Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
First, a disclaimer: I played this game on the Switch, mostly on version 1.03 and 1.04. It sounds like the current versions and other platforms perform better, which I will be grateful for when I return to it for the DLC. I’ve tried to isolate performance/crash stuff to its own section.
It’s going to be a little hard to confine everything I felt as I played Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes to a single post. Or even, really, to the written word. A mixture of relief, frustration, sadness, and joy in different measures and different times will have to do. It took me months to gather my thoughts enough to write the bulk of this and months more to refine it and each time I’ve felt a little different.
A little bit of history, since this is the backdrop for my experience with the Kickstarter. If you’re interested enough to follow the niche genre of “character collectathons with HQs, inspired and once named after Chinese classics but left in their Japanese rendering” (whew) then you may know the original writer behind Suikoden (Yoshitaka Murayama) left the industry for years. I’m not aware what happened during the development of Suikoden III, and I’ll leave speculation/details to those who know more. Either way, two more Suikoden games and three more spinoffs were made after III, and they were still pretty decent games. I’ve long been a fan of the series – their eastern flavor, their heartfelt moments, their fun and varied cast of characters and attention to both large and small scale are a breath of fresh air in a genre that mostly sticks to smaller groups, bigger stakes, and plot twists for the sake of shock value.
More recently Murayama re-entered the industry (with Alliance Alive) and then created the Eiyuden Chronicle kickstarter along with a team including series veterans. It was fairly successful, Eiyuden Chronicle Rising was released a while back, and more recently Hundred Heroes came out – unfortunately, weeks prior to its release, Murayama passed away. So it was with a mixture of sadness and happiness that I downloaded Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes.
Hundred Heroes starts off with a fairly traditional setup – one most easily recognizable from Suikoden II. A League of Nations on one side, an Empire on the other – after bickering, both agree to a territory swap and (as a token of cooperation) a military exercise near the border of Grum County in League territory. The main protagonist, Nowa, and a secondary protagonist, Seign, meet here and get to know one another. Naturally, things don’t stay all that peaceful.
While it makes for a good setup, Hundred Heroes never really veers that far from “what you would expect”. This is both its weakness and its strength – after all, it is a game explicitly designed as homage to and iteration upon a specific series. Some additions feel so natural – for example, material gathering in the field for construction of base building dovetails into a guild that does gathering for you – that you’d be forgiven for not noticing all of them.
Likewise, delving into dungeons, finding characters, and doing minigames are also somewhat standard – perhaps uncomfortably so. While the dungeons might feel like home for those who grew up on early 90s-era games, those with more modern sensibilities might be put off by the “slog” – there’s limited inventory space, no post-battle HP or MP recovery, and not much in the way of options to avoid fighting. I recall reading from one of the kickstarter updates that Murayama specifically pushed for this “battle of attrition” style of exploration.
Mechanically, the new “rune lens” system is a mix of the familiar and the new. Each character has multiple slots for lenses, with each slot fitting different categories (such as passive boosts, magic abilities, or lenses unique to a character). The balance leaves something to be desired, since some characters get 6+ slots or have really powerful innate lenses. Others get only 4 slots or have early slots taken up by innate lenses that prevent characters from really standing out – and if a character doesn’t seem interesting early on there isn’t much incentive for the player to try them out again later.
By the time you’re really in the thick of things in Hundred Heroes there are chapters of the story that really do feel like a new Suikoden. For me, Suikoden punched a little harder in places than Hundred Heroes does, but I can respect that Hundred Heroes doesn’t dwell on tragedy as much – and it’s appreciated in some ways as there’s enough real-life tragedy surrounding its development and release. I think there’s plenty to like in the story of Hundred Heroes, and it’s still a rewarding game to play even for fans of the Suikoden series. I don’t think it provides quite as fertile a backdrop for expansion as Suikoden does, but I hope I am wrong.
Hundred Heroes is at its best when it’s weaving typical dungeon-crawling into a political story, and recruitment or development is interspersed throughout. But it also hews closely to tropes (character archetypes, for example) that plague the JRPG genre, and this may turn off players early on. Its obsession with minigames, particularly the very cliched Beigoma, holds it back. Hopefully further entries in the series can improve on the foundation while resolving some of Hundred Heroes’ problems.