And we’re immediately off to an uncomfortable start. That is a teacher.

Most everyone has some nostalgic lens that they view their educational upbringing through. Sure, you might have segments that you actively try to forget (literally all of middle school), but you probably had some wonderful moments in one stage of your school days. It was a magical time of development, discovery, and finding out what does and does not mix with MadDog 20/20. And there are universal aspects that everyone shares, regardless of where or what degree you went to school. Class of Heroes 3: Remaster does the impossible by reminding everyone, everywhere, why they are grateful they eventually graduated and never had to look back at certain parts of school: the mandatory, mind-numbing repetition that takes up far more of your time than anyone cares to admit.

Class of Heroes is a series of first person dungeon crawler titles that cut their teeth on the PSP and gave the portable faithful some decent grinding on the go to enjoy. For each of the games, the premise is similar to many dungeon crawlers: make a party out of a variety of races and skill classes, band them together, and go beat the tar out of monsters over and over again while you get loot and level up. With the Class of Heroes franchise, the backdrop is always a premiere institute of hero training that wants you to become the very best and, surprise, eventually face down a great evil the teachers failed to mention was always on the horizon. Getting to that faithful day of discovery means doing a bunch of quest errands for the teachers and faculty up until the reveal, which is hardly unexpected.

If you’re a fan of the franchise, Class of Heroes 3: Remaster is probably an exciting release. The first in the series was only ever officially released in the West, and the second entry had a weird situation with a Kickstarter campaign culminating in a “how is this legit” fan pressing and then a digital release that disappeared quickly thanks to game breaking bugs. Acquire decided to make the third one a proper release for multiple systems, bringing it out nearly fifteen years after the original dropped. With this remaster, the graphics have been updated, the UI is smoother and more polished, and the voicework is crisp, if not as potent as one might enjoy. Hands down, if you were interested to play the game, this Remaster is the way to go after comparing it with the PSP version, and not just because it’s in English.

The incorporation of quicktime events to do double attacks was interesting, at least.

People have a lot of fondness for this style of game thanks to the customization and roleplaying elements. Class of Heroes 3 boasts hundreds of combinations of races and classes that really make it a buffet of character creation when it comes to your dungeon party. Besides traditional fantasy tropes like elf, dwarf, fighter and thief, you get some intriguing originals like the felpurr (cat race), diaboro and celestia (good and evil deities) and wild classes that are both race specific (not everyone can be a Fallen Angel) and more that unlock with educational advancements. You can swap voices, hair styles, body types and so forth, so plenty can be seen in terms of how your new recruit looks and sounds. There are premade characters, but the creation screen is both robust and surprisingly fast, so I recommend making at least one original character.

One thing Class of Heroes 3 also boasts is a relationship system, but it’s fairly barebones compared to folk who are used to the Persona series or similarly involved synergies of characters. Instead of characters having traits or quirks that let them match up with each other, the player physically sets their attraction and connection, weaving a conspiracy theory map of attraction and repellance. These result in synergy attacks for people who do and don’t like each other, which is both weird and hilarious at the same time. There’s no greater sense of omniscience than telling the party who they love and hate. And, if you’re like me, you decided to have everyone hate one student for maximum enjoyment, because a real D&D campaign would probably have one player who no one wanted there either. You know who it is. He rolls the dice with fingerless gloves. That guy.

The customization extends beyond the initial setup, which does add a fantastic element of roleplaying to the overall presentation. At any point, you can have your characters change to other classes when they’re back at the school, which gives you plenty of time to figure out what does and doesn’t work for you. Didn’t enjoy the fighter aspect on your fairy? Switch up to a magic class and see if it lands better! A lot of the starter equipment is universal, so there’s no inherent penalty from swapping around and trying out different skills and classes to see what gels with your combat style best. Heck, doing so is the only way to discover some of the aforementioned unlockable classes, so treat this game like your sophomore year of college and pick up worthless electives because why the hell not?

Salsbu, the Celestia Fallen Angel. Short, of course, for Salisbury Steak. Don’t judge me.

Now, it should be noted that these changes are not cumulative, and, most of the time, changing a class means completely partitioning off the skills and abilities you’ve attained while being a monk or a hydromancer or whatever. This works as a double edged knife if you aren’t careful and mindful of what you’re doing. On the one hand, it’s cool that you can easily change a character’s usefulness with the same casual effort of changing one’s shirt. On the other hand, if you don’t remember that you changed your healer into an offensive class for a couple of battles and then wander into a boss fight unprepared, you’ll get your ass handed to you. Oh, and when you change classes, you unequip everything, even if it’s cross class compatible, so don’t be like me and charge into battle with a naked angel by accident. On purpose? All you, king.

Class of Heroes 3: Remaster does its best to try and keep players engaged with plot points, but they’re genuinely rather contrived and boring. A random student at the school who just happens to have some suspicious connections that lets him make requests. A female teacher who constantly speaks in innuendo and suggestive natures. These are things that you see all the time in anime-style games, but they aren’t always performed well and thus feel hollow. This is an example of the empty nature of dropping tropes into a game where they don’t belong. The purpose is to dive into the dungeon, kill monsters and loot stuff. If you’re going to have a story, make sure you take the Etrian Odyssey approach and make it compelling without needing to editorialize it. World building, not cheap jokes and played out ideas, are what move the game forward.

Additionally, the game is just…wildly unfun. I’m sorry to say this, but all of the excitement of dungeon crawling is completely destroyed by the way Class of Heroes 3 divides up the dungeons and the difficulty curve. The initial area is so easy in terms of grinding and exploration, in spite of there being no visible map. As soon as you pass the initial quest, your next quest throws you into an area where most, if not all, of the enemies will murder you in two rounds. Escape is never a guaranteed option, which leaves you with two equally unsavory options. Either you decide to keep venturing into this far-too-dangerous area and hope you can stupid your way onto the items you need to pick up for the quest, or you spend hours – and I do mean very real hours – grinding levels and cash in the easy zone.

Even if you inspect the chest, you can still guess the wrong trap and get smote out in the field.

I understand that grinding is a very real part of JRPGs. I spent chunks of time constantly attacking the Sharks in Earthbound and throwing Gau at monsters on the Veldt in Final Fantasy VI, so I completely understand the inherent mechanics. But both of those things were optional to make life more interesting or easier, not mandatory. It seems like you can’t even get to the meat of Class of Heroes 3 without first committing an absurd amount of time to what boils down to mashing the A button over and over against multiple waves of balloons. By the time you have enough cash to buy something worthwhile (or enough materials to synthesize it), you’ve dropped a massive amount of time into the same lather, rise and repeat process. And that’s just one piece of equipment. Do you want to outfit your team? Better set aside the afternoon.

Worst of all, there’s no automation available: you can’t blitz through these bland battles, you just need to keep mashing A. When enemies start appearing in tiered rows (which occurs almost immediately), a straightforward fight can take a full five minutes of just pushing A, watching moves resolve, then doing it all over again. Characters will default to their last selected activity, but you still need to set it up, target a monster and confirm each and every time. You can’t set up anything to automatically complete or move forward. As a result, you can’t even do a decent multitask of playing the game while watching the latest episode of Digman!, which feels weirdly appropriate given how much time I spent whipping things. You just…gottta keep fighting.

The last kick to the gullet is Class of Heroes 3: Remaster has a system set up to dispatch multiple classes of students at once and toggle between them. The idea is that, should one of your teams not be strong enough or not have the right students to move forward, you can bring in a second string (or even a third) to go out and do things in their stead. Which means you need to have another team of fully equipped, leveled and synergized students ready to go, implying you’ve somehow committed tens of hours to parallel play and put together The A-Team just in case. Who in the sweet magical world has that level of time and that much interest in roleplaying an entire classroom, complete with having concurrent running group projects?? It’s great that it’s there, but who the hell will use it?

Yay! I can stop fighting for a moment! Huzzah!

Class of Heroes 3: Remaster claims that every aspect has been iterated and improved upon, making it the best in the series. If that’s true, then I have no idea how we got to a third game. It’s grindy to the point of exhaustion, the lack of minimap until later on is a bananas choice, and the entire throughline is paper thin in terms of giving players any direction other than “you like doing random encounters, right?” The mechanics are interesting and genuinely fun to experiment with, but having to utilize them against such a stark, bland and repetitive gameplay loop is punishing. It’s like having an awesome pen for taking notes in class titled History of Every Person Named Edmund. The pen cannot save the crushing boredom of writing “He was also interested in the music of Phillip Glass” for the fiftieth time. 

If you must get this game, then you must, and Godspeed to you. Maybe you loved the original PSP versions. Maybe you need to play every dungeon crawler available on the Switch. Or maybe you hope that supporting this title will lead to the 3D sequels getting a Western release. Whatever the case, do your thing, but, for players trying to find a new title that goes toe-to-toe with Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society or Boyfriend Dungeon, Class of Heroes 3: Remaster is simply not the right class to audit. Drop it, and go take literally anything else.

Class of Heroes 3: Remaster is available now on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Steam.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Class of Heroes 3: Remaster was provided by the publisher.