But there's enough love in the game's look and feel to make it effortlessly likeable. The music, meanwhile, is joyful, ear-infesting chiptune that's about four or five notes away from the Zelda overworld theme. Dungeons you need to get to are marked on the map, but nothing else is - in true retro style, it's possible to get lost for hours wandering without a clue, looking for the right path or person to talk to. Water-effect cubes glimmer in the light and little 3D pixel people do their two-frame animations in their pixel houses. Monsters and plants disintegrate back into them when hit with a sword, exploding in a shower of little pieces sent careening across the screen. Everything is constructed from tiny 3D pixel cubes.
It's astonishingly beautiful, and that's not pure nostalgia talking (I'm too young, for a start). It's a naked, nostalgia-soaked appeal to a lost generation of Japanese gamers in their mid-thirties, a generation that has fond, fuzzy memories of the 8-bit looks, music and simplicity that 3D Dot Game Heroes carries off very well. If an artform comes of age when it starts getting self-reflexive, then games like this, Half-Minute Hero and Retro Game Challenge suggest that we're definitely getting there.Įqual parts homage, pastiche and straight rip-off, 3D Dot Game Heroes takes a decades-old game concept - the original Legend of Zelda, to be precise, though there are more subtle nods to numerous other NES-generation classics - and reimagines its pixel art in gorgeous 3D.
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