Class of Heroes: Anniversary Edition

I've spent enough time with old-school DRPGs to know exactly who Class of Heroes: Anniversary Edition was made for, and it is absolutely not me expecting a gentle on-ramp. This is a remaster of a 2008 PSP title, and Zerodiv has preserved its thorny, uncompromising design almost completely intact. If you walked in expecting Etrian Odyssey's careful tutorialisation or Wizardry 8's modern ergonomics, adjust your expectations sharply downward before you hit the infirmary. The genuine strength here is party composition, and it deserves credit. Picking from 10 races, including Dwarves, Fairies, and Felpurrs, and slotting them into 15 courses like Summoner, Lord, and Kunoichi gives you a matrix of decisions that actually matters. Alignment, Good through Evil, gates certain courses and also affects the affinity your party members share with each other. Misalign your Diablons and Celestians and your affinity rating tanks, which in turn locks you out of Gambits, the multi-character combo skills that can hit all enemies or guarantee a clean escape. That layered cause-and-effect is the game at its best. Front row versus back row placement, stat thresholds to qualify for a course, even gender locks on four of the fifteen courses, all of it feeds into a pre-dungeon planning phase that genuinely rewards deliberate thinking. Once you are actually inside the dungeons, the ceiling drops fast. Over 75 floors spread across the game sound generous, but the level design relies heavily on randomised map pools rather than hand-crafted layouts, and the repetition becomes visible within a few hours. The handful of fixed labyrinths are exceptions. Combat is turn-order, command-assignment, watch-the-results, which is fine for the genre, but the surrounding systems age poorly. You will appraise items you have identified before, repeatedly. The menu hierarchy for moving gear between storage, your bag, and individual party members is the kind of friction that felt acceptable on a portable device in 2008 and grates on PC in 2024. The Anniversary Edition does add adjustable difficulty modifiers that tweak damage and XP rates, and a boss-replay arena for targeted grinding, but reviewers and the Steam community are right to call out that quality-of-life work stops well short of what the underlying design actually needs. For DRPG veterans, particularly anyone with fondness for the Wizardry lineage or players who bounced off the original PSP version and want a cleaner shot at completion, there is a real game here. The alchemy system, where materials gathered in dungeons get appraised, converted via recipes, and turned into crafted gear, is genuinely more cost-efficient than the shop, and figuring out that loop is satisfying. The school framing, Particus Academy as your home base, keeps the tone light and the character art is charming. The music inside dungeons builds appropriate tension. None of that disguises the fact that the narrative is paper-thin and the setting is cosmetic dressing rather than a world with depth. Bottom line for anyone searching right now: if you are new to the genre, Class of Heroes 2G is widely considered the better entry point with more quality-of-life adjustments. If you specifically want the first game and are comfortable managing obtuse menus as part of the fun, this PC port is the most accessible way to play it. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 3 ProtonDB community reports.

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