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It’s tradition, at this point. Whenever I get my timeline sorted out for this series, and start actually working through things chronologically — as I recently did with Out Live and Phantasy Star II — I always find some other games I missed and end up going back to play them. I’m tempted to tell you that this detour will the the last one, but that’s what I think every time. Hopefully it will at least be brief, and then we can head back to 1989.

For now, though, we’re going way back to June 1987, for the Japan-only game Glory of Heracles: The Labors of the Divine Hero by Data East, for Nintendo’s Famicom. That places it a few weeks after Zillion and about a week before Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished in our timeline. I’d originally skipped over Glory of Heracles because I’d heard it was basically just a Dragon Quest clone (indeed, the first two Dragon Quest games, as well as Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord, are the only proper Japanese-style role-playing games to precede it), but then I read that the later entries in the Glory of Heracles series are good, so I decided to play it after all, using an English translation from DvD Translations (who also did the translation for Cleopatra no Mahou). It turns out it has a lot of interesting ideas of its own.

I can see why Glory of Heracles gets called a Dragon Quest clone, though. It has the same top-down, tile-based presentation. The same single hero character. The same menu that is summoned at the press of a button, where players can choose options like “talk” and “search”. The same slightly clunky controls, where button presses don’t always register as quickly as I expect. The same system of random battles, pitting the player against a single enemy at a time, as they take turns attacking. All of this is clearly borrowed from Dragon Quest.

But Glory of Heracles does a lot to set itself apart. There’s the Ancient Greek setting and mythology, for one: as you might suspect, the game stars the mythical hero Heracles, who is perhaps better known by his Romanized name Hercules. Many of the events and special “boss” encounters in the game are inspired by legends of Heracles, particularly his twelve Labors (hence the subtitle). Unfortunately, the story of the game is less interesting than in the myths. In the game we are simply told that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, has been kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld, and taken to his realm; Heracles must rescue her. So yes, it’s a standard damsel in distress story, a sadly overused trope.

This is even more disappointing because Heracles’ actual motivations for his Labors in the myth are far more interesting. He’s the illegitimate son of Zeus, you see, making him a demigod with superhuman strength. But that means that Zeus’ wife, the goddess Hera, doesn’t like him very much. She cursed him with a fit of madness that caused him to kill his wife and children. When he regained his senses, he sought penance for his actions, and was instructed by an oracle to pledge his service to the king Eurystheus. Hera then advised Erystheus to come up with a series of impossible tasks for Heracles — the titular Labors — to torment him. Yet Heracles managed to complete each one, much to Erystheus’ and Hera’s consternation.

That would have been such a cool backstory for this game! Alas, instead we get a tired damsel in distress story. Data East couldn’t even be bothered to use the actual Greek myth about a goddess being kidnapped and taken to Hades: the story of Persephone, who is abducted by Hades, and eventually becomes his wife. But she ends up spending half of her time in the mortal world and half of her time in the underworld, creating the cycle of seasons. I guess Data East preferred a more famous (and more canonically beautiful) damsel for their game. Sigh.

Heracles begins his adventure in the city of Athens, and it’s here that we see a major difference in design compared to the Dragon Quest games. Athens is not a separate area as towns usually are in Japanese-style role-playing games, entered from a zoomed-out world map. Athens, and indeed all the cities and towns in Glory of Heracles, are seamlessly integrated into the world map, with no transitions or breaks between the two. At first this just seemed like a cool detail, but it actually has a huge impact on how exploration feels. The wilderness areas between towns are at the same scale as the towns themselves, and there are even roads between them, and friendly travelers to meet on the way. This makes traveling feel more interesting than it does in most similar games, where each tile on the world map can represent miles of terrain. It also means that there’s less wilderness, since the settlements take up a big chunk of the map. Heracles’ adventure is on a smaller scale, limited to Ancient Greece rather than the entire planet. The world map even has edges, where most games would instead have it wrap around.

It also means that Heracles can spot the walls and buildings of a new town during his wanderings, without knowing where the entrance is. At once point I was excited to spy a new city, and traveled the perimeter of its walls looking for the way in, only to find none. Mountains blocked me from circling the whole city, and I realized that its entrance must be in another region of the map; indeed, I wasn’t able to visit that city until later in the game. Data East cleverly weave these towns and cities into the wilderness to create different routes and barriers, using them to create a more puzzle-like world that Heracles must pick through on his quest.

You see, Glory of Heracles is all about finding the right items to bring to the right people, or use in the right place, in order to proceed. Heracles can only carry ten items at a time, so it can be a tricky balancing act between the utility of things like healing items versus quest-related items that he needs for his next task. There are tons of these. Heracles will collect all manner of trophies, treasures, and knick-knacks and lug them around with him. Sometimes I knew what I needed to do with these, and other times they remained mysterious, clogging up a space in Heracles’ inventory while I waited to see when they would prove useful. Sometimes I needed to sell off a few to make room, and then return and get them later. This is generally possible, as the items themselves are used to track Heracles’ progress along his quest: if he has the item, it means he did the prerequisite task and can proceed. DvD Translations — who also provide a translated PDF manual that is quite helpful — recommend using the game’s default password system instead of save states, to ensure that items can be retrieved again if necessary. In practice I found that save states often worked too, but I did use passwords much of the time.

Even Heracles’ weapons and armor can be key items for progression. He can carry three weapons at a time, which is helpful because certain weapon types are strong against certain types of enemies. Typically, I wanted to carry a weapon for land-based enemies, a separate one for water-based enemies when sailing the Mediterranean (even Heracles’ ship is an item that takes up one of his precious slots), and another either for flying enemies or bosses. There are even some instances where carrying a specific weapon is needed to open up new conversation options. The ten-item limit can feel tight at times, but it was the three-weapon limit that really forced me into tough choices. Most weapons are found somewhere in the world, rather than purchased from shops, so I had to gauge how annoying it would be to go get them again, if I needed to take a different one in the moment. Oh, and in another surprising move, Glory of Heracles models equipment degradation, with weapons losing durability after each attack, and armor after each hit. Heracles can get them repaired by Hephaestus in Athens, or even hire Hephaestus to travel with him (but that uses up an item slot!), but if he takes too long his equipment can break completely.

All this was a bit confusing at first. When starting the game, before I could even reach the town of Pella where Heracles can get a password to continue the game, I had to face the Iron Boar who blocked the path. Heracles could barely scratch it, while it dished out huge damage. Even when I’d saved up and bought the best weapon and armor for sale in Athens, I still couldn’t defeat the boar. It turns out I needed to get a shield, at which point the boar’s attacks went from deadly to harmless. It was far from the only time that an impossible battle became trivial, just by bringing the right equipment.

Even so, I thought it was a strange decision to put players through all of that before they can even save their game. But, it turns out I could have just run away from the Iron Boar… and then continued on my way to Pella unimpeded. Running from battles is nearly always successful in Glory of Heracles, which I didn’t expect; in most role-playing games fleeing is a last-resort maneuver, used only in desperation. It’s a good thing it works well here, though, because many parts of the game saw me encountering very tough monsters before I had the means to battle them. This is even trickier because many weapons are two handed, which means Heracles can’t use his equipped shield. As I saw with the Iron Boar, the shield makes a huge difference to his defense, so it can be quite dangerous to travel with two-handed weapons equipped. But, with only three weapons, I sometimes didn’t have a choice.

Lest that all sound like annoying logistics, let me assure you that I really enjoyed Glory of Heracles once I started to understand how it works. I always felt I was making steady progress, simply by exploring and finding items. Townsfolk offer hints, naturally, and DvD Translations warn players to note down everything they say, as every hint is important. In fact, they took a few liberties with the translation and added some extra hints so players are sure to get all the information they need. With the exception of one particular spot (which saw me turn to an online walkthrough) I was indeed able to follow the clues and figure out where to go and what to do. I met gods and goddesses, found sunken treasures, delved into dark shrines, opened secret passages, collected all manner of magical relics, and eventually found my way to the underworld to face Hades. It was quite a ride.

What Glory of Heracles really reminded me of wasn’t Dragon Quest, despite all the mechanical similarities. No, it reminded me of Ys I, even though that wouldn’t release for another week. The way the countryside is the same scale as the towns, the way every single item is significant and therefore rewarding to find, the way character growth is defined more by equipment than by gaining levels — all of this recalls Nihon Falcom’s action role-playing game. But that’s probably because both Glory of Heracles and Ys take inspiration from adventure games. The early Dragon Quests have their share of world-spanning puzzles, especially later in the game, but they’re also very focused on leveling up the hero(es) through countless battles. In Glory of Heracles, I barely noticed when Heracles gained levels, and indeed reached the maximum level (and maximum sum of money) well before the end. But I was finding items and using them to open up new quests and clues right from the start. Since the late-game puzzles were my favorite parts of the Dragon Quest games, I was happy to find that Glory of Heracles focuses on them throughout.

It’s not all smooth sailing, though. The enemy encounter rate in Glory of Heracles is very high, often triggering another battle after Heracles takes just a single step. This gets annoying fast, especially when most battles are either trivial (with Heracles defeating the enemy in a single hit) or so tough that Heracles will just run away. There are items that can reduce the number of encounters, but they take up precious slots that I usually needed for other things. Also, they must be re-used after every fight for them to take effect again. The artwork for all those enemies — and indeed for the game in general — isn’t that great either, even when compared to Dragon Quest’s rudimentary art. Enemy creatures in Glory of Heracles tend to be sketched in just a few similar colors, and can’t match Dragon Quest’s cartoony but iconic monsters. The music is unremarkable too, and sometimes grating: the shrill melody of the battle music makes those frequent fights even more jarring.

But these shortcomings aren’t enough to spoil the fun of Heracles’ adventure. We’ve seen games like Final Fantasy II and Phantasy Star II (released in 1988 an d 1989, respectively) show early signs of the linear stories that would become standard for the Japanese-style role-playing game genre, so it was nice to go back to an earlier style where the world is wide open and players must collect clues and uncover secrets to figure out how to proceed. It’s a design that seems to only exist in the earliest entries in the genre, before epic stories with colorful casts of characters took over. Those are great too, of course, but Glory of Heracles showcases how much fun exploration can be when the world is designed as a mystery to be unpicked. That’s something that, dare I say, lives on in Dark Souls and its ilk, and is a big part of why those games are so popular.

If you’re interested to try Glory of Heracles: The Labors of the Divine Hero, you’ll need to use emulation. As usual for Famicom games, I used the Retroarch frontend and Mesen emulation core to play. I also had to get the translation patch from DvD Translations, which proved a little tricky since there are two versions of the ROM out there, and I apparently got the wrong one. Eventually I found one that already had the patch applied, and was able to enjoy the game.

I’ll be trying out the other games in the Glory of Heracles series when my timeline reaches them, but for now our detour continues. Next we head to July 1988, for a game that I did not realize had a big influence on early Metroidvania design. Stay tuned!

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