hit responses for random objects - until this one. Even if most of the lines are really inane, there's something impressive about being able to come up with so many variations on "Wow, it's a table."
How would you... "hole for a bomb?" What? WHAT? Packs have standard holes for bombs now?
Another mini-quest involves one of the strangest relationships I've ever seen. Dink meets a girl, she volunteers to be his girlfriend, he buys her a TON of vases (I guess she collects them?), she says "Let's get married!" This is the totality of their interaction with one another. Forget getting to know somebody as a person and sticking together with them through fun times and bad - vases are the way to go to get yourself a spouse. This life event is worth a whole percentage point, so you'd better do it. You want 100%, don't you? There's a good boy.
The map is fine for the most part, but there are a handful of depth dot errors and a lot of hardness errors. I lost count of the places where I could go into walls, water, cliffsides, or a dark void. Even where there weren't gaps in hardness, walls were unevenly placed, resulting in countless invisible little "ledges" you could get snagged on, which is a disaster when you're being pursued by an enemy.
Some places also look a bit strange. I know there aren't graphics for horizontal-facing cliffs, but this just doesn't look right. Oh, and Dink isn't supposed to be standing on that roof.
Some cutscenes don't freeze Dink, so you can move around (even if Dink is invisible) and bring up the usual "notalk" responses during them. At least doing so doesn't stop the cutscene and the game, like in some other mods.
Most of the musical selections are pretty good, but there was a section early on with a strange MIDI that I didn't like at all. It was a bunch of weird droning noises. It sounded like the musical equivalent of indigestion.
Dink's foes aren't portrayed as too bright in this D-Mod. A bumbling group of villains called the "Disturbed Rats" (somewhat analogous to the Scarab Club 7 from "Cloud Castle 2") seem to mess up at every turn, and Daniel's oppressive knights demand cookies at a meeting. I got a good laugh out of a scene at a training camp for the "Rats" members where one guy says that he's Dr. Phil and starts spouting off the kind of nonsense statements that TV personality is famous for.
Robj, is that you?
Dink himself can also be quite silly, as we know.
Notice me guard-sempai ;_;
Toward the end, especially when you actually enter the castle Glamour, "Historical Hero" finally feels like an epic. Your actions seem to drive the story in the final sections, a sense that is missing from the rest of the game and makes things a good deal more exciting. The castle is a huge multi-level dungeon where Dink must rescue prisoners (including his father) and defeat the goblins, the remnants of the Disturbed Rats, and King Daniel's evil knights in several boss battles, some of which involve unusual elements like pushing barrels around in order to reach targets.
Negative rainbow, what does it mean?!
The difficulty also ramps up a lot at the end. For most of the game, the enemies are a cakewalk, but just before you reach the castle, the enemies suddenly get very strong, having an attack of 70, 100 or more. For once, I was grateful that max health doesn't really cap at the 220 that the status bar is capable of displaying. I still was able to handle the enemies by using herb boots to keep my distance. There was just one screen in the D-Mod that I found truly difficult. It involved a very strong slayer and not enough room to dodge its attacks. Even that may have been manageable if it weren't for the fact that the hardness of the walls is a mess, which caused me to constantly get hung up while trying to move. I had to fight this thing twice in order to go back and get the flame bow (which was worth it).
I got stuck here for a long time.
"Historical Hero" is a fine D-Mod with lots to do, and I think it's the first time that anyone who had made something on the level of "Adventures with Jani" went on to make something of such quality. However, I didn't enjoy it as much as, say, "Three Amulets," to use a recent example. It's not all about how much stuff you can put into a D-Mod - structure and a sense of purpose are even more important.
"I'm so shocked that I'm not acting like a n00b as I usually do."
It's a lot of effort to make really long D-Mods, so people stopped doing it. This is the first "epic" I've covered since 2005's "The Scourger," and that had yet to receive an update with new areas when "Historical Hero" came out, so it was still considered a "quest" at the time. That'd make 2004's "Cloud Castle 2: Scarab" the last epic at the time, ignoring "Apex," which was demoted to a romp after I wrote about it anyway. "Historical Hero" took me about five hours to complete, certainly an impressive length from an author who'd been making D-Mods that take a minute or two to finish a few years earlier.
When I first saw the title, I assumed this was going to be an adventure where Dink travels through different periods of history or something. In fact, it has nothing to do with time travel or history. I guess the title is just a different way of saying "Legendary Hero."
For a significant portion of my playing time, I would have had trouble telling you what this D-Mod was supposed to be about. There is a story involving King Daniel trying to take over the world using a doomsday device (and you think you know a guy...), but it doesn't really come together until more than halfway through the game. At the start, all you know is that Dink has bought a new house and it doesn't live up to his expectations.
Ewww.
After wandering around the starting village for some time (the house you need to visit to advance the plot can't be entered at first, without so much as a "the door's locked" for explanation), you do learn a major plot point: Dink's father, an apparently cowardly soldier named Nathan Smallwood, was captured by goblins back during the war and is still alive and being held captive at a goblin stronghold known as Castle Glamour. This is a solid motivation for Dink to press on, but Dink's dad isn't mentioned again for hours of game time. Even Castle Glamour isn't mentioned again for almost as long. Most of "Historical Hero" consists of Dink plodding around similar-looking villages doing seemingly random favors for people. Rather than being driven to reach the castle and rescue his father, Dink just seems to be killing time. Dink actually says at one point, "Well, I still don't have anything else to do, so ok." Come on, man. Quest-relevant NPCs also have an annoying habit of giving you no leads. They'll tell you to go get something, Dink will say, "Where is that?" and they'll say they have no idea. That's not usually a big deal because you can go around and ask other people, but on several occasions, a conversation between Dink and an NPC ended, I had no idea what to do, and it turned out that I just have to talk to them again. How was I supposed to know to do this, and why do the characters stop talking right before getting to the most important part of their conversation? Good thing there's a walkthrough.
At least Dink has plenty of ways to kill said time. There are lots of little things to do in "Historical Hero," and they're quantified for you in terms of a percentage that you can check at "Town News" bulletins posted in various buildings. The main plot doesn't seem to go toward this percentage - instead, each time you do a little chore for somebody or find one of a few kinds of secrets, it goes up by 1%. Telling players what percentage they've completed is a good way to motivate them to see and do everything, but this D-Mod misses the mark by making some "percentage points" permanently missable, making it into more of a motivation to stick to a walkthrough like glue, which I couldn't be bothered to do. Nevertheless, I did manage to get 100% completion. I only had to go back and look for 3% I'd missed at the end, and none of them were of the permanently missable variety.
A scene from the 100% ending.
Some of the tasks Dink does are simple and rather boring - "Go get a book for me" and similar errands. I don't mind fetch quests, but these have no twists at all and are dull as a result. Other tasks are more interesting, like a guy who wants you to get rid of a guy who stands on top of a cliff and yells at him. You can make this guy walk right to his death by taunting him!
Other "percentage points" are gained by finding little yellow "honorgems" and rocks that you can break with a skill called "mage fist" (you'll be examining every rock you see). The most fun I had playing "Historical Hero" was scouring the map for secrets, of which there are many. All of the powerups I found in this way came in handy in the more difficult later section. There's also percentage in buying houses. Dink can buy an awful lot of different houses in this adventure, most of them for dirt cheap. Each House of Dink contains a save point, and all but the first few have a bookshelf where you can read little books you buy in a certain shop (I guess they magically travel from house to house). For some reason, every single time you buy a house, the game boldly declares "YOU JUST BOUGHT A HOUSE" and runs slowly through the same explanation of what you can do there. HH has a knack for unnecessary tutorializing. At the end of the intro, you have to sit through a S-L-O-W series of instructions on what every button does in Dink Smallwood. I get it, thanks.
But hey, speaking of houses, there are a lot of houses and other buildings in this D-Mod.
It's a whole Dinky subdivision.
In most Dink games (I say it this way because the original game is a prime example), towns tend to be pretty skeletal because it's hard to keep coming up with new ideas for NPCs and dialogue. "Historical Hero," by contrast, is pretty stuffed with them. In addition to all the NPCs, the author has shown a rare commitment to handing out unique scripts to just about every item of furniture in the game. No qualifiers here: EVERY D-Mod of much length at all that I've ever seen runs out of steam at some point in terms of talk and hit responses for random objects - until this one. Even if most of the lines are really inane, there's something impressive about being able to come up with so many variations on "Wow, it's a table."
How would you... "hole for a bomb?" What? WHAT? Packs have standard holes for bombs now?
Another mini-quest involves one of the strangest relationships I've ever seen. Dink meets a girl, she volunteers to be his girlfriend, he buys her a TON of vases (I guess she collects them?), she says "Let's get married!" This is the totality of their interaction with one another. Forget getting to know somebody as a person and sticking together with them through fun times and bad - vases are the way to go to get yourself a spouse. This life event is worth a whole percentage point, so you'd better do it. You want 100%, don't you? There's a good boy.
The map is fine for the most part, but there are a handful of depth dot errors and a lot of hardness errors. I lost count of the places where I could go into walls, water, cliffsides, or a dark void. Even where there weren't gaps in hardness, walls were unevenly placed, resulting in countless invisible little "ledges" you could get snagged on, which is a disaster when you're being pursued by an enemy.
Some places also look a bit strange. I know there aren't graphics for horizontal-facing cliffs, but this just doesn't look right. Oh, and Dink isn't supposed to be standing on that roof.
Some cutscenes don't freeze Dink, so you can move around (even if Dink is invisible) and bring up the usual "notalk" responses during them. At least doing so doesn't stop the cutscene and the game, like in some other mods.
Most of the musical selections are pretty good, but there was a section early on with a strange MIDI that I didn't like at all. It was a bunch of weird droning noises. It sounded like the musical equivalent of indigestion.
Dink's foes aren't portrayed as too bright in this D-Mod. A bumbling group of villains called the "Disturbed Rats" (somewhat analogous to the Scarab Club 7 from "Cloud Castle 2") seem to mess up at every turn, and Daniel's oppressive knights demand cookies at a meeting. I got a good laugh out of a scene at a training camp for the "Rats" members where one guy says that he's Dr. Phil and starts spouting off the kind of nonsense statements that TV personality is famous for.
Robj, is that you?
Dink himself can also be quite silly, as we know.
Notice me guard-sempai ;_;
Toward the end, especially when you actually enter the castle Glamour, "Historical Hero" finally feels like an epic. Your actions seem to drive the story in the final sections, a sense that is missing from the rest of the game and makes things a good deal more exciting. The castle is a huge multi-level dungeon where Dink must rescue prisoners (including his father) and defeat the goblins, the remnants of the Disturbed Rats, and King Daniel's evil knights in several boss battles, some of which involve unusual elements like pushing barrels around in order to reach targets.
Negative rainbow, what does it mean?!
The difficulty also ramps up a lot at the end. For most of the game, the enemies are a cakewalk, but just before you reach the castle, the enemies suddenly get very strong, having an attack of 70, 100 or more. For once, I was grateful that max health doesn't really cap at the 220 that the status bar is capable of displaying. I still was able to handle the enemies by using herb boots to keep my distance. There was just one screen in the D-Mod that I found truly difficult. It involved a very strong slayer and not enough room to dodge its attacks. Even that may have been manageable if it weren't for the fact that the hardness of the walls is a mess, which caused me to constantly get hung up while trying to move. I had to fight this thing twice in order to go back and get the flame bow (which was worth it).
I got stuck here for a long time.
"Historical Hero" is a fine D-Mod with lots to do, and I think it's the first time that anyone who had made something on the level of "Adventures with Jani" went on to make something of such quality. However, I didn't enjoy it as much as, say, "Three Amulets," to use a recent example. It's not all about how much stuff you can put into a D-Mod - structure and a sense of purpose are even more important.
