Hero's Helper -- an idea for a Zelda parody General Outline: The hero Fink has to find the shattered pieces of the Pentagon of Courage to rescue Princess Olga and save the land of Hyskuul in an M-rated parody of the Zelda games which deconstructs what it does not shamelessly copy. Game goal is for 20 hours of gameplay with five or six small dungeons. Main characters: Big Bad: The evil character. A tall black obelisklike figure who has six eyes in two columns running down his face and a large toothy frown with his teeth looking like doors. His teeth are black like the rest of him. He has a symbol on his forehead that looks like two letters 'b' back to back. Princess Olga: A foul-mouthed drunk with a round face and curly red hair. Her elven ears point out horizontally when she is drunk or moody. She wears a purple dress that looks more like Peach's than Zelda's. She is cute and attractive until she starts talking. Fink the Fabulous: The hero (but not the character you play). He is a handsome male elf with a strong jaw, beautiful blond hair, and a perfect smile. He wears a red outfit that looks a lot like Link's except for the colour. Squab: Fink's squire and the player character. He is an older boy of about 14 years. Imagine the adventurous boy from Twilight Princess given a few more years to grow. Torg: Fink's cowardly donkey which he rides instead of a horse. Torg also carries Fink's collection of items in his saddlebags. Torg is the one you ultimately need to give the Pentagon to so that you can use him to resupply and switch items in the final fight against Big Bad. Game Mechanics: Except where it is different, the game plays like Twilight Princess ("TP"): you run around a 3-D world in third person view using one controller for movement and another for using items. Everybody is limited in what they can carry except for Torg the donkey. You don't get to switch out items unless you go back to Torg, so Squab and Fink get four item slots each. One of Fink's item slots is going to be taken up by his bow and arrows and he might choose to have a potion in another slot and a rope in a third. Squab can trade items with Fink if Fink will let him, which might only be possible in puzzle rooms. As the hero's assistant Squab, you don't do much of the fighting but you have to do almost all of the puzzle solving. You get a powerful wingman in Fink who will distract enemies and wipe them out from a distance as long as you keep supplying him with arrows. Fink can attack far faster than is humanly possible, shooting three arrows per second and spinning with his sword like a top. There will be places where you have to go solo and you won't have Fink to help you fight. Squab's basic sword-fighting and archery skills will improve in speed and accuracy the more he uses them; the extra delay in the animation might be 1024/(1024 + $n) seconds where $n is the number of successful uses of the skill. Fink can also train Squab in special swordfighting skills, essentially the exact same ones from TP with the first special skill being the basic spin attack. You would have to remember to ask him to train you at certain points, like when you are back at the bar after a dungeon crawl. Fink handles most of the money but Squab also gets some money, perhaps an allowance or a portion of profits minus resupply costs (TODO). Fink may pay Squab or withhold payment based on how helpful Squab has been in supplying Fink. Squab can use his own money to buy himself a better sword or his own bow and shield. Squab might be able to steal from the money pouch on Torg, but Fink would find out about it (TODO). If there is a day/night system, you can speed it up by going to an inn during the night or a bar during the day. Both cost money. Staying awake too long would give you fatigue which would reduce your fighting ability, but this could be alleviated by using a Brown Potion which is clearly coffee in a jar. As Squab, you get some periods of free time when Fink retires to the bar for the evening. You can wander around town to talk to people to gain clues, do your own shopping, or you can even go take Torg to go out adventuring on your own. Fink takes the place of TP's Midna for a help system in that you can talk to him to get a hint for the current situation. If he has the right items, talking to him might lead him to solve a puzzle himself. If Fink is defeated, you can still bring a potion to him to recover his health or drag him to the donkey and bring him back to town to recover. The game does not let you run away from a fight without rescuing Fink. If you or the donkey are defeated, it's "Game Over". Level Design Notes: The dungeons are smaller than in TP. A player should be able to beat any of them in no more than two hours on the first run. If you end up in a place without the items needed to proceed, you need to be able to run away and head back to the donkey. This includes any boss fights that can be reached without the items needed to defeat the boss or where you may run out of the needed item during the fight. It might be possible to permanently modify a level by building rope bridges or hiring contractors from town to build wooden bridges across certain gaps. The bosses should tend towards the exceedingly cute or silly. Other notes: The same horse-calling plant from TP exists to call Fink's donkey. It makes a kazoo-like sound. You have to blow it like a donkey (high note, long low note) using TP's howl system. Fink introduces Squab to the plant but cannot blow it correctly, so you have Fink in the background blowing it badly while you are using another plant. Fink gets better at it the more Squab uses it; the chance of Fink doing it right might be $n/64 where $n is the number of times the donkey has been successfully called by either of them. The plant might be available (and work) in a few places where it is obviously physically impossible for the donkey to reach. The plant might look different; I want it to look like the famous three-pronged 2-D optical illusion but that won't work when you bring it into 3-D and add colour. If you bottle a fairy, the other fairies nearby will attack you until you free it or run away. The bottled fairy will die of asphyxiation in an hour of gameplay, leaving you with a useless Dead Fairy. During the last ten minutes of its life, the fairy becomes a Dying Fairy on thes item screen to warn the player that it needs to be used or released. If you can acquire a bottlecap with holes in it, the fairy will stay alive but the same bottle can no longer be used for potions. You also cannot take a bottle with holes in it underwater or the fairy will become a Drowning Fairy and will die in three minutes if the bottle is not emptied (used) above water. One of the levels will include the exact same sliding box puzzle from TP's Snowpeak Mansion. It starts with one of the three blocks in the middle and one button visible at the end. Fink begins the "easy" puzzle -- he "solved a puzzle just like this a while ago" -- by pushing the middle block to the button, revealing the second button in the middle. Then he stands back to contemplate the situation, and it's up to you as Squab to solve the puzzle while Fink intermittently pushes blocks around in an attempt to help. Once the puzzle is one or two steps away from solved, Fink will really help finish the puzzle for you. His AI would look two steps ahead for a solution and act semi-randomly in the absence of one. The sliding blocks will run over Fink or Squab if either is in the way and will cover them if they were at the end of the block's path, requiring the other to push the block away to release him. If both get covered by a block, it's "Game Over" but that should be difficult to do. TP's grunting speech system needs to be mocked. Big Bad could make sounds like "Derpa-derpa-doo!" while making ominous imposing demands. Everyone else can get away with sighing and grunting or simply having no sound with the generic electronic scratching sound as text is written out on the screen. The Opening Scene: It begins with Fink riding his galloping donkey along a Hyskuul road. Onlookers shout out as they recognize him. "It's Fink!" "That's Fink the Fabulous!" "The great Elven hero blessed by the goddesses!" The donkey rears and halts as it reaches a bridge with no railings. Fink steps down and says to the donkey: "What, you won't cross that?" The donkey shakes its head. Fink sighs and begins loading his backpack from the donkey's saddlebags, hauling a bag of bombs, a huge sack of gems, an extra suit of armour, a few other things, and finally a ball and chain. The overloaded Fink stumbles onto the bridge at an angle, tries to correct his movement to another angle, spins around, and falls off. The assembled crowd sweatdrops. Fink hangs on to the edge of the bridge with one hand while his pack is floating away on the river (thanks to some water-magic-item he had packed in). All he can do is say "uh... could I have a little help here?" The camera moves to a boy in the crowd and you take control of him. The rest of the crowd behind you is blocking your path in that direction so you have to go forward onto the bridge to help. If you pass Fink, you stop while he repeats his request for help. If you wait for two minutes, Fink falls and dies and you get the first opportunity to use the "Retry?" option. Princess Scene #1: Big Bad: "I expelled the chamber maids, so now YOU have to clean all of the rooms in the castle." Cut to view of Princess Olga wearing a hair scarf and holding a bucket of water in one hand and a toilet brush in the other. Olga: "But I'm a fucking princess!" And this is as far as we go with a Toilet Princess pun. Princess Scene #2: Princess Olga is in her room on a cell phone to her agent, with a bottle of vodka in her free hand. "Listen, this is fucking ridiculous. This is a fucking outrage. I've only had two fucking lines in this whole fucking feature and it's supposed to be about me. It's *my* story about how *I* get rescued by some fucking replaceable hero of the day, right? So what I'm saying is Princess Olga should have more fucking screen time in the fucking Tale of Olga! That's what I'm fucking saying! They changed the name? I'm not getting enough lines and you let them change the fucking name? What the fuck am I paying you for? So do those fuckers want to call it now? Who the fuck is going to buy a game called Hero's Helper? Listen, just find some fucking way to get me some more fucking screen time, alright? No, fuck no! I already told them I'm not doing a fucking nude scene!" The Land of Hyskuul: There should be more evidence of agriculture in the game just because there is hardly any in TP, so you could travel on roads between fields of wheat, corn, and squash. Note: this is probably a CPU issue since clusters of grass are present in TP but large grass fields aren't, so this might not be possible. There might be fewer ruins and less cyclopean architecture than in TP. However, so many things will still be falling apart that someone will tell Olga "you suck at princessing". Hyskuul Castle is where Big Bad and Olga are. There is a probably a settlement with trading posts outside the castle. The castle's inner chamber might have absolutely no features to mock TP where the castle's main chamber had no doors except on balconies. One of the rooms in Hyskuul Castle is the Hall of Heroes where statues of the great saviors of the kingdom are displayed. All of the ancient heroes happened to have been named Fink. "None of them were named Squab?" "Not yet. Maybe some day there will be one." The Town of Lisy is a trading center to the south of Hyskuul Castle; or there might be a character named Lissy in Hyskuul Town. (TODO: incorporate "lycee" or other words for high school into the Hyskuul universe) The Village of Garou is a place where every one of the villagers turns into a wolf at night. They take it well, looking like friendly dogs and saying "woof" even though they can speak. Nobody else can become a wolf. Olga is still a Princess even though there is no other royal family. Why is that? "The fucking Chancellors say I'm not fucking mature enough to be the Queen. Can you fucking believe that shit?" The Chancellors would be expelled from the castle like everybody else except Olga, and you could talk to them for hints and direction since this is the one game where the Chancellors are actually good guys. One of the Chancellors might be a fat imp named Impy who likes to eat lembas burgers. There is a chain of potion shops called Zorbucks with the emblem being a female Zora from TP. There might be an Ordon Village clone called Boredom Village where there is absolutely nothing to do. There might be minigames for watching grass grow and counting ants. There might be a Kakariko Village clone called Cocklicker Village. Cocklicker might be mentioned in passing by a real estate agent who is having a hard time selling units there despite the town's great view of Painful Death Mountain. Gorons -> Morons. They have rocks for brains and act like it. Ideas that probably won't make it include a catgirl village whose inhabitants look more like cats than girls, a band of hooded 'mages' who are really time travelers from the future and their staves are RPGs, and a shady drug dealer character named Oiram who sells magic mushrooms. The Mythos of Hyskuul: The Pentagon is the symbol of the kingdom's power and authority. It also makes a shorter game to collect five fragments than nine. There are many Pentagons which impart supernatural power. Most of them have been broken into shards which have been scattered across the land and hidden in dungeons to make it hard for anyone to find them because people get pissed off when one person has a Pentagon and nobody else does. This has made a good business climate for the Dungeon Development Corporation. Fink is seeking the Pentagon of Courage because he knows people who say they know where the shards are. It seems like a useless goal because Fink has plenty of courage and so does Squab, but Fink hopes having a Pentagon will give him some supernatural powers in addition to the redundant courage. No one knows who created the Pentagons. The spirits blame the goddesses and the goddesses blame the spirits and the great high priests of old tried to take credit for it but were probably lying as usual. There are many gods and spirits of Hyskuul, none of which could be arsed to get off their butts and help. They are annoyed to be bothered when you ask for their help saving the world from evil, and whatever help they offer you is meant more to get rid of you than to actually help. Level Bosses: Guardian Tanuki Amawupyuras: A 6-meter tall racoon with 2-meter tall testicles that he thrusts out to hit you with when he's not slapping them like drums. He wears goggles to protect his eyes from arrows and his hands protect his balls when he is drumming. You can roll a bomb under one his his balls to bounce it into the air and stun him for a moment. His balls take reduced damage unless you hit them with Hanlon's Razor and shaving cream which will temporary make him take full damage. When you hit him enough, he retreats to a gigantic tub of Bactine and you can pass through the passage he was blocking. Fluffy Marshmallow Puffycomb: A 3-meter-tall Jigglypuff ripoff with an orange crest of 3 hairs or antennae on its head. Its signature attack is an unstoppable slow rolling itself over you like a steamroller. When it stands up again, its crest takes a moment to "poing" back up. If a bomb explodes under it when it is rolling, it blasts into the air with a high-pitched squeal of "oh shiiiit" and hopefully lands in the lava. It may also have a reverse-Kirby breath attack which throws you backwards, hopefully not into the lava. Auric Insect Mantissa: A 3.5-meter tall glowing golden mantis, just so you have to kill a Golden Bug. There may be a small skeleton with a parasol in its chamber to represent Agitha from TP. Most of the insect is immune to damage except for the eyes on the side of its head which can be targeted when it is attacking your partner. The eyes can also be hit with the Chainshot to drag the insect towards you. If both you and Fink hit its opposite eyes with Chainshot at the same time, the insect's eyeballs get pulled out on long stems and you can hit them for heavy damage while they reel back in. (TODO: More bosses) Big Bad: No idea what the final fight is going to be like except for the decision that you will need the donkey there to resupply. You might need more of your items than two people could carry or more of a disposable item (bomb or arrow) than you could carry at once. If you don't have everything you need, you can open the big door to the chamber for BB to knock Fink through and you can then retreat. Items: Heart Shaped Box: Collect all 20 of them to increase your life level by one heart. Bombs and arrows are the same as in TP, although you might not be able to make bomb-arrows. Ropes can be tied to certain objects to allow you to travel up and down the side of a pit. Tying a rope in two places across a gap allows you swing across the gap by way of the rope. A rope across a gap may also mark a place for a bridge to be built if you have a hired worker on hand. The Rope Wheel: You may need to use a special object to travel along a rope across a gap. The Edge Fan: A large metal fan with an L-shaped clamp that can be placed on a right-angled ledge to extend the area you can walk on by a meter, allowing you to reach places that you were not able to reach earlier. It takes the place of the ladder from the original LoZ except that you have to push a button to use it. You can also whack enemies with it as a simple, weak weapon while you are holding it. The edge fan might also double as a springboard or diving board, extending your jumping range by more than the fan's length. The Crow Bar: At one point in the game, your path will be blocked by Lawyer Crows who will slow you down with paperwork and eventually lift you up and throw you out of the area. Their attacks will have no effect on someone who wields the power of the Crow Bar. You can also use the Crow Bar as a weak weapon. The Silver Flute of Edhoc Uli: A flute that will stop time for a few seconds and move you backwards 15 meters in the direction from where you entered the map. Since this changes the gameplay a lot, it could only be used once in a minute or two. It could be useful for puzzles where you have to move very quickly before the puzzle resets. The Brilliant Cap: This is one of those TP propellor plants with a leather strap that allows you to wear it as a hat. You can use it to fly, but only to where the plant wants to go. The plant would fly you straight forward in a rising/falling wave pattern, then fly you back to your launch point if you did not hit land. The Razor of Hanlon [or Occam?]: a large thin blade with the power to cut away an enemy's outer defenses. It may have some physics-altering properties as well, such as to cut through flowing water like the way the sword in TP can cut through black mist. It might also increase the quality of its carrier's dialogue, but that might be too much work. The Chainshot: "You find the Double Chainshot!" "Hey look, there's one for each of us!" "You get the Chainshot!" It works just like in TP. (TODO: More items. I'm short on actual gameplay ideas.) Weapons: The Wooden Sword: "This sword is only useful for training or for fobbing off on some kid who wants to be an adventurer." Fink buys you one at the start of the game. It does one point of damage. You also need to be wielding it for Fink to train you. The Short Sword: An iron sword with short range. It does three points of damage. The Long Sword: A sword with better range, but a greater malus to your ability to use it well without a high skill level. It does the same damage as the Short Sword. The Broad Sword: A two-handed sword that requires the most sword skill to use and prevents you from using your shield. It exists mainly for players who want to try something different. It does five points of damage. The Magnificent Sword: This expensive sword from a master swordsmith has the range of the Long Sword but requires less skill to use. It does four points of damage. The Supreme Sword: The best weapon in the game. Fink already has it. You can only get it if Fink is passed out, and he will want it back when he recovers. It does six points of damage. Already Mentioned: The fan does one point of damage and the crowbar does two. Arrows do two points of damage. Bombs do four. Armour and etc: Wooden Shield: Like the TP wooden shield. Metal Shield: A buckler that covers a relatively small area. Tower Shield: Like the TP metal shield. It slows you down a little to have it, but stronger attacks are less likely to knock you back. Light Shield: A shield that is between the Metal and Tower shield in area and resistance to being knocked back, but does not weigh you down. It costs a lot. Leather Armour: 50% chance of cutting any damage by one point. Barely slows you down at all. Chain Mail: Two independent 50% chances of cutting a point of damage. Slows you down more than the Leather Armour. Plate Mail: Cuts all damage by 50% floored. Slows you down a lot. Might not be in the first game. Average damage over time: None L C P 1.0 0.5 0.25 0.0 2.0 1.5 1.0 1.0 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.0 4.0 3.5 3.0 2.0 One idea for the Big Bad battle: You might need to use the Brilliant Cap to climb some ledges, the Flute to drop from a high ledge to a lower one (in a straight line back towards the entrance), the Razor to break Big Bad's defensive spell by hitting him in a precise spot, and the Fan to extend the ledge long enough so you can jump off and hit that spot. Then Fink can arrow him in the eyes, causing Big Bad to open his mouth and stumble around when all six eyes are hit. while his shield is down, you can toss a bomb in his mouth from a high ledge for huge damage to shorten the fight. Endgame: At the end of the game, everyone is praising Fink's heroism and they throw a parade in his honour, but he has to put in a word for Squab because "he helped." After the big celebration and everyone but Princess Olga has left the castle, the archvillain Cruelio appears to enslave this world! Sequel Ideas: Hero's Helper 2: Girls' Knight Out In the first sequel, a bored Olga escapes from the castle with Min, the first female castle soldier she found, to search for the Pentagon of Sexiness because they saw it in a list of the known Pentagons and thought it would be fun to look for it. The new archvillain Cruelio is too busy playing some addictive adventure game on the Wii to chase them, but from time to time he opens up portals to drop enemies on Olga and Min. One of the introductory scenes steals a joke from the Fighunter Mardek games. To introduce the player to the control system, Olga tells Min how to use this button to do that and to wave the controller to attack. Min says "wait, what is a Z button? And I am not familiar with this symbol (Wii controller). Is it from the ancient language?" The view switches to both of them where Olga looks a bit peeved while Min looks genuinely confused. Olga turns towards the screen and points a finger at You the player, saying "HEY YOU! Use the Z button [etc]". New characters: * Cruelio, the latest bad guy. He looks and acts a lot more human than Big Bad did. He gives off an air of easygoing comfortable confidence. He may be surrounded by a highly-transparent cloud of darkness. He wears a black leather jacket with the word "Evil" on the back in a red cursive scrawl, and a backwards baseball cap with a shock of hair poking forward through the hole. He may have orange or blond hair. His secondary colour is orange. * Min, the player characer, a young woman with blonde hair. She fights with a spear and, later, a crossbow. She might be an elf. Major differences in the second game: Both Olga and Min have horses since Olga is a princess and already has them. You start with lots of money for the same reason, but some early quest acquisitions are expensive and Olga will drink through the rest at a steady pace. Min also begins with a spear and armour because she is a guard and already has them. Olga is a mage who uses a magic staff to shoot projectiles. She already has the Pentagon of Magical Focus, so "I can even cast spells while drunk!" She does not need your help with items as often, but she cannot fight as well as Fink and will need you to fight enemies for her. Min can already fight fairly well with her spear or a sword if she decides to use one. The spear has more range but it only does full damage on stab attacks. Olga may refuse to cross ropes across a gap, so more of the game may involve prospecting, hiring workers to build bridges, and returning to town to hit the bar while the work is being done. Since this is too repetitive, the workers may hang out inside the dungeon after they receive their first order and carry out future orders in an instant. The work might not be instantaneous unless you bring some bottles of liquor to use while waiting for it to get done, and afterwords you would be a little dizzy and lethargic unless you use a Brown Potion. Min's armour will protect her but will slow her down. She is faster in plain clothes but takes more damage from attacks. She cannot instantly change her clothes without first acquiring a special magic item that was originally designed "to get girls out of their clothes". Min would have less free time than Squab did in the first game because part of her duties would be to keep men off the drunken, loose Princess when she visits the bars at night. There are a couple of bars where you can get away: in Garou where everyone is a wolf at night, and another place with a woman bartender who will watch out for Olga. A secondary quest might be for Olga to hit every bar in Hyskuul and sample every alcoholic beverage in the kingdom, including some fancy mythical ones that they don't make anymore. At the end of the game, Olga and Min only have 4/5 of the Pentagon when they meet up with Fink and Squab. Cruelio then drops a giant 65,536-ton weight on all four and congratulates the player on reaching the end of the game. Hero's Helper 3: Cruelio has finally beaten that addictive Wii game when the next archvillain shows up to bring darkness to the world. Cruelio informs him that he has already beaten the heroes. The new guy is impressed and offers to become Cruelio's assistant. New character: * Jordan (tentative name, after the Darkener [inside BBS reference]): another evil humanoid and the player character for the opening third of the game. His secondary colour is purple. He might have white or silver hair. Jordan and Cruelio warp around the world attacking all the humans and turning them into monsters. You race against Cruelio to see how many you can zap in a time. They reach Garou during the night when everyone is a wolf, so since everyone is there is already a monster, the two of you decide to disrupt their lives by lifting their curse and turning them all into humans. Then you fix a broken bridge because it would help your monsters move more easily, and you start a rainstorm so your goblins can grow crops because they no longer have people to eat, and after a few more things like that you start to get the impression that you're accidentally doing more good in the world than evil. Then you run across a giant overturned 65,536-ton weight with a large circular depression on its bottom. Olga's magic saved the heroes and they have been alive and active while you have been running around doing evil. From here you skip to the other two groups in subsequent sets of quests. Fink and Squab complete the Pentagon of Sexiness and you can equip either of them with it to give them some handsome facial hair. (TODO: Why would the girls give it to them?) They have another quest on top of that, looking for the shards of the Pentagon of Defeating Evil Villains. Olga and Min are looking for other shards of the same Pentagon since they'll complete it faster with two teams on the job. Near the end of the game, Jordan and Cruelio split up to attack the heroes. When Jordan finds Fink and Squab, he gives off an impressive show of heretofore unseen power: setting the countryside on fire, exploding the sun and raining down the fragments as meteors, and setting off a few nuclear explosions. Then he locks himself and Fink inside a combat circle and says "now you will face the full extent of my power!" The camera pans to Fink and for the only time in the series, you get to control Fink. Jordan's battle AI alternates between firing a slingshot at Fink (which does the minimum 1/4 heart damage) and trying to run away, and he goes down in one hit. After the battle, Fink remarks that "he looked a lot tougher in the cutscene." Cruelio would put up a better fight, so Jordan's fight would come second. An early guess at the Cruelio fight is that you have to dodge flying objects while hitting him with crossbow bolts to distract him so that Olga's magic can break through his defenses. Cruelio and Jordan fall back to the castle to recuperate. They decide that next time they'll team up on one group at a time. Once they feel healthy and ready to go, all four heroes show up. In the final battle, you get the option of swapping back and forth between Min and Squab as both sets of heroes fight both Jordan and Cruelio at the same time. When you win, Olga uses the Pentagon of Defeating Evil Villains to expel the two villains to a dimension where evil villains are expelled to, where they now have to face off against Big Bad from the first game who considers himself the supreme boss of all evil and doesn't accept the competition. If you lose this fight, Big Bad sends Jordan and Cruelio back to "the dimension from whence you came", which means back to the castle, and the four heroes have to beat weakened versions of them again to send them back to fight Big Bad, with the cycle repeating for as long as you can't beat Big Bad. Big Bad stays damaged between fights but recovers a quarter of his lost health so that you cannot kill him in one hit on the next cycle. After three or four cycles, Cruelio implores the heroes to "just send us back!" and that part of the fight is skipped. In the aftermath, Olga and Squab get in an argument over whether she swears too much. Fink drops an arm around Min and laughs that "Squab and the Princess are getting along nicely." Fink and Min share a kiss, and Min lets him know that her armour's not coming off on the first date. Fink abruptly gets up and leaves. Min retreats to Olga's booze stash where Olga soon joins her. Fink and Squab end up in a bar, and the game ends with everybody getting smashed and depressed that they didn't end up with the girl/guy in the way that these games are supposed to end. Later on, the Hall of Heroes gets a statue of all four heroes. Of course Olga had it made so she is the most prominent, but at least all four are there. Since the third game wraps up the story, it should run closer to 30 hours or more instead of the 20 of the previous games.