## 2025-02-21 I randomly found out that **Glory of Hercules IV** got a fantranslation a few years ago, which means every game in the series has been translated to some extent - the only official one that ever showed up was the DS game from 2008, which I haven't played. But I was drawn to this game because it looked neat and I also feel like I've played every [[Super Nintendo|SNES]] [[JRPG]] worth playing that's appeared in English at this point, so fantranslations have been a nice way to branch out further. I expected to dink around with this game for a few hours before the novelty wore off and I put it away, but I spent a good 25 hours on it and finished it. It was very, very good! It was ambitious in ways that I just don't expect by most games from this era, and its narrative actually got me - which was a surprise until I found out that [[Kazushige Nojima]] wrote and directed it. I'm assuming I'll never escape this man. **Glory of Hercules IV** barely involves Hercules which is pretty funny. You don't play as him and he's a party member that slips in and out of the squad as the plot progresses. Instead you play a nameless guy who lives in Atlantis. One day Zeus, fuckhead that he is, decides to invade the place and sink it. At the same time, your professor that's searching for the secret of immortality opens up Pandora's Box and shoves you in it, causing you to wake up 9000 years later. Also you are a dog now. Okay not quite - you and your other party member, Plato (yes that one) have no body at all, so the Gods of fate give you the ability to possess new ones. You can collect up to 100 different bodies that effectively act as a class system. Each one has different skills and weapon proficiencies that can be leveled up, and some of them have unique overworld abilities, like the ability to chat with animals when you yourself are one. NPCs will react to whichever soul you are in a lot of instances as well. There's also a day/night system that you'll need to engage with on your collectathon. ![[Glory of Hercules IV-1740176222287.png]] I really need to emphasize this: this is a game from *1994*. Each time I encountered a one of these mechanics for the first time my jaw almost dropped. Data East managed to crank out something really impressive with this game. You don't really *need* to engage with all of this stuff, but it's tons of fun finding cool setups and breaking the game with characters that start off horribly weak but end up godly with some training. It made the somewhat high encounter rate a lot more bearable as a result. This game's mechanics in moment-to-moment combat don't extend much further than **Dragon Quest V**, but it plays nice and quick and has fun enemy types based on Greek monsters. It's fun! ![[Glory of Hercules IV-1740176390424.png]] The story was also awesome. I'm cooking up something else about this, but I love when a genre takes on an interesting new setting because it can mix the formula up a bit. Every time I thought I knew where **GoHIV** was going, it zigged instead of zagging. It probably helped that I'm not that familiar with Greek myth anyways, but the story was legit unconventional and kept me playing just to find out what happens next. As someone who's played tons of games at this point, that's huge praise because it doesn't happen often. The plot is tragic in the ways that these larger myths tend to be, and actually left me pretty melancholic by the end of it. Even sad? It was neat! And kind of like [[Earthbound]], you can do a lot of exploring and even tackle a new dungeon after the credits roll. Honestly...don't have much negative to say about **Glory of Hercules IV**. If you're interested in games that never got localized to English, or enjoy Greek myth or a gripping plot, I'd definitely check it out.