The world is threatened by monsters sent by the Demon Lord. To counter him, Dragons which are deities who reside in another dimension, bestow powers upon champions known as “Dracovalis”.

In a small, unremarkable village, Imos lives with his sister Tori, helping her run a potion shop. Along with his sister, he spends his days with his childhood friend (and a Dracovalis) Lotia, a gentle nun Krimina, and a tomboy princess Aina.

However, this all changes when an order is made for all Dracovalis, including Lotia, to hunt down the Demon Lord.

Dark Hero Party (Original name: 外道勇者一行, “Thug Hero Party”) is an indie/doujin RPGMaker by U-ROOM released in 2015 (JP) / 2020 (EN)

(This article will contain major spoilers past a certain point, please refrain from reading past the point if you wish to experience the game on your own)

There was a recent topic on a message board entitled “RPG you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving” which made me think – hey, I’m stuck in a T-Virus Qurantine while developing Cabin Fever (Ooh, faced!) anyway so maybe I’ll try being more adventurous by playing RPGs I don’t think I would like. However, I admit I’m half cheating on this, because I confirmed with trusted sources that it actually has a good story before I jumped in and as a hypocrite who only plays RPGs for their gameplay (supposedly), that’s perfect for me!

Don’t worry, I’ll get into the factor that I consider the “turn off” later.

Today’s subject is an indie RPGMaker game by the name of Dark Hero Party (or Thug Hero Party as it’s more commonly known, though they’re both kinda strange names either way)

(You may notice name changes from my screenshots from the fantranslated version – the officially localized version uses different terms.)

Now before I begin I would like to say I find the English marketing for this game extremely amusing – if you take a look at the Steam page, it sorta looks like a basic arse RPGMaker harem game, where you have your childhood friend, your other childhood friend and your little sister for the Kurou Daijuuji audience, so it’ll be a heartwarming story where you go on a journey and fulfill your promise to get married and have lots of children right? Haha no.

I realize there’s now a sizable community in general who doesn’t think the adult content in these sort of games has any artistic merit so offering a PG-13 version in theory just makes sense from a certain financial perspective, though I’m not sure how they’re supposed to attract interest by making it look like the most generic game on the planet. Given how many commercial RPGMaker games are on Steam despite the seething hatred quite a number of people have them, I guess they’re managing somehow.

So the Japanese marketing is a bit more honest about the genre this game’s story belongs to: it’s something that all Weebs dread (except the Californians)

N T R

A quick primer, for those of you blessed to never have heard of it before, NTR is short for “Netorare”. In non-Weeb terms, the closest word is perhaps “cuckoldry”, but NTR generally has a very particular formula that it follows instead of just being your regular everyday cheating.

The general set-up is that the couple is in a romantic relationship or at least has some sort of attraction to each other which is broken up by a third-party who through the use of emotional manipulation / blackmail / drugs, “steals” the heroine away from the MC, who is powerless to do anything. There’s usually a lot of focus on his mental anguish and I’m going to be really judgmental and say that I have no idea how this is one of the most popular fetish in Japan because really, what kind of super masochist would willingly put themselves through this kind of emotional distress? Hypocritical humor here

So let me sorta recap the set-up with the parts that the official description leaves off: In this world, benevolent Dragon gods wage a war against the Demon King through their agents, the Dracovalis – humans imbued with their power. Recently one of the Dracovalis, Variges (who will now be known as Chad because I can never spell his name correctly without looking it up), has worryingly risen to power – under the pretext of acquiring assets for the war, Chad is a thug who has been pillaging the local villages for their resources and women, and his benefactor Dragon turns a blind eye due to him prioritizing the war effort and his combat potential over morality.

Anyway the MC and his friends live a peaceful life in a peaceful village away from such troubles and just kidding within 10 minutes Chad wrecks the place up and forcefully conscripts them into the party.

His Thug Hero Party, if you will. AYYYYYYYYYYYYY.

What follows is basically a couple hours of despair that would give a certain Danganronpa character a ladyboner 10 times over.

What I find interesting about the game is how much of an anti-power fantasy it is. If I didn’t make it clear, the character you are playing as is NOT a Dracovalis – he’s a regular person, heck maybe even worse than your average human because his little sister (also not a Dracovalis) has better combat potential than him!

Sometimes you see people complain about protagonists being “unrelatable” because they were born with a super special talent that makes them more powerful than their friends with 0 effort (Rean Coldsteel joke here) so here’s the protagonist you’ve all been waiting for – someone where if you were asked to say something positive about them it would be 10 minutes of awkward silence and then “he’s… kind?”

This is also one of those cases where the turn-based gameplay isn’t here to provide a “big brain chess tactics” experience but to enhance the storytelling and I think it does pretty well – the game constantly throws unwinnable fights at you and there’s almost a sort of cruel twisted joy it gets in giving you new things to experiment with such as powerful items and even a scene going “you improved your abilities!” only to show you that the ultimate truth is that no matter what you do, you’re never going to match up with those gifted with supernatural powers.

The game basically spares no expenses in humiliating you to the point it almost feels like satire at times. When you’re in a party with other characters, it rather shameful to end most of your battles face-down and to be carried by your teammates, and when you’re alone, you have to avoid every fight (the game uses on-screen encounters rather than “random” invisible battles) because it takes like 10 hits to kill a Slime that wouldn’t otherwise threaten a child from the Dragon Quest series. At one point it even replaces the MC spot with the much more powerful Chad after a short stint in showcasing your ineffectiveness explicitly to rub his power in your face.

There’s a sequence in a game where you actually fail a rescue attempt like 7 times in a row until the people with actual power get bored and decide to actually do something about it. Outside of battles, you’re forced to clean the toilets and watch your friends degrade themselves into shells of their former shelves. You can voice your discontent at any point, but all that rewards you with is a good beating. You can try to save them, but all the good intentions in the world amount to a hill of beans when you have nothing to back up your talk with.

To sum it up: There’s an ominous “hatred” stat on the main menu screen and you’re not even halfway through the game when the number starts breaking the 100 mark.

Anyway, the story progresses the way you expect its genre would, with the main character, betrayed by his closest friends and finally realizing his powerlessness, returning home to either go insane from his experiences or deciding to “settle” by marrying a rando villager to continue his bloodline and live a boring life.

Or does it?

So if this was where DHP truly ended, I would probably say something like “well it was a kinda bog standard story so I don’t know why people recommended it to me but the gameplay / story unification is pretty interesting I guess? You know, from an intellectual perspective.”

But as the pre-NG+ area and the fact that the endings are numbered hints at, there’s a couple more endings you still have to go through before the story is complete. I’m gonna have to drop some spoilers now because the remainder of this article will make like 0 sense without doing so – I would rather people go experience it themselves but I’m going to resign myself to the fact that not a lot of people enjoy putting themselves through the emotional distress that this game brings out but perhaps have some academic interest in what happens next.

From here onwards, it’s spoiler town

If you’ve met a certain mysterious character and accepted her power, at the end of the game, instead of resigning himself to fate, the main character can give in to his hatred, becoming a Demon King. Said mysterious character is actually the Dragon of Darkness, “created” as the designated antagonist whose purpose is to provide the world a common foe to unite against. The main character bides his time gaining power, before facing his tormentor in one of the hypest showdowns in JRPG history.

However, while he’s preoccupied in that one battle, the Dragon of Darkness loses the war – even with his new-founded power, there’s some things he can’t change – but he can at least end the life of one Chad right? If nothing else, it would at least be extremely cathartic for all the hell he put you through.

Except if you do, your childhood friend shows up and yells at you, because she developed Stockholm Syndrome, already having beared his child and currently pregnant with a second one, but also because in her eyes, she believed she was sacrificing herself (body and dignity) to achieve world peace by finally convincing Chad to take the task of defeating the Demon King seriously… only for you to bungle that up by becoming said Demon King.

By killing Chad, you lose your powers as it is your fixation on revenge on that one man is what fuels your reason to live and she kills you near instantly by disintegrating you with her magic.

You can also spare him, and the MC rescues the Darkness Dragon and retires to a quiet life with her. It seems like the happiest ending, comparatively speaking

But the true ending begins when you perform the unthinkable – through one of the most twisted forms of “the power of friendship” trope, you slay your childhood friend (utilizing a replica of her formed through your memories of her anguish) and the despair ends up causing a sequence of events opening a portal to Dragon Heaven (not the actual place name) where the D.Dragon brings you along to seek the final answers you desire.

In Heaven, you learn that the Dragons aren’t as benevolent as they seem. In truth, they think of humans as nothing but pawns and have set up a world system where the strong and beautiful are beloved and the weak and ugly are despised – essentially running an Eugenics program through their machinations. All of those “convenient” events that occurred to make your life a living hell ends up not being a coincidence – it was planned all along.

You slay them all and eventually reach the Holy Mother Dragon, who explains that the desire for money / sex / power / etc is what makes humanity what it is, that she’s only giving them a world that best suits their nature and that killing her will do no good. But you do it anyway.

What happens next is interesting because the world certainly becomes a peaceful place with no violence and strife – because everyone has lost their desires and thus their drive to do anything at all. They don’t even want to have children – like what’s the point, right? With reproduction not even on the table, humanity will eventually perish as a mathematical certainty , given the 0% growth rate.

Eventually, you’re offered a choice – do you keep things the way they are, dooming the human race?

Or do you return humanity to its original state – which means returning their ability to sin and hurt one another in an eternal cycle?

So ultimately, Dark Hero Party ends up being a deconstruction, not just of its own narrative genre, but of RPGs and power fantasy narratives as a whole. It takes a relatively cliche story set-up and actually uses it to weave a story with its many themes. It’s about Systematic abuse and the value of Justice without power to back it up. About the contrast between the “Chosen” and the “Unchosen”, the “Useful” and the “Useless”, the “Winners” and the “Losers”, the eternal cycle of violence and the hollowness of Revenge.

There’s something very “real” about the plot despite the fact that it often involves superpowered dudes beating the hell out of each other – yes, in real life, Chads who can rip the ground with their bare hands and deal thousands of damage punching you in the gut don’t really exist, but we all know CEOs, World Leaders and the Wealthy Elite whose status as the “Chosen” grant them a significant advantage in life over the chattel. Sometimes your paths will intersect and they’ll cause you unbearable pain, so the question is – will you choose to be a victim or will you finally choose to stand up for once in your life?

The final choice presented in the game is an interesting one because we know inherently that a world without conflict can never be a realistic one – CEOs tend to be CEOs and Politicians Politicians specifically because in a certain sense, they have traits bordering on socio or psychopathy that allow them to thrive in those positions. A world without that built-in potential for abuse is likely impossible to create, not without reverting humanity into like maybe super small pockets of subsistence farmers with no ambitions in life, perhaps.

Maybe that’s something we just have to live with and in a certain sense, maybe it could even be considered beautiful – because there can be no meaning in life without the pain to go with it.

Dark Hero Party has a bit of a reputation of a “meme” game that gets recommended to emotionally traumatize newcomers with no experience in the genre and I really don’t think it deserves that reputation. Part of it seems to be due to the fact that most people ragequit early in the game before the deconstructive segments appear, which leads them to believe it’s simply just one of the many of its kind, but I suppose that’s the fate that all deconstructive works that don’t immediately play their hand will have to live with. There are many aspects of how this game constructed itself that really impressed me and I think it’s a lot more subtle, perhaps even philosophical, than most of the Interwebs gives it credit for.

Anyway great RPGMaker game. I wish people would recommend me stuff like this more often instead of “wow check out this free RPGMaker game, it’s a spiritual successor to Suikoden!!!’ I rate it Grave of the Fireflies Vincent Valentine Edition out of 11.

(Also I’m interested to know what the experience is like for anyone who decided they wanted to try the PG-13 version available on Steam.)