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Described as a game that honors the JRPGs of the 90s, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is easily one of the most anticipated titles this year for fans of the genre. It is, after all, a game by the creators of the Suikoden series, and cited as a spiritual successor to said franchise, which had not gained any new entry for 18 years already.
More prominently, this is a game directed by the late Yoshitaka Murayama, who left an everlasting legacy in the JRPG genre as the creator of Suikoden. For all intents, Eiyuden Chronicle is not only a homage to the Suikoden series but also one that is deliberately designed to echo the JRPGs of the past. It is also quite remarkable for having one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns ever, alongside the likes of Shenmue III and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
As someone who is unfamiliar with the Suikoden franchise, unfortunately, I may not catch many of its facets to the series.
Tales of War
The story of Eiyuden Chronicle is one about politics and war between nations – the quest for power that sparks conflicts. Our story begins with protagonist Nowa, a young boy who joined the militia group Eltisweiss Watch and went on an expedition with an alliance with the Empire in search of the magical artifact Primal Lens. This magical artifact then became the source of conflict among the nations months later.
Avoiding venturing deep into spoiler territory, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes has an extremely intriguing narrative with surprise twists and turns, high and lows, that would keep you on the edge. As the game title implies, it will have more than a hundred heroes to recruit. While most stories would struggle with keeping up the narrative with so many characters, Eiyuden Chronicle somehow keeps every one of them interesting, from visual designs and abilities to their backstories and personalities. Sure, there are some who are based on certain character archetypes, but they still have some aspects that make you want to recruit and learn more about them.
With a colorful anime aesthetic, do expect lighthearted moments as well. The game does a great job of balancing lighthearted moments and serious moments, with none of the scenes or pacing feeling off because of sudden jokes. That said, there are times when I do feel some cutscenes are not necessary, and their inclusion does affect the gameplay pacing. Even so, they are few and far between. Like many RPGs in recent years, there are character dialogue pop-ups during exploration, but these appear at a small portion at the bottom right part of the screen and have no voice acting, so they can be missable if you don’t notice them.
Combat
If you are wondering how encounters work in this game, it features a random encounter system as opposed to the enemy patrol system that most games are going for nowadays. While on the one hand, it does capture the old-school vibes of classic RPGs, the randomness can be annoying as at times, you are forced to combat without warning. This is especially irritating because as mentioned, there are dialogue pop-ups, and they can be erased away because an encounter happened. The good thing is that the random encounters are not that frequent.
In terms of combat, it goes like this – rather than each individual taking their turn one by one, you immediately assign actions to your entire party at once and watch the result play out by the turn order displayed on a bar above the screen. Players have access to regular attacks, some form of defensive ability, items, and Rune-Lenses, this game’s version of skills. Within the Rune-Lens, there are two types of skills available, either one that spends SP or one that consumes MP. To simplify it, SP restores by 1 point each turn while MP does not replenish aside from using items. There are also combo attacks, where two characters with high affinity to each other initiate a powerful move together, highlighting the importance of character relationships.
With an excellent sound design, camera zooms, and a highly epic soundtrack, the battles do look and feel satisfying, especially with how well-animated the characters are with their abilities. However, the combat system may not be for everyone, and certainly not for me. The issue with this is that enemy information is heavily omitted and some foes have multiple abilities, it can feel very random on what they will unleash. This makes the combat experience rather frustrating because you cannot tell who the enemy will target and what ability and effects they have. And since MP can only be replenished with items, which take up a turn, it makes it overly complicated to even plan a simple heal cast, let alone hope that your plan would not be foiled because of how random enemy chooses their target.
Aside from the enemy name text changing color from white to yellow to red, there is also nowhere to tell how much enemy HP has left. Amplifying this frustration is that bosses will feature gimmicks in their fight, and to get a better advantage in the battle is to engage with these gimmicks. The problem is, that some bosses do have clever and well-thought-out gimmicks that I thoroughly enjoy, while others rely on complete randomness that tests on your luck rather than tactics. If luck is not on your side, you will be punished greatly, not exactly a fun experience.
The only way to know what an enemy does is basically to fight them plenty of times to a point where you know what to expect, which is not ideal when it comes to bosses. Because of how frustrating and difficult it is to even plan ahead in battle, with no enemy information and all, in most encounters I would rather choose the Auto option and let it do its job, skipping gameplay.
Customization
Speaking of auto, if you want to be lazy but still want some sound strategy, the game does allow you to set a Battle Plan for each character, tweaking their move frequency to match their role. Yes, as expected from a game that boasts more than a hundred recruitable allies, there will be lots of ways to customize your party.
Your party, by default, is comprised of up to 6 members, with 3 at the frontline and 3 at the backline. These positions heavily played into how your members function in battle, as melee at the front could not target the enemy at the back row or backline characters have less frequency of being targeted. And of course, a diverse roster of characters means an insane variety of different team compositions to mess around with.
To push customization, characters do have equipment to wear and weapons to upgrade. Every member can have rune slots unlock as they level as well, unlocking new skills to cast, or the ability to customize them with rune items for either more stats or more abilities.
User Interface and Progression
While customizing your party may be a huge part of the game, the user interface does little to be desired as it can be confusing to navigate and rather irresponsible as it has a noticeable delay when switching between tabs.
Meanwhile, in exploration, the game comes with a larger field where you can run between towns and dungeons. Progression wise, the game is mostly linear as you are traveling between places to clear objectives. However, there are specific quests that I feel are poorly thought out at all, with no hints on where to go, which leads to frustrating back and forth around every corner of the map in to hope of gaining some glimpse of ways to progress. This is coming from someone who enjoys games that don’t hold your hands. Even puzzle designs were baffling sometimes, with hints that made terrible sense and led to simple answers becoming complicated roundabout solutions.
War and Duels
As a story about war, you could actually also engage in actual war in game mode at certain points of the stories. This is a simple game mode where you command your legion to move to a specific point and initiate a battle that plays out in a cinematic fashion. There is not a lot of control over the result aside from recruiting more characters, and it can be quite a chore because you are essentially watching a glorified unskippable cutscene of a group of soldiers whacking each other until results appear.
Apart from the war segment, there are certain parts of stories where characters may duel each other. Avoiding spoilers, this slightly different combat game mode has you take on either the offense, anticipate attacks with a counter, and crush your opponent’s guard. A far more engaging mode.
Visual
Graphically, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is no doubt a visual delight, blending character 2D sprites with 3D modeled environments to create a rather unique style. Despite seeing pixel art in a 3D background, no scenes look visually off as textures fit in well with one another. The game also has some remarkably stunning lighting, illuminating scenes that heighten the atmosphere – shadow casting above characters and torches glowing in dark interiors, all contributing to enhancing story moments and exploration.
The character sprite animation is also stylistically simple by design but adds a lot of charm to the game. Rather than having characters loaded with varied sets of animations, expressions were presented with simple movements like the sprite static jumps to showcase excitement and so on. Moreover, the portrait pop-ups and text bubbles are also amazingly charming, especially with how well-illustrated each character is.
Despite how beautiful it presents itself, such an approach to art direction does lead to visual annoyance. You see, the camera is rotatable while in the open large field, but completely fixed when in dungeons and towns. At times, there will be 3D objects in the foreground that block off a good chunk of the screen, and with a fixed camera, this means that the object stays and your characters are nowhere to be seen.
While you are not going to be lost when exploring dungeons as they are all quite linear, it is still annoying to not know where your character is heading or if there are any hidden interactable objects. To make matters worse, due to the forced 2.5D perspective and blended textures, many pathways are not readily recognizable unless you look up the minimap. For all the work towards the visual, you would; unfortunately, be staring at minimaps most of the time while exploring dungeons and towns. This may seem like a small matter, but there are some dungeons where minimaps were intentionally blurred to match the area that is covered in fog.
Audio
As for audio, Eiyuden Chronicle comes with excellent voice acting in both English and Japanese. The game mostly carried its audio with music with minimal sound effects aside from combat, and the soundtrack was phenomenal – featuring wind instruments that carry the JRPG fantasy feel. It is, after all, composed by Motoi Sakuraba, who is best known for his work in the Dark Souls series, Star Ocean, and Tales series. Another contributor to the soundtrack is composer Michiko Naruke, who worked on the Wild Arms series.
Verdict
For what it aims to achieve, there is no doubt that Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes succeeds in capturing the vibes of classic JPRGs, with its lovely sprites, colorful cast of characters, and banging soundtrack that screams old-school. As mentioned, I am not familiar with the Suikoden series, but I can see many fans will definitely be delighted and might thoroughly enjoy Eiyuden Chronicle.
Even so, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes suffers from many minor frustrating elements, especially in the combat department, that all coalesce and spiral into an unpleasant experience that tarnished an otherwise highly potential title. The combat system may be a subjective one, but when the game gives you no directions in some quests, poorly conveyed puzzles, and pieces of unwelcome aspects like having your screen literally blocked by more than half by an object in the foreground – no matter how well done the story or art is, all expectations shatter into disappointments and annoyance.
In summary, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes has a lot going for in echoing the classic. It has an eye-pleasing timeless visual, a well-written and intriguing story, and excellent music, but sadly marred by pinches of poorly thought-out elements that should have gone through more playtests.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes was reviewed on PC via Steam, with the following specs – AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, 32 GB DDR5 RAM 6000MHz, Windows 11.
Review code provided by 505 Games.
The Review
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
PROS
- Absolutely beautiful game
- Fascinating story
- Interesting cast of characters, with all of them unique in their way
- Excellent soundtrack
CONS
- Combat, especially boss encounters, can be frustrating with a lack of info
- Boss gimmick with randomness is downright infuriating
- Objects can appear in the foreground and block off your view
- User interface can be confusing and quite unresponsive
- Some quests and puzzles are highly poorly thought out
