My Hero

Genre: Beat-‘Em-Up Developer: Sega Publisher: Sega Players: 1 Released: 1986

I don’t quite know why it is, but the Sega Master System is one of my favorite consoles and It never made sense to me since so much of the U.S. library (though not all) is so poor in quality. I’ve been slowly wading through the sea of crap on it trying to find decent games to enjoy and have been underwhelmed many times so far. My Hero is one of those games that’s nothing more than underwhelming, and truth be told, it may be my least favorite game in the entire North American library.

My Hero takes the form of a platform based beat-‘em-up and plays very similar to games like Kung-Fu for NES and Irem’s Vigilante. A ruthless gang has kidnapped your girl, and of course, you’re out to get her back. Yeah, it’s another one of those mindless “save the damsel” storylines that no one cares about and does nothing more than give you a reason (or not) to play the game.

Unfortunately, you’re only armed with mostly useless punches and a jump kick. Enemies attack in hordes and aren’t smart, but your attacks still do little to dispatch many of them since they have such a short range. Short-ranged attacks are only half of the problem. There are usually enemies throwing bottles and grenades at you from windows while hordes of enemies gang up on you, so the game plays pretty unfairly when you’re trying to attack while dodging projectiles. Worse yet, each enemy can kill you in only a single hit. You’re given a meager three lives, and the one-hit deaths make for some awfully short games. My Hero only has three stages, but with how weak and limited you are, you’ll be hard pressed to finish the first stage. Overall, it’s not worth seeing the whole thing through because there’s no real ending. Once you finish stage three, the game starts back at the first stage and just loops over and over with just a higher difficulty.

The simplistic and unfair gameplay could almost be forgiven if the game didn’t look so bad graphically. Each stage has minimal detail and your character, as well as the enemies, are too small. The game is too bright and gaudy, making everything look cheap and unfinished. If you remember all those hard-paged children’s books that are like six pages long and have one or two sentences per page, then you can imagine how the graphics look in My Hero. They are just like those books; they don’t fit the game at all and come off as just lazy looking. Not improving anything are the dismal sound effects. They sound as bad as can be, even taking into consideration the Sega Master System’s limited audio. Nothing takes advantage of the hardware this game is running on.

I’m sorry that this review isn’t longer, but My Hero is far too short. There just isn’t much more I can say about it, other than that it’s too hard and cheap and it just not fun to play. Don’t do yourself the disservice of playing this game and move on to a title that’s worth your (and the console’s) time. I stand by my opinion that this is the worst Master System game, at least in the North American library, and maybe the console’s entire library as well!

SCORE: 2 out of 10