Class of Heroes

In a World where children dream of growing up to become adventurers, their needs are catered to by a set of academies dedicated to providing guidance and teaching for the budding explorers. As a student of Particus Academy, you will learn the ups and downs of dungeon spelunking, with each quest solved and monster slain a step towards graduation.

It is with this premise that developer Zerodiv (and localizer Atlus) introduces to us Class of Heroes for the PSP. The game is a throwback to the old days of Dungeon Crawling and is heavily based on Wizardry. Two sequels have been released in Japan with class, balance, and interface tweaks, but as of yet no word of localizations.

This series provides examples of:

 * Academy of Adventure: Well, it is a school for adventurers.
 * Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: The stores, oh so much. To give you an idea, the campus store ditches the "We buy your stuff at 50%". For most early game items you'll be lucky if you can get more than 10 coins.
 * Always Chaotic Evil: Averted. Want a Diablon (devil-folk) Paladin (required alignment: good)? You can make one.
 * Breath Weapon: Diablons and Drakes have this as a racial ability.
 * Catgirl: The Felpiers. They can be both male or female though.
 * Combination Attack
 * Cute Monster Girl: At least half of the female Playable Characters.
 * Dark Is Not Evil /LightIsNotGood: Nothing will stop you from making a Good Diablon, nor an Evil Celestian.
 * Dungeon Crawling
 * Fantastic Racism: A gameplay element - if two races who are distrustful of one another end up in the same team (e.g. Elves Versus Dwarves), their stats will be negatively affected. Conversely, if the two races like each other, they get a bonus to their stats. Certain items and using Gambits can negate this eventually.
 * Final Death: As in Wizardry, this game's spiritual ancestor, there are three stages of death: normal death, turned to ash, and "Lost". It costs thrice as much to bring a character back from ashes, but if that fails...well, let's hope you had removed that character's equipment beforehand!
 * Fire Forged Friends: As you use up Gambits your students will grow closer to each other (possibly even overcoming Fantastic Racism!) and will earn stat bonuses when on the same party.
 * Five Races: Averted, as there are actually 10, including fairies, cat-people, dragon-folk, devil-folk and angel-folk.
 * Item Crafting: A major source of equipment in this game is item crafting. You can buy from the campus store, but weapon and armor prices tend to be exorbitant. It's cheaper, especially if you have your own alchemist, to create your equipment from the stuff the monsters drop or base components which you can buy.
 * Luck Manipulation Mechanic: Gambits, which use up the built-up "Tension" gained from completing quests and fighting.
 * Money for Nothing: Largely averted. Money is hard to come by in the beginning, and various items tend to lean on the expensive side. Later, when you party is completely pimped out, you can trade money for experience by donating it at the infirmary.
 * Nintendo Hard: Atlus refuses to localise games that can't reduce the player to a shivering, disheartened wreck. The tradition continues.
 * No Export for You: Japan already has a third game from the series, as well as PS 3 remakes of the second and third game. Only the first has been exported.
 * Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Dwarves in the game are closer to beast-folk, and their description says that they're good with languages.
 * Our Gnomes Are Weirder: In the Japanese version, the Erdgheist are called Gnomes. In either they basically exist only on the astral plane, and need to possess a physical shell in order to interact with the material world.
 * Palette Swap: Many, many of the monsters.
 * Power of Friendship: If your team likes each other, they will get stat boosts.
 * Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Drakes. They are said to be arrogant, don't get along well with most races, and are best suited to melee majors.
 * Relationship Values: The longer a team works together, the more they will grow to trust one another. This becomes harder to do the higher the level of the characters in question, though.
 * Spiritual Successor: To the Wizardry series, of which the game takes it's basic engine and tropes from almost verbatim.
 * The dev team of Class of Heroes even created the latest Wizardry title, Wizardry Labyrinth of Lost Souls.
 * It's more a Spiritual Spinoff than a successor, though, as the Wizardry series is still going strong in Japan. The latest release in Japan is in 2011 -- Wizardry Labyrinth of Lost Souls is actually from 2009.
 * Squishy Wizard: Erdgeists tend to make very good wizards and summoners, but because they don't have corporeal bodies, their HP are among the lowest of the ten races.
 * Videogame Caring Potential: You'll grow attached to the characters you create, it's hard to see one die and fail to revive.
 * Whatevermancy: Getting progressively more extreme with each game. The latest of which includes Nurses, Idols, and Tsunderes as class options.
 * You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Erdgeists and male Drakes have blue hair, whilst female Drakes have bright red hair. There's also the orange haired Dwarves, the green haired Sprites, and white haired male Diablons. The sequel's trailer shows that the Drakes have changed their colors, but both of them still have hair that fits this trope.