Hero Cantare with WEBTOON Review

A Stunning Release

Ngel Games has decided to create a gacha game that rivals even the Final Fantasy series in terms of sheer brilliance. Did they achieve sheer brilliance? Not quite, but they got pretty close.

Hero Cantare is an MMOPRG that crosses over with Webtoons comics to create the planet Tetra, where webcomic dimensions collide. They’ve got it all: beautiful comic-style graphics, stunning soundtracks, slightly questionable translation of speech bubbles, confusion over the actual plot, and more. They’ve also got it all for a gacha game, including a wack summoning system and RNG feel in combat. But let’s dive into what this game is actually about, first.

Three Stories Crammed Into One

Hero Cantare features three main Webtoon comics: The God of Highschool, Tower of God, and Hardcore Leveling Warrior. Because they’ve stuffed three whole webcomics inside one mobile game, there’s a small amount of confusion about the plot.

The basic gist is that a villain from The God of Highschool is trying to seize “The Cube,” AKA a magic Rubik’s Cube, because it’s all-powerful. The Cube is currently guarded on the planet Tetra. One of the protagonists and guarders of The Cube activates it, gathering heroes from all of the different webtoon comic dimensions. Then they fight the bad guys and save the world.

The other thing that makes the plot a little hard to understand is the fact that all of the speech bubbles are translated strangely. Also, all of the dialogue is still in what I assume is Korean. This is fine, though. Players can get the general gist of what’s going on. And honestly, the graphics more than make up for things lost in translation.

We’ve got general MMORPG features, including a main Story Mode, Tower levels, Boss levels, Arenas for 1v1 and 3v3 matches, Guilds, Dungeons and all that jazz. One cool thing they’ve included is the Hero Dungeon, where the player can play through a specific character’s actual storyline. Well, there are already mobile games that exist for some of these comics, such as Hardcore Leveling Warrior. It’s still cool to have it as a feature within a larger mobile game.

The tutorial is incredibly easy, and honestly doesn’t take more than a minute to get through, which is refreshing for the experienced gamer. 

Tricky Combat Generator

There are some problems because sadly, the perfect mobile game doesn’t exist. Hero Cantare’s problems are with its summoning system and how it lets you play in combat.

Combat is turn-based, occurs in rounds of about five attacks, and continues until either you or your enemies win. The player gets a number of “hero chips” to play during rounds. Stacking chips of the same character-face boosts that hero’s attack. The only problem is that the way the chips come up each round. It feels entirely like a random generator and doesn’t seem to preserve the chips you couldn’t use the last round. This makes combat frustrating, especially when you know that you have a hero with the perfect move to take out an opponent but you never seem to get enough of their chips in the rotation to actually use it.

The other problem is summoning, and this is part of the reason it’s not entirely f2p friendly. You’ve got a tiered list of heroes, the lowest being A and the highest being SS, and you need in-game currency to summon them. It takes some grinding to get enough gold and gems to actually summon. Even then, the drop rate of any SS tier hero is 1%. That’s a serious amount of battles to even get a chance at an SS tier hero. This isn’t to say only the SS heroes are good. There are a few lower-tier heroes that are my personal favorites because of their specific skill sets. It’s just the kind of thing that makes a player think it’s far easier to buy the gold to do the summoning, and unfortunately, this kind of trickery is commonplace for gacha games.

Beside all that, it’s funny to see how the different heroes rank in the tier compared to their actual webtoon comics. I’m thinking of Hardcore Leveling Warrior again, who’s webcomic is literally about him ranking as the top player. He’s an A-tier hero in Hero Cantare, and it’s hilarious.

Gorgeous Game Alert

I don’t often use the word “beautiful” to describe mobile games, but it seems to be the only word to describe the look of Hero Cantare. This is to be expected, as they feature literal webcomic characters and aim for that general style. Because these are all characters from different webcomics, they all have cool and eclectic names, such as Taek Jegal, Heart Heater, Hardcore Leveling Warrior (his gamer name), and Curtis. They keep the styles of their respective comics, but Webtoons has a general overarching style, so there isn’t a Kingdom Hearts-esque clashing of design to worry about.

Definitely do NOT skip the cutscenes, because they are so good. They’re comic-style (obviously) and the art kills me with its gorgeousness

Despite its inevitable gacha features and having the grammatical style of a freshly-translated manga, Hero Cantare definitely soars as a mobile game by sheer art style alone.