I had to go back and play another few old NES Shmups again to really crystallize my opinion on Hector. It's an interesting game full of personality, with beautiful sprites and varied enemies and bosses appearing before you. You can certainly tell that a lot of effort went into the game, and the Zanac-like gameplay is decently engrossing. The music is very nice, and the historic ruins flavor for the game is awesome - I do wish the lore felt more consistent, but at least it's overall a neat product.
The real problem is unfortunately the punishing difficulty, or at least the way it's established. Hector's specific style of gameplay involves hurling lots of enemies with very specific and weird patterns at you, a sort of older version of hectic shmup design where instead of massive amounts of bullets it's just a few guys who move way way too fast in too many different ways on screen. The first level already introduces you to a punishing style where your suspiciously kind-feeling euroshmuppy life bar is promptly rendered totally pointless by aggressive homing enemies that slam into you as an insta-kill, and then the second stage puts you in bizarrely difficult sections with enemies bounding about every part of the screen in ways that are essentially too fast for you to really react to. I think the actual enemy ideas are very good, and the designs are cool, but the specific synthesis of its parts is so aggressively mind-numbing in combination with the punishing checkpointing that I have no idea how people beat this properly. It doesn't just feel like trial and error, but like trial and error that only lets you get an attempt to learn it after surviving like a minute of work that taxes your brain to get back to a certain point, and it already starts doing that by two levels in.
The bosses are interesting and unique designs, although they have the unfortunate curse of many NES era bosses in that they really only do one specific thing. Super rigid bosses where you learn a trick or two are at least reasonable given, again, extremely mean checkpointing, but it does get a little frustrating. A lot of them are also immense damage sponges, so it's hard to tell if you're actually playing them properly - the Egyptian boss for instance I had no idea if I was properly hitting or making some awkward mistake with. There's a reason later games would often have enemies flash when hit, especially with Hector having multiple sounds it can play depending on the enemy in question. The final boss is also a very classic design in that its one attack is horrifically incomprehensible to dodge at first and honestly just in general, creating a sort of FF3 Cloud of Darkness type situation where it's like "Is that it?" as you get blasted to pieces again and again. There's also not really that much fanfare leading up to it or during the fight, which is pretty unfortunate - a unique boss theme, or some specific indications that this was the center of the opponent's force, would have been nice. The last level does have unique graphics, but it doesn't really scream "this is the last level" in the way a lot of other shmups were able to do...
Overall, Hector is a game I find interesting and cute, but if I have to rate it honestly, I just don't think it's anywhere near as fair or reasonable to learn as several of its contemporaries. There's certainly depth to it, the levels are nice, the bosses are good, but the difficulty is punishing in such a specific mind-breaking way and I don't really feel like it rewards your time spent with it. They clearly spent a lot of effort on it, but it just isn't quite there. It's the kind of game I think would be cool to make a fangame version of, though, or something like that.
But yeah, great art and music. And I love that it's called Hector. Thanks for reading.
The real problem is unfortunately the punishing difficulty, or at least the way it's established. Hector's specific style of gameplay involves hurling lots of enemies with very specific and weird patterns at you, a sort of older version of hectic shmup design where instead of massive amounts of bullets it's just a few guys who move way way too fast in too many different ways on screen. The first level already introduces you to a punishing style where your suspiciously kind-feeling euroshmuppy life bar is promptly rendered totally pointless by aggressive homing enemies that slam into you as an insta-kill, and then the second stage puts you in bizarrely difficult sections with enemies bounding about every part of the screen in ways that are essentially too fast for you to really react to. I think the actual enemy ideas are very good, and the designs are cool, but the specific synthesis of its parts is so aggressively mind-numbing in combination with the punishing checkpointing that I have no idea how people beat this properly. It doesn't just feel like trial and error, but like trial and error that only lets you get an attempt to learn it after surviving like a minute of work that taxes your brain to get back to a certain point, and it already starts doing that by two levels in.
The bosses are interesting and unique designs, although they have the unfortunate curse of many NES era bosses in that they really only do one specific thing. Super rigid bosses where you learn a trick or two are at least reasonable given, again, extremely mean checkpointing, but it does get a little frustrating. A lot of them are also immense damage sponges, so it's hard to tell if you're actually playing them properly - the Egyptian boss for instance I had no idea if I was properly hitting or making some awkward mistake with. There's a reason later games would often have enemies flash when hit, especially with Hector having multiple sounds it can play depending on the enemy in question. The final boss is also a very classic design in that its one attack is horrifically incomprehensible to dodge at first and honestly just in general, creating a sort of FF3 Cloud of Darkness type situation where it's like "Is that it?" as you get blasted to pieces again and again. There's also not really that much fanfare leading up to it or during the fight, which is pretty unfortunate - a unique boss theme, or some specific indications that this was the center of the opponent's force, would have been nice. The last level does have unique graphics, but it doesn't really scream "this is the last level" in the way a lot of other shmups were able to do...
Overall, Hector is a game I find interesting and cute, but if I have to rate it honestly, I just don't think it's anywhere near as fair or reasonable to learn as several of its contemporaries. There's certainly depth to it, the levels are nice, the bosses are good, but the difficulty is punishing in such a specific mind-breaking way and I don't really feel like it rewards your time spent with it. They clearly spent a lot of effort on it, but it just isn't quite there. It's the kind of game I think would be cool to make a fangame version of, though, or something like that.
But yeah, great art and music. And I love that it's called Hector. Thanks for reading.