It's nothing you haven't seen or played before, but Heracles combines good humor, characters, and story into a fun JRPG.

User Rating: 8 | Hercules no Eikou: Tamashii no Shoumei DS
The DS continues to get a steady flow of Japanese-style RPGs. The latest batch have been very traditional in standard turn-based combat, with swords, magic, random battles, dungeon crawling, small towns, etc. Glory of Heracles is really no different. But where I felt the just-released Sands of Destruction felt stale and repetitive, I feel Heracles still manages to do things well enough to keep me engaged. Why do I like one over the other? It's all a matter of mood and taste, I think -- they are very similar in gameplay, and both are very well done. Yet I think I'll play through Heracles completely, while Sands I got tired of in about 6 hours.

The facts:
* Turn-based combat with the standard hit points and spell points, order of combat chosen based on stats of the fighters.
* Character stats auto-level (you can't distribute experience yourself)
* Save anywhere (woo!)
* 2d sprite graphics in 3d environments
* No spoken dialog (all text)
* Combo stylus and d-pad/button use
* Length -- ? I'm about 9 hours in, and maybe 1/2 of the way through?
* Standard overworld map leading to towns/dungeons gameplay
* Frequent random battles
* Optional stylus-based "minigames" to buff up spellcasting

The good:
* While it's the usual "hero with amnesia" story, the ongoing story and the characters you meet have a good mix of backstory and (most importantly) quirky humor. Some of the dialog is genuinely funny, and not full of cornball bravado.
* The animation and little visual touches throughout the game are really well done. (This is in contrast to one of "the bad" items below...)
* Decent orchestral music throughout
* Short, frequent in-game-world cut-scenes to drive the story along
* Decent array of monsters, and the boss battles can be quite strategic.
* True character multi-classing -- you can have a good fighter that also knows a nice array of spells.

The not-so-good:
* Game world can be a bit bland and has lots of "sameness" throughout.
* Character sprites are very chunky looking -- can't really tell girls from guys, monsters from humans, etc. because the level of detail is pretty poor until you're in battles, where things look much better (but as I said above, everything is animated smoothly, so overall effect is good visuals...?)
* Medium amount of "grinding" (useless easy random battles that you can "auto" your way through)
* It's generally a pretty easy game, and I'm a wuss at these games, so very skilled JRPG players may get bored. Boss battles can be challenging, usually because they are after a long string of smaller battles to wear you down a bit.

Overall, again, a very solid JRPG that has the right mix of story and humor to keep me entertained even though I've played a million of these games. Recommended for fans of turn-based RPGs.