Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is still the most elegant and instructive meanie in all of games.
Clash of Heroes really clicked for me when I stopped seeing the screen as a top-down view of the battlefield. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, because the screen is literally a top-down view of the battlefield, your troops on one side, your enemy’s on the other. But the game started to sing for me when I forgot all that and I started seeing this as the side-on view of a battle. A strange battle perhaps, but one which I could grasp quite cleanly on an emotional level. And that’s because now, my enemies weren’t in front of me but were instead above me. Much more frightening. Much more energising! I was at the bottom of the screen and all my enemy’s attacks were like daggers hanging overhead. And there’s a truth to this. Clash of Heroes is often a game about impending doom, about the terrible thing you know is coming your way. This is often a game about violence, suspended.
And it’s beautiful twice over. It’s beautiful because its richly colourful pixel-drawn heroes are beautiful, battlefield Muchas with billowing hair and perfect, heavily ornamented armour, moving through a series of moody fantasy worlds. And it’s beautiful because the rules that power everything you do in the game, to borrow a thought from Edwin, have the precise interconnected clarity you get from a poem. Puzzle-RPG is such an ugly term. This is a game with the lightness and steeliness of verse.
I’ve lost the last few days in the newish download version of what was once a DS classic. It’s now called Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition, a title that strains awkwardly against itself in exactly the same way that the game itself doesn’t. I would say I’ve been spellbound, but that has a little too much of the passive to it. I’ve been stirred by this game. Engaged. Terrified. Delighted. Sometimes furious.
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