How I ever came across this series is a mystery I don't think even Nicolas Cage could solve. If I had to make a guess though I'd say that it was suggested to me by a fellow translator I knew at one point when the 2 of us were talking about Chinese and Korean RPGs. Outside of that, this game is done by such a no name nothing company, that I'm not entirely sure how I could have even accedentally come across it.

Yeah I stole the title screen from whoever the heck Moby Games is, cause I'm way to lazy to install it at the moment and do it myself. Plus taking screenshots in that game is a super pain. Since Fraps for whatever reason didn't want to work with it, I had to hit prtscrn, alt tab the game, paste it into photoshop, and then go back into the game and hope it didn't crash. Which it would do about 90% of the time. In any case, the game starts off with Edda talking to Bedin and the 2 of them wondering around the ocean. You start off just helping out random people in town trying to figure your way out of the castle area and eventually move the story along.

   

   

While my chinese language skills are pretty much 0, for the most part the graphics in the game are enough that most of the time you could tell what was going on anyways. I also happen to know a guy that was working on a transltion, so most of the time I either asked him or a chinese girl I knew what was going on. I managed to make it pretty far in this game before I eventually lost interrest in it because of my Final Fantasy 11 addiction.

   

The battle system in both this and the second game is something I've never seen done in any other RPG ever. Basically you have a bar at the top of the screen that shows a bunch of small rectangles and a portrait of your characters. Every attack in the game takes a certain number of bars. You essentually have to plan out what moves you want to do for infinity. The best way to handle this is to pick a bunch of different moves for all your characters till you fill up most of the bar or all of the bar or beyond all of the bar or just have them autoattack. Then once your characters get near having completed all of their moves, you stop battle and then select a new set of moves. This means that you have to try and plan out everything that's going to happen for the next 15 to 20 seconds and work around that. It's possible to cancel moves so in the event that you start to loose the battle you can stop combat and redo all of your moves. Generally healing takes about 5-6 seconds so sometimes it's best to just have one character spam group heal or anything.

Also in dealing with combat, the entire area is split up into 3x3 squares in 3 places. You have enemy squares on the front and back sides of your group, and then your main group's squares in the middle. Certain moves only operate in maybe an X pattern or a line pattern, so it's important to strategize how you want your characters placed otherwise they may all end up taking a huge amount of damage from a single enemy attack. This also plays into healing spells as well as spells that give certain buffs to your party. It's actually a really neat system and is probably one of the most fun I've delt with out of all the RPGs I've played.

The second game in the series picks up sometime after the first. I honestly have no idea where since I never actually finished the first game. However it starts off with Edda, Hulen, and Bedin making their way around somewhere. Which I honestly don't remember since I havn't played this game in like 4 years or so.

   

I actually started off with the second game. When I first heard about the Heroine Anthem games, Heroine Anthem 2 had litterally come out like 3 months before. However, at the time, for me it was impossible to find. I searched high and low and for like a year was unable to find this game. Then one day a friend of mine was talking about some new import site he had come across and as usual, first thing I did was search for Heroine Anthem. Sadly they didn't have Heroine Anthem 1, however they did have Heroine Anthem 2. And not only did they have Heroine Anthem 2, but they had it as both a regular version and a special collectors edition. The special version came with not only the game, but an artbook, the soundtrack, a special disc with all the patches and a bunch of random other items, and the strategy guide. So of course I went after that one. Played it non stop for about a month or so, and eventually got so rediculously lost in the game, that I was unable to continue. After about another year or so, a japanese friend of mine had a chinese friend of his that happened to have the first game, and mailed that one to me from China.

I never did finish either one of these games. I'd really have liked to but the language barrier I belive has caught up with me. I've considered many times actually learning chinese since it would not only be useful here but it would be useful for me to know in a few other places in my life. I may one day finish these 2 great games, but for now they are put on hold forever.