now playing: "Hero Generations"

Hero Generations
Genre(s): Social/MMO, simulation
Credits: Heart-Shaped Games, 2011 (2011 IndieCade Festival Finalist)

A few months ago I started playing MapleStory Adventures on Facebook, having heard enough praises from a friend of mine who played the original MapleStory MMO. I shared the news excitedly with him. Surely, this would be a better, transcending-pixels worthy alternative to the Zynga domination—?

"You're lame," he informed me. And to my disappointment, he was quite right. I know the learning curve on these things is supposed to be easy, but when you can control a stagnant-graphic battle with just a few mouse clicks, it seems way too easy, not to mention there are too many places where it looks like an advertisement. Sure, the constant quest to get gold and battle evil mushrooms got tied to my dopamine levels, but it was—empty. Purposeless. An adrenaline rush.

Enter Hero Generations.

As most Facebook apps work anyway, the cutesy graphics and brainless click buttons eliminate the learning curve, and the tutorial is smoothly integrated in actual gameplay that builds your score. Genre-wise, it's your basic RPG—kill monsters, collect gold, build farms, fall in love. The only difference is that then you have kids. (You know, the part that the Disney movies forget about after "they lived happily ever after." Oh no. Everyone knows that the honeymoon is only the beginning of the end.)

And those kids go on to kill monsters, collect gold, build farms, and fall in love. Then they have kids.

And those kids go on to kill monsters, collect gold, build farms, and fall in love. Then they have kids.

And those kids go on to... do stuff.

Bestow yourself a name and an assortment of traits like life expectancy, strength, and gold. No genetic diseases, though.

The world map—revealed bit by bit with every move you make. But don't go darting around so fast—it takes a year of your life to move from one space to another.

In short, Hero Generations is part-Darwinian fitness problem and part reverse-genealogy project. Once your hero PC is married off, a final "fame" score is tallied for him or her, and you essentially get to start over with the next one in the line. As generations advance, the world map gets bigger, new types of buildings appear, quests get more detailed, potential mates get pickier about how many stats they want from you... you know the works. By itself, it's just a formula—but when you iterate that formula enough times, you start developing a connection that spans space and time and energy and matter and all the things!

Seriously though, it's way more addictive than any MapleSewageStory I've ever read.

She loves you! But is she worth it for 500 gold? Ah, the decisions of our lives...

"Leveling up" becomes meaningless suddenly. After you've played a few generations, you start losing track of the overall picture. Pour as much energy as you want into earning all the fame and gold you want for your current hero, but sooner or later it has to end. You have to start all over, in a fresh world map with nothing to your name. You get to relive the adrenaline rush of click-and-slash infinitely, as long as future lifetimes keep coming. The addiction we have to clicking buttons is channeled into as productive of an excuse as "it's for the kids." It's a wonderfully satirical theme that fits the Facebook platform perfectly (not implying anything per se about Facebook. Other than what everyone already knows about it).

Hero Generations spins a realistic twist on the typical click-and-slash Facebook RPG by intentionally not taking itself realistically. Ironic how the indie designers always seem to know what they're doing compared to many triple-A companies.

Friday preview: From the creators of Echo Bazaar comes an interesting (and highly entertaining) promotional campaign....