Not an easy game to make sense of on your first playthrough, Half Minute Hero is an RPG game that decants the experience of the sweeping J-RPG genre into thirty second bites of adventure.

When you think of a J-RPG game you think big hair, big swords and big epic games. Half Minute Hero tries to squeeze the whole thing into less time than it takes to eat a slice of delicious wood fired tandoori chicken pizza (is it obvious I missed lunch?).

Negative view, you have 10 seconds left to win the game, positive view, you have a whole third of your time left

You’re a warrior, actually named Hero I think, facing off against a series of monsters, bad guys and evil wizards, each intending to destroy the world in thirty seconds. You have to journey to their lair, fighting random battles to level up and buying new items and weapons and even completing quests along the way then face off against the boss and hopefully defeat them. If you run out of time, the world ends and you need to start the level again from scratch.

Now there are a few small caveats, when in a village or town the clock pauses and offering a heap of gold to the statue of the time goddess restarts your clock. Battles are fought by you and any other party members charging from one side of the screen and the enemy from the other, you bounce of each other till one dies. So each battle takes about three seconds.

This is a witch, named Catherine, who is old and a lady, layers of character going on here

Eventually the whole game turns into a complicated game of trial and error dominos. After a few turns at each level you’ll have worked out the optimum path to get the most gold, experience and equipment to beat the boss. Go here, help this guy, buy this, go here, go back to buy time, take the guy with you, beat the bridge monster, go back again to buy time, then take a run at the boss. To avoid problems like random encounters eating up your time you can hold a dash button to avoid them when moving between locations. Of course forgetting to do this can imperil your whole carefully laid out chain of activities.

Graphically you have the option of playing Half Minute Hero in a ‘classic’ 8-bit animation style that looks marginally worse than the animation for South Park, or you can switch to the upgraded option which turns the game into a modern anime style. The sound remains depressingly 8-bit through out with little more than bloops, beeps and the same short music track playing on loop for the whole game.

Don't worry about the black knight, I brought my umbrella

Off course the real draw of Half Minute Hero isn’t the art or audio, or the generic fantasy plot; the hook is an RPG game you have to tackle in thirty second bursts. The progression of this hook goes from perplexing annoyance to interesting, even engaging structure, but winds up as annoying gimmick. The game is unique and at first a lot of fun when you get your head around it, but quickly tiring and just plain frustrating. Even if it was a mobile game as opposed to a Live Arcade title I’d expect it to have a teeny bit more going on than it does. Surprisingly it’s a port of a PSP title, I’d wagered on it being an HD remake of an old Commodore 64 game. Half Minute Hero is definitely unique and original, but just a touch too lacking in charm to make it endearing in its challenge.