It’s as if Dark Souls has become self-conscious.
I picked up Last Hero of Nostalgaia when it released on Xbox Series X last year. It ended up being one of his favorite games of the year. His style, witty humor, and brilliant satire of modern game development suited me perfectly. On top of that, it was also one of the best Souls-esque games I’ve played in that it accurately replicated the fun of the Dark Souls series. With its departure from the console exclusive on Xbox and its arrival on both Switch and Playstation, we finally have an excuse to dig deeper into The Last Hero of Nostalgaia.
Calling it Soullike is a bit of an understatement. After all, this is an intentional parody of the Dark Souls series. But unlike many games that have imitated Fromm’s software flagship roguelite, The Last Hero of Nostalgia seems to have a better grasp of Dark’s soul flow and vibe than most indies. is. Attack speed, enemy hitboxes and attack patterns, invulnerability frames found by well-timed rolls, it’s all perfect. Nonetheless, it manages to feel a little more familiar. The mechanics are more clearly explained, and the initial slope of difficulty isn’t as steep as most Soullikes.
You play as an unnamed hero made up of just a few pixelated lines who are summoned to save the world of Nostalgia as it slowly recedes through the history of video game graphics. One of his early areas takes clear inspiration from Super Nintendo-era RPG towns, with 16-bit style texturing throughout its structure. Other areas have even simpler art and still feel old. In one region, the lantern may be a low-poly 3D model of him, while in another, the lantern is represented by a flat sprite that pops into different perspectives as you move around it. Activating a checkpoint restores a small patch of modern graphics and transitions in real time before your eyes. The game as a whole is stylistically beautiful, and the Switch feels like the visual make-up is basically uncompromised. Of course, you don’t get the 4K image quality of his Xbox version, but the image is sharp, with no apparent evidence of dynamic scaling.
As you progress, you’ll find weapons and gear that are subject to the same pixelation effects that affect the world. Each of these comes with a bit of lore explaining the specific events and locations held in the object’s memory. If you find its place in the world, you can cause the object to awaken a memory, which restores the object to its original form and upgrades its stats. This makes the Dark Souls trope of hiding all the lore within the item description interesting. In The Last Hero of Nostalgaia, that lore really matters, and all players, not just those who want to decipher the plot, will want to engage with it.
Performance is a little more complicated. Last Hero of Nostalgaia features a completely seamless world with no loading screens. Most games can be delivered quite smoothly, but they tend to actually crash when there’s a problem with the framerate. This generally seems to revolve around streaming assets. If you navigate to an area with a distinctly different visual style, you’ll hit the boundaries of your slideshow until the engine can load the new area and unload the old one. Luckily, most of these transition areas tend to be devoid of enemies, so while the stuttering is annoying, it doesn’t directly affect gameplay. However, he encounters one of these bottlenecks while navigating through a room full of enemies and can become a problem. This situation seems to happen for a short period of time while his two regions of the game are loaded into memory at the same time, before moving on to one or the other. However, how much you experience these issues depends on your performance settings. By default, Last Hero of Nostalgaia implements his 30fps cap on Nintendo Switch. Most of the games have no problem achieving this goal. You can also disable this cap along with v-sync to get up to 60fps performance. Surprisingly, many areas can actually reach that level, but the performance degradation becomes even more apparent.
Last Hero of Nostalgaia is one of the best soul-likes I’ve ever played. It knows exactly what makes the genre so appealing, and manages to spin a fun world around it without getting too hung up on reinventing the wheel. The Switch port pretty much accomplishes this, but world streaming can cause real problems. The perfect storm of performance struggles and combat rarely overlap, but when they do, they can be understandably frustrating. Still, even if it didn’t solve the problem, the customization of the performance options offered is appreciated. Whether you can use a switch port depends on your personal tolerance for interruptions in asset streaming. For those looking for a smoother experience, the Xbox version (presumably his PlayStation port) offers it. But the Switch, despite its flaws, offers a very enjoyable time overall.
