100 Turn Hero is the latest game by Kotaro Yoshida and a spiritual sister to Half Minute Hero.
This one is Japanese language only. Although it's playable without knowing Japanese, it requires a lot more patience than his other games, plus there's a fair amount of dialogue you'll be missing out on. But even without knowing Japanese, it's pretty fun. It's not free (about a dollar) and it also features in-app purchases (although they're totally not necessary.) The in-app purchase are for jewels to level up your weapons, but you can quickly get the same amount of jewels through playing stages.
You play as Hero Fundel, who is on a quest to save the world with the ninja Shadow Maru. You're on a different island full of visible monsters each stage and need to kill the highlighted boss to win. You have free movement, you level up by killing monsters, and the monsters don't move or attack... but you can only attack a maximum of 100 times before the stage ends. You bring three weapons with you and switch between them at will. You'll want to use multiple weapons not only because of their different skills (ex. strong against water monsters or strong against land monsters), but because the weapons hit a different pattern around you. When you beat a stage, you get jewels and, depending on the number of turns it took you to beat the stage, another weapon. You can use jewels to upgrade your weapon. Choosing an efficient path through the stage is important, this game gives you plenty of aha moments that let you shave a lot of turns.
Honestly, I was hoping for more out of this game. The concept is interesting, but the game doesn't really do as much with it as I had hoped. The strategy of the game is 10% figuring the right order to kill monsters in and 90% about bringing the right weapons. Bringing the right weapons requires a fair amount of grinding, which I dislike. I think the main reason for my disappointment was that I was hoping the game would be more like Half Minute Hero, which attempted to be a JRPG. I had hoped there'd be more to a stage than just killing monsters. The stages in 100 Turn Hero could have had multiple paths through it... quests to complete that give you shortcuts to the boss, searching for secrets in a stage, or party members to recruit. I think it would have be a perfect touch screen based Half Minute Hero, but instead it's much smaller in ambition. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the game and it's definitely worth a dollar. I hope ritterz decides to localize this game. But I would have rather paid for a five dollar game with more charm and surprises.
To play without knowing Japanese isn't impossible, you'll just need to rely on trial and error. I've added descriptions of some of the various menus. These descriptions will help keep you from wasting your jewels. Hopefully this helps with the less obvious parts of navigating the game.
Lastly, I thought I'd go over some tips.
Always visit all the buildings in a stage. You'll often get gold you can spend at the shops. You buy food at the shops in exchange for stat increases that will last for the remainder of the stage. You can increase Attack, Charge, Guard Shave, Range, or Everything. Each type of food corresponds to one of those increases.
At the end of each stage, your remaining Gold is converted into Jewels you keep. Quest 14 is really nice for grinding money, you just need a weapon that hits the boss over the water. That way, you bypass needing to kill the strong guys. You can easily end the stage with 300 Gold, giving you 100 Jewels.
When fighting a Boss, the critical and guard shave stats are much more important than your attack or level. It's common to do 1 damage normally against the boss, then have a 20 or 40 damage critical hit.
Most of the "strategy" of this game is bringing the right weapons into battle. Like in Gun Spirits, weapons can have skills. They're the orange text on the upgrade screen. Most are obvious (EXP/Attack/Guard/Charge/Gold increase), but the following require a little special mention:
These stats significantly increase your damage against that type of monster and are the key to progressing through the game without spending money.
Hopefully these tips help you enjoy the game. So, have fun~ And here's hoping to more Kotaro Yoshida localizations!
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