Little Town Hero

Little Town Hero, released for Nintendo Switch on 16 October 2019, is notable for what it isn't before it's notable for what it is: it was Game Freak's first RPG released under its own name that had nothing to do with Pokémon, built through an internal effort the studio called the "Gear Project." What it turned out to be is a small, strange, genuinely original turn-based RPG about a boy defending his isolated hometown from a string of monsters, fought through a battle system that borrows as much from card games and board games as it does from traditional JRPG combat — scored, unexpectedly, by Toby Fox of Undertale and Deltarune fame.

Ideas, Techniques, and a battle system unlike its peers

Combat is built around a resource called "Ideas," which start as vague, unshaped concepts called "Izzits" and get converted in real time into concrete offensive or defensive "Techniques" that you place against a single large boss-monster opponent. It's a genuinely different structure from standard turn-based JRPG combat, closer in spirit to a deckbuilder or a board game than a menu-based RPG battle, and reviewers consistently credit it as the game's most interesting idea — one review frames the whole game bluntly as "such a wonderful game to play" specifically because of "the amount [of] strategy needed when playing in hard mode." The dedicated hard mode matters here: base difficulty is reported by multiple players as comfortably forgiving, and the strategic depth the system is capable of only really surfaces once you turn that difficulty up.

That same system draws the most consistent criticism, too. Multiple reviews, including ones that otherwise recommend the game, describe individual fights as frustrating due to a heavy reliance on random card draws rather than pure positioning or planning skill — a fair critique of a system this novel, since Game Freak was building the format from scratch rather than iterating on decades of established genre convention the way a traditional turn-based RPG could.

A short, charming, thin story

Critics at launch were broadly consistent on the writing: charming, storybook-simple, and light on stakes, following a boy investigating why monsters have started appearing around his sheltered hometown. Reviewers who liked the game frame that simplicity as a deliberate, kid-friendly register rather than a failure of ambition, but the same reviews also flag the plot as bare and the overall runtime as short — criticisms that appear across the wider critical conversation around the game rather than in isolated reviews, and that read as the main reason Little Town Hero settled into a "charming but slight" reputation rather than breaking out as a must-play new IP for the studio.

The Steam port's own, entirely separate problem

Little Town Hero didn't reach PC until July 2020, nine months after its Switch debut, and its own small Steam review population is dominated by a complaint that has nothing to do with the game Game Freak actually designed: the PC port shipped with no fullscreen display option at all. That's not a single disgruntled outlier — it's the single most repeated complaint across the port's entire review population, described by one player as "very embarrassing" for a full-priced release in 2020, with another advising prospective buyers to "definitely consider... the Nintendo Switch version instead" for exactly that reason. Layered on top are scattered but specific performance complaints — reviewers citing modern, more-than-capable hardware and still reporting poor framerate — that don't track with a game of this visual scope and suggest the PC port simply wasn't given the same care as the original release.

A studio experiment that didn't get a second chance

Little Town Hero arrived as an outlier in Game Freak's catalogue at a moment when the studio's attention, resources and public spotlight were almost entirely absorbed by the far larger Pokémon Sword and Shield, which launched barely three weeks later. That timing shaped how the game was received as much as its own design did: a small, single-team experiment competing for coverage against its own developer's biggest global release of the year was never going to dominate the conversation, whatever its merits. Game Freak has described the Gear Project, the internal initiative behind this game, as a scheme that lets staff pitch and build original ideas during quieter stretches between Pokémon development cycles — a structure explicitly built around smaller-scale experimentation rather than flagship-level investment. That reframes the thinness critics flagged in the plot and content volume less as a missed opportunity and more as an accurate reflection of the scope the project was actually resourced for. No sequel or expansion followed, and the belated, under-supported PC port nine months later reads consistent with that picture — a genuine creative side-project rather than a title Game Freak treated as an ongoing commercial priority worth continued investment in.

That context doesn't erase the specific criticisms above, but it does change how they should weigh against the score. Judged as a full-scale RPG competing against the genre's biggest names, Little Town Hero's short runtime and light plot are real shortfalls. Judged as what it actually was — a contained, lower-budget experiment testing a genuinely new battle system, released alongside a publisher's far bigger flagship title — it's a more interesting and more forgivable release than its quiet legacy suggests, and the fact that its card-and-board combat idea hasn't been meaningfully copied elsewhere in the years since makes it worth remembering on its own terms rather than as a footnote to Pokémon.

Verdict

Little Town Hero's combat idea deserves more attention than the game's quiet, mostly-forgotten footprint suggests: a card-and-board hybrid built from scratch rather than borrowed, elevated by one of the more distinctive video game scores of 2019 courtesy of Toby Fox. Its short runtime and thin plot are real, critic-confirmed limitations rather than unfair complaints, and the belated PC port compounds those limitations with a launch-day fullscreen omission serious enough to actively push some buyers back toward the Switch original. It's worth trying for the battle system and the music alone — just go in with realistic expectations about scope, and check the PC port's current state before choosing that version over the console original.