Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroesis a love letter to Suikodenfrom Yoshitaka Murayama (the creator of both) and shared with its fans. That’s not just some marketing or Kickstarter bullet point, but an essential part of almost everything aboutEiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. I’ll spare you the drama here and say that if you just want to know if it’s a respectable successor toSuikodenby telling you, yes it is –Mighty Number 9this is not.
In particular,Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroeshews closest to the most acclaimed of the Suikodenseries,Suikoden 2. There’s a strong resonance withSuikoden 2, enough thatin my previewI worried that it might be going for a serial numbers filed off redo of it. That concern proved to be unnecessary, asHundred Heroesdidn’t just recreate the story in a new world, but it remains a kindred spirit and close cousin to the acclaimed classic.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred HeroesCharacters and Story
That serves as a good place to leap off to discussingEiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroesas any – its story and characters. The broad strokes of the story are familiar to anyone who’s played any games in the Suikoden series: it’s a political war drama, wherein the protagonist (Nowa in this case) ends up in charge of a resistance or rebel force, gathering allies to push back the enemy. It takes its time setting up parts of the world like the League of Nations, which is made of smaller allied powers, and the Galdean Empire, which (spoilers) ends up at war with the League.
Review: Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising manages to be more than the sum of its parts, becoming a likeable adventure.
It can be a bit of a slow burn asEiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroeswants you to walk a bit in the shoes of the people who live in this world. Nowa starts as a recruit to the militia/mercenary organization The Watch, doing work in the local area of Grum, as well as serving on an internationally aligned expedition exploring an ancient site. This early calm lets you see the world before the dominoes begin falling en masse, letting you build a connection with it and the characters you interact with. This also serves as a chance to introduce many mechanics and ideas that are important throughout the game.
A good bit of this storytelling is done through the plethora of characters you can recruit – first for the Watch and then later for the Alliance that you lead. With over one hundred recruitable characters,Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroesuses them to show off parts of the world or help fill in the gaps about regions while also being interesting individuals in their own right. Some of the characters are going to rub you the wrong way, becauseEiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroesoften tends towards outsized personalities and traits. It does largely avoid doing so to the point of caricature, though it walks a fine line there at times.
Another upside of such a large cast is that outside of a handful of characters at the center of the story, you can largely leave those characters you dislike off to the side. That’s not to say secondary characters aren’t important though, as they will often bring insight shaped by where they are from and who they are to the story, events and exploration.
Much of that huge cast of characters is recruitable and most of them are optional to end up in your Alliance. I’ve jokingly referred to the fact that at times it feels like I’m playing Spot the Difference while playing for this review, as I’m looking for characters with unique or different models that are likely to belong to a recruitable character. Unlike some games that want you to spend time with side content (Cough any Bethesda game sinceMorrowindCough),Eiyuden Chroniclehas breaks in its story where you are waiting for things to happen, or when you need to gather allies and are encouraged by the game to go on walkabout, and partake in searching for these characters and doing side content.
Recruiting these characters ranges from sigh-inducing to highly satisfying and there’s a fair variety in how you do so. The most sigh-inducing recruitment for me was probably getting Doctor/Healer Falward because it was a stupid fetch quest given the situation. He needs you to get him some healing herbs to treat an epidemic in a small town. This, in theory, isn’t a stupid thing, but the surrounding situation made it so. Doing this required me to go out of the city hall, take a turn, go down a few steps, turn again and walk over to the item shop where I was able to buy the herbs at the normal cost. There’s no reason that Falward couldn’t have done it himself or asked one of the assistants to just take five minutes to walk over to the general store and pick up the Tylenol.
While there are a number of characters that want you to get/recover/harvest an item for them, most of them are thankfully more engaging than that. One recruitable character has a whole dungeon you do, while others have multistep quests and most of them have interesting or witty dialogue. One big annoyance here is that no one thought that maybe they should add a notebook for what people were asking for, so it’s up to you to track it, talk to them again or make use of the diviner once you recruit her for the Alliance. I’m not saying I wanted a clear ‘do this’ or a follow the yellow dot trail, but instead something that jots down ‘so-and-so here said they wanted something like X or needed Y done to join.’
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Combat and Dungeons
The combat ofEiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroesalso hearkens back toSuikoden, as it’s a 6-party member turn-based combat system, with characters in set positions in a pair of lines on each side. The combat here is a solid take on the classic JRPG style of combat, with a simple-seeming system belying a fair amount of depth if you want to get into the weeds.
Your wide array of party members have different stats that govern what they are good at, which are increased with levels or can be manipulated with various gear or lenses. Many characters also have unique lenses that give them skills that only they have and help them stand out in combat. Weapon range and type also vary between characters, with ranges going between short, medium and long range having different options depending on where they are in the combat lines.
What weapon type a character uses matters as some are better against certain types of enemies. Some enemies have armor, which can be ignored by grapple fighters, or broken by those using bludgeoning weapons, while those with throwing weapons can do additional damage to flying enemies. This is in addition to a rock-paper-scissors type of elemental interaction and all of this comes together to create the fact that you may have fifty characters able to fight, but none of them are the same.
One issue is that some animations or effects can take an annoyingly long time to play out. When you’ve seen the animation for a move that takes five seconds to go through thirty times, it’s repetitive to see it again, but if it’s the right move, you generally will use it again. While you can skip story cutscenes, you aren’t able to skip these combat animation or disable them in the menu.
Some of the dungeons inEiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroesessentially operate on a single expanding concept premise. The dungeon will have one core mechanic it presents to you, further exploring that as the dungeon goes on. For example, in an early dungeon, it’s about moving minecarts, and it builds on that by having minecarts with ore that can break rocks and using minecarts to balance lifts.
That dungeon was decent at exploring its premise and also had an alright variety of enemies. The next major one, though, was full-on spatial awareness-based and frustrating to me as someone who struggles with that sort of puzzle, as I am on the Autism Spectrum and struggle heavily with visualization of moving maps. Then another had badly-worded guidance on what to do, causing me to spend half an hour checking everything else before I stumbled into what it was that the game wanted me to do.
Many of the areas don’t have these types of concepts, but when they pop up, it’s been something of a miss for me outside the first one. It ended up being a frustration several times as I went through them, and that was compounded by the random encounters that would slow me down during my attempts to work out the problem. The encounter rate here is higher than I’d sometimes like, though it’s thankfully nowhere nearSuikoden 4’s ocean sailing rates.
Enemy variety also isn’t great, though it’s not terrible. There are generally upwards of five enemies in an area and they can come arranged in different mixes. There are also reskins of some enemies, and in at least one somewhat egregious case, the reskins showed up in the same set of events, bearing a similar name. Overall, it’s largely passable, but given the encounter rate, you can find yourself getting frustrated, particularly if a specific enemy is annoying you.
There are also war battles, which zoom out from small squad-based battles to armies on the battlefield. These are also turn-based, featyring relatively-simple positioning, unit strengths and ability activation to use. It’s a competent and solid approach for a smaller part of the game that helps avoid the issue many RPGs have of it feeling odd with all this talk of war, but the war not being shown or being decided by people acting entirely outside of it, as your commanders are various members of your Alliance.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Minigames And Beyond
One change fromSuikodenis howEiyuden Chroniclehandles the evolving base. In the Suikodenseries, your base improves when you hit certain milestones of characters recruited and/or story points. The same spirit is pulled over, but it now is built into a bit of a management thing that you do at your castle. It’s thankfully handled with a light touch and you build facilities from a chart based on who you’ve recruited, what stage your area is overall at and what materials you have. It’s not bad, but it feels like unnecessary busywork compared to people setting things up like they did inSuikodenwhen they came to your base, which helped provide the idea that even when you were out, people were working on things.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroeshas several different minigames. They include Shi’Arkcraft Racing (Sandship racing), Beigoma (spinning top battles ala Beyblade), Card Battle (a Gwent-ish card game), Eggfoot Racing and Eggfoot Training, Cooking Battles (framed ala Iron Chef), Theatre plays and, of course, Fishing.
Largely, these minigames are surface-level, many of them involving button spam pressing and/or matching a character to a certain role. For example, in cooking battles, you need to prepare dishes that please the four judges who show up with a bit of hint, or making use of knowledge of their favorite meals that you can get from the diviner, and then spam button press to charge the readiness. All the minigames have at least one character tied to them and many of them have a quest line as well. For example, your chef character is seeking revenge on a member of a dark culinary cabal who are sending the chefs to defeat him, but when you win a chef battle, he learns more about who it is he seeks.
They are largely fine, but the number of them means that none of them have the type of depth that makes them instantly memorable. Shi’arkcraft racing, for example, is basic sandship racing by the numbers, and if you downgraded the graphics, it would be the basis for a mid-weight NES or 8-bit title. It’s one of the more underdeveloped ones, as it lacks much in variety, but most of them are in that same class sadly, making for decent momentary diversions, but you aren’t going to see anyone modding the game to turn it all into Beigoma Battles likely (and no, that’s not a challenge!).
Keyboard and mouse controls were clearly a secondary concern. The binding for many actions seems nonsensical to anyone used to playing games on a PC, in a way that only Japanese games seem to do at times. For example, to open the menu to get back to the title screen (you may’t just directly quit via the menu either), you press ‘y’ for some reason and not escape. Many other choices are similarly frustrating and there isn’t any key rebinding. It’s not a huge issue, but it was an ongoing minor annoyance for me.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Visuals and Audio
Eiyuden Chronicleis a great example of HD-2.5d art and looks gorgeous with great pixel art and 3D backgrounds. It’s a callback to the PlayStation era of pixel art, where it was taking advantage of the system’s power to do advanced things even as people were more focused on 3D games at the time. It calls to mind Square Enix’s work with games likeOctopath Traveler, but aims to recall the 32bit 2d market rather than evoking the 16bit styles that Square generally targets.
I’m not much of a game audio person in general. I often play games with something else on instead, butEiyuden Chronicle’s soundtrack managed to grab me. For most of its region and general adventure, the music is a highly replayable set of tunes that vary to give a feel to the locale, but are more designed as a supporting role instead of boldly claiming center stage, which in a game that can reach a hundred hours is what you want. What you also want is music that can rise to the occasion during big moments, and boy does it deliver it, with the music carrying climatic moments and driving the atmosphere for some major parts of the game.
Closing Comments:
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroesis the final work ofSuikodencreator Yoshitaka Murayama who passed away earlier this year, and it’s a love letter to fans of the classic series. It was a promised beginning to explore a path that has largely been the road not taken by games since, probably due to the scope and ambition that it entails. While he may not have lived to see its release, he would have been nothing but proud of the end result. You should take the time and check outEiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, and when you’re done, look intoSuikodenif you enjoyed your time. It’s not perfect, there are flaws, relics of another time and oddities in places, but it’s a soulful work with an excellent tale, engaging characters, a rich world and strong gameplay. It’s easy sometimes to miss the forest for trees when reviewing a game, to get caught up in smaller problems that detract from the game, but it’s important not to get lost here, and take in the view of it all as a remarkably cohesive, thoughtful and fun whole.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
Version Reviewed: PC
The author backed this project when it was on Kickstarter, though this review was done with a review key provided to them.
