Hero & Daughter RPG Maker game

Yes I know, I haven’t made a post in several months now so I wanted to write about this silly game I’ve been playing recently called Hero & Daughter. It is an RPG Maker game made by tachi: you can view his website here. Recently, vgperson has provided a full English translation which can be downloaded on her site here.

EDIT: So I was wondering why I got a surge of views on this page recently, and just noticed that this game is now available on Steam!  Super cool and totally unexpected.  Unfortunately, since I played on a fan translated version, some of the character names I use here are different than the official translation.  And the game has gone through a large number of revisions since I last played, so some of the information I present here may no longer apply in the newest version of the game.

Even though it’s an RPG Maker game, Hero & Daughter is quite well made. It’s a fun little romp and will probably take between 15 to 20 hours to complete. It’s a dungeon crawler turn-based JRPG with a silly premise: the dark lord has returned to the land, and once again the main hero is called to defeat him. But the hero accidentally drinks a potion that permanently drops him back to Level 1, making him unable to level up. In order to defeat the dark lord, the hero must travel to several dungeons around the world and obtain the seals to open up the dark lord’s castle to challenge him.

So you’re probably wondering how the hero can stand a chance without leveling up. Well, he meets an old man who is able to summon girls to join his party. And of course, they are not under the permanent Lvl 1 curse. To summon a new girl, the hero has to find summon stones which are found randomly in dungeon treasure chests. There were a total of 25 different girls in my game, but I know that tachi updates H&D quite often so there will definitely be even more available in the future! Each girl is fairly unique, and almost every RPG archetype is represented so you get a lot of freedom in your party configuration. Since the girls are randomly selected every time you summon, it also ensures that everybody will have a unique playthrough.

You can only have a maximum of 4 characters at a time in your active party, and the hero must always be present. So it seems like he’s always going to be dead weight, but the game actually has a unique way of “leveling” him up. Even though he is stuck at Level 1, he can still increase his stats by eating at a restaurant in the main town. Each dish gives a significant increase to one stat. However, you can’t just eat at the restaurant all day: the restaurant runs out of ingredients after you eat, and will only re-stock after you a dungeon run. You might think that this encourages quick dungeon runs, but there’s another check in place: every time you return from a dungeon, there is a chance that the main town will get invaded by monsters. At first, these monsters are fairly weak, but they get stronger every invasion, so this discourages quick suicide runs in the dungeons to re-stock the restaurant. In any case, this system allows for a decent amount of freedom for how you want the main hero to play. For example, if you want him to be a physical fighter type, then you would binge on the dish that raise his attack stat, and if you want him to be a mage, then you would focus on raising his magic stat.

You can also level up the main village. This is done by spending money at the various shops. This is quite important because as the village levels up, more items get added to the Item and Magic shop. The dishes from the restaurant also get boosted in their effectiveness. So there is pretty much no reason to hoard money in this game: just spend all of your money on the shops whenever you can to ensure the best merchandise is available.

Even though the main hero cannot level up, he still gains experience just like everybody else. However, this exp is not wasted, because the game allows him to transfer his experience to other girls to level them up instead. This is quite useful, since newly summoned girls always start at Level 5. So it really reduces the amount of grind required to normally get a new character up to speed.

During battles, each character has 3 main parameters: HP, MP, and TP. HP and MP are fairly self explanatory, and TP is something that is required for a character to use his/her unique skills(Self Skills). The maximum TP is 100 and it cannot be raised beyond that. Skills use various amounts of TP, and characters slowly regenerate TP whenever they do any action that is not a Self Skill, like attacking, guarding, using magic, etc. Every character gets a new self skill at Level 10, 20, 30, and finally 40.

Each dungeon contains 5 floors, and every floor is randomly selected from a pool of premade layouts, with the exception of the 5th floor which always contains the boss. Treasures and enemies are also randomly placed. You can actually see the enemies on the map, so this game doesn’t have the dreaded random battle system that is in a lot of JRPGs. Sometimes in dungeons you will see a special miniboss enemy, which has a unique sprite and does not chase you like all the normal enemies. These are called bounties, because defeating them gives you a great deal of prize money back in the main town. Anyway, the bounties are not required to beat the dungeons. They are usually quite a bit more difficult than the boss and require unique strategies to defeat, so it is highly recommended to fight all of them if you’re looking for a challenge.

That about covers the basics of the game. There are a lot of things that I like about this game, but the biggest thing is the tone. The game doesn’t take itself seriously at all, and has a very similar comedic tone to Disgaea. There’s a lot of hilarious dialogue, silly item names, and equally silly item descriptions. Similar to Disgaea, the game is also kind of a grindfest. It’s totally shameless about this, and many times characters will break the fourth wall during dialogue and encourage you to grind more. Luckily, there are a number of things in this game that make the experience quite pleasant. EVERY animation and displayed text during battle can be skipped by pressing the Z key, and you can even hold down the Z key to just skip everything and repeat your last action. You also cannot get a Game Over in a dungeon. If your entire party dies, you just get sent back to the main town with everything intact.

Like I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of playable characters in this game, but the most noteworthy ones in no particular order:

• Sion – fencer girl wearing a swimsuit. Very balanced stats, with a preference towards attacking. She is one of the few characters in the game to not have a single useless Self-Skill.  Two of them activate her Hyperoptic Suit, making her invincible to physical or magic, depending on which one you choose.  The other three are strong physical attack skills that have an added elemental property of ice, thunder, or holy.
• Lenna – blonde delinquent fighter girl. Terrible magic, but excellent physical attacking stats and very high agility. All of her self skills are physical attacks of both the single target and multi target variety. They also have the added effect of decreasing the enemy’s defense and magic defense stat, so she has great synergy with any party configuration.
• Strega – tsundere mage girl who looks like she went to Hogwarts. As you can probably expect, terrible attack stat but great magic and surprisingly decent defensive stats, which you wouldn’t expect based on her appearance.  She has an amazing self skill called Magic Berserk, which allows her to get two actions per turn.  That in itself is already amazing, but she also has other skills that let her regenerate her own TP and MP
• Yumel – psychic girl who appears to be wearing a snow coat. Very balanced stats overall, and can play both the fighter and mage role decently. Many of her self skills are multi-target status inducers, which are very useful for mobs. She also has a buff skill that sharply increases ATK and DEF, which is super useful to put on a strong physical fighter on your team. Finally, she also comes with the Healer spell learned, so she is one of the few characters in the game with a reliable way to heal the entire party all at once.
• Dark Lord Arue – AMAZING stats all around, strong self skills, and can play both the fighter and mage role at the same time(though I would say she’s stronger as a mage). The only problem with Arue is that you can only get her near the end of the game, and most of her best self skills cost a whopping 100 TP.
• Selphie – funny techie girl who is always on her phone. Has 3 self skills that are multi target status inducers, including the ever useful Paralyze and Silence. They also have an added effect of decreasing the enemy’s MDF. She also comes with the Darkness magic spell learned, which is useful since it takes a decent number of village levels to get Darkness to show up in the magic shop.
• Red Witch – as you can probably guess, another mage type. If you manage to summon her early on, she can carry you through the first two dungeons, as her ridiculous Fire Attack self skill does astronomical damage for that part of the game. It even has a chance to induce instant death! IMO she is eventually outclassed by Strega, but she is still quite strong.
• Hauyne – busty princess. The ultimate support character, she has subpar attacking and magic stats. But she has three free(as in, they cost no TP) self-skills that buff the entire’s party ATK, DEF, or LUK stat. She also has a skill that heals the entire party for 30%, and her final skill cures the entire party of status ailments.
• Aquata – swimmer girl who is wearing almost nothing. A great support character, she has a subpar attack and magic stat as expected, but has some very useful self skills including one that gives a 10% increase to every stat of every member of your party, and one that drains an enemy’s magic defense and MP at the same time. This is especially useful against bosses that rely on magic to attack you. You can kind of consider her to be the magic analogue of Hauyne.
• Candy Lix – apparently she’s a guest character from a different tachi game. Another great support character, she can also play the mage role since her magic stat is quite good. She has a unique self skill called Star Candy, which allows her to make anyone in your party invincible for 2 turns. She also has 2 other self skills that make party members continuously regenerate both their HP and MP simultaneously

Eventually, you will summon every playable girl in the game, but you will continue to find Summon Stones in dungeons. What happens then if you try to summon? When there are no more characters left, you will instead summon a girl’s memories. These memories allow you to teach a girl’s self-skill to the main hero. This is where the real fun begins when customizing the main hero, since the hero spends most of the game with only 2 skills. Some of the most noteworthy skills include:

• Prodigious Samidare(Sion) – A physical attack that hits 6 times, and has Holy elemental property. Very useful if you made your hero the physical fighter type
• Absolute Shadow(Ayame) – While Ayame herself isn’t that great of a character, her Absolute Shadow skill is quite strong since it allows the user to attack with three physical attacks in one turn for 5 turns. Another useful skill if the hero is a fighter
• Brass Knux(Lenna) – an attack that ignores the target’s defense. Has a great added property of reducing the enemy’s defense and magic defense stat. If you don’t use Lenna in your main party, then is even more useful.
• Magic Berserker(Strega) – I already described why this ability is amazing in Strega’s writeup earlier. Definitely get this if you made the hero a mage type
• Hee Hee Hee(Red Witch) – It increases your magic attack stat continuously throughout the battle. Another must have if your hero is a magic user
• Potions For All(Felice) – restores your party’s life by 30%. A great skill no matter what type of character your hero is, since multi-target heals are scarce in this game.
• Counseling(Yumel) – gives a huge boost to one ally’s ATK and DEF. Great skill if you have a strong physical fighter in your team(and you should)
• Berserker Roar(Rouge) – buffs your entire’s party attack stat. Great skill in general, but even better if you have more than one fighter
• Sweet Candy(Candy Lix) – gives an ally Sweet status for 3 turns, where their HP and MP regenerate 20% and they get a 50% boost to magic defense. Very useful skill if you have a mage on your team(and you should)

That’s about all I wanted to write. Until next time!