Heroland Standard Edition - PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5

I purchased this game during 2020 Thanksgiving week for $14.99 before taxes. It is quite a bargain.

A silly happy story about a guy named Lucky who must take care of the patrons in an amusement park.

Watching a few reviews online and gameplay videos was a pretty easy way to convince myself to pick up Hero Land. It's a funny turn-based RPG that doesn't take itself too serious and something you can kind of just relax and enjoy. Sure why not give it a whirl? Problem is that the game is slow, very slow honestly. Which is amazing since it has a feature built in to speed up the combat by three times. Still you find yourself having to grind a whole lot to get any sort of levels or money before continuing forward. There's also a severe lack of control you have over your team. Typically you input whatever commands for your characters to perform in a role-playing game, whether that would be attacking, defending, using items, or performing magic. In Hero Land you only control the main character who isn't actually on the combat field. They can use items on some of the team, tell all your team to focus on attacking one individual, focus on using skills when attacking but that's something that has to be built up over a course of time before you get that option. Otherwise the combat is on auto throughout. The grinding doesn't stop there since you may want to go back into a specific battle over and over again until you get certain items to drop for those us out there that are completionists. Which isn't exactly out of the ordinary for the genre but added in with everything else and the battles feeling relatively boring due to how little strategy it feels like you've given you'll quickly find yourself messing about on your phone while you go through dungeons. The writing and the characters themselves can be pretty amusing and quite likeable but none of them exactly have a lot of depth to them so they can be difficult to get into. Seeing the cast grow and all their interactions together can be funny at times but other times you'll feel like you've stumbled across the same tropes in some by-the-numbers anime. I really do want to like Hero land and I know I've spent a lot of time dogging on it but it's just boring. Like the main story itself never really evolves to such a degree that I feel like all the hours poured into it seemed worth it. I guess I had higher expectations for whatever reason and they weren't matched in any way. Worth getting if you see it for super cheap, maybe $10 or less.