A look inside 300 Heroes, China’s most IP-infringing MOBA

These three things should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention: China’s one of the world’s biggest gaming markets, China loves MOBAs, and China doesn’t care about foreign copyright claims. The combination of these three explains the continuing popularity of home-grown MOBA 300 Heroes.

(See: Chinese net cafe gamers played 30 billion minutes of MOBA games in July)

Just what is 300 Heroes?

300 Heroes is extremely derivative of China’s most popular MOBA, League of Legends (LoL). But while it does have a fair few tweaks to LoL’s format here and there—each team has seven players, for instance—its success comes mostly from its roster. The game is a who’s-who of popular anime and gaming icons.

Characters range from Attack on Titan’s Mikasa, to the fan favorites from big series like One Piece, Naruto, and Fairy Tail, to gaming characters like Axe and Illidan from Dota 2 and Warcraft 3. For some of these characters, their abilities are relevant and functional. Naruto can power up by using his nine-tailed fox chakra, and use his signature rasen shuriken. But others have more generic abilities taken from other MOBAs and handed to them somewhat randomly—Angry Birds-themed projectiles, for instance.

300 Heroes got some attention some time back for featuring Shrek. The character was a clone of LoL’s Dr Mundo, though his thrown cleaver was replaced with firing a giant Donkey at enemies. Sadly, the character’s no longer in the game; Shrek’s been recolored, and Donkey is now a zebra, of all things. Shrek’s also been re-listed as One Piece’s Blackbeard, but the in-game model doesn’t really look like him. Instead, the recolor just looks like a large man in a black and white prisoner’s outfit. Pixar’s Wall-E remains playable.

How it plays

In 300 Heroes, the map is an ugly carbon copy of LoL’s. Gone is the lush (and sometimes seasonally-decorated) jungle players know and love, replaced instead by generic gray corridors with a mild sci-fi aesthetic. Brush has become a kind of bland energy field that provides the same benefits.

Dragon and Baron have been replaced by two dragons, whose animations and models are actually fairly decent—but whose presence in the metallic-looking map is a bit jarring.

(See: Blizzard sues makers of Chinese Hearthstone knock-off game Sleeping Dragon)

No more jarring, however, than the other jungle creeps. From Bowser to the Ninja Turtles, the jungle is as full of familiar faces as the game’s hero roster is. It makes little difference, however, as they are functionally identical to LoL’s jungle creeps, down to their number and relative strength.