Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes - Short Expectations And Mismanaged Scope

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a new title from Rabbit and Bear Studio, a studio formed by game developers and artists who worked on the original Suikoden titles. Hundred Heroes itself is a spiritual successor to the gameplay styles of Suikoden, but the question with all spiritual successors is "Does the imitation live up to the original?"

In Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes you play as Nowa, a young man who left his town to become an adventurer for a quest guild. After being selected to join a mission in search of a rare artifact dominoes quickly fall leading to the Dux of a neighboring country sowing discourse leading to a war between nations.

Now the leader of an Alliance of nations Nowa must travel the country recruiting allies to fight off the invading Imperials. This adventure takes him across the world visiting various towns, interacting with, and recruiting denizens of the world from state leaders to common folk.

An Adventure to Nowa-where

The story starts off strong. Introducing you to key characters who will work in tandem with your efforts and set up Nowa as a reluctant hero. There is also a solid backing cast including a mentor-like figure, a spunky friend who treats you like a kid, and a powerful noblewoman orchestrating your whole effort from the background. These character archetypes might be a bit tropey but they do a good job establishing the world quickly so you can hop into exploration.

As the story continues however this plot of global traveling and political subterfuge quickly begins to show cracks. No longer are characters fleshed out, travels to different destinations become shorter and shorter, and new factions begin appearing out of nowhere to slow Nowa's progress.

You can tell the exact moment in the game when the scope of the story didn't look like it was going to be managable and later plot points began to get paired down. The final act manages to cram more story, characters, and dungeons than you've faced in the whole game so far. It simultaneously feels rushed as well as so slow as every time you feel you've reached the end of the game some different villain needs to show up for their own epic moment.

The Hundred+ Heroes

This sense of scope issue also comes to the 100+ recruitable characters that you'll encounter. Some of these recruitable characters have a quest associated with them and unlock different functions at your home base, others join you with a simple conversation.

A lot of the heroes don't feel like they're adding anything to the experience but are instead giving the player abilities that other games would have an item for or even a setting. Having an NPC to let you carry more items, or to even walk faster feels like things are being taken away to then be gifted back as gameplay rewards.

Some Heroes open access to mini-games. There's a card game that uses similar points and lanes to Marvel Snap, and even a Beyblade-style minigame. These mini-games too come across as half-baked, feeling like the idea was there but there's not enough to keep you playing.

It's because of this that the implementation of the 'Hundred Heroes' themselves felt like they didn't add much to the overall experience.

Combat on Auto-Pilot

Turn-based combat functions well on the surface but once you start diving into it deeper, obtaining more abilities, and collecting characters it starts to show a lot of its cracks.

At any time you can have six members of your fighting party, with three to swap in. Characters have a standard attack and an Auto-Rune attack, for some characters, this could mean a special attack that consumes SP or a magical ability at the cost of MP. 

SP slowly refills throughout the course of the battle allowing for party members to keep doling out special attack, I grew especially fond of a character you receive early on who always spends his entire SP gauge for attacks that grow in power as there's more to spend. MP however not only doesn't refill, but it's also not possible to purchase MP restoring items.

MP abilities aren't that much more powerful than SP alternatives, but the big downside is that MP is required for healers. This means even when you have a spellcaster in your party there's no incentive to perform a magical attack as the heal for a character with a powerful SP attack is going to be a far more efficient use of your magic.

Characters can be programmed to Auto-Battle, using their abilities and items to keep themselves dealing damage and staying safe. Whether it says something about the difficulty of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, or how fantastic the default character AI is I was able to clear the majority of the game battling on auto-pilot.

There were maybe only two handfuls of battles against boss creatures that had additional gimmicks to the battle, such as taking a character's turn to fire a canon or drop an icicle, where I wasn't able to use Auto mode throughout the battle.

As long as I had upgraded my weapons and purchased optimal gear at a town I always felt confident going on to the next stage in the story.

There are a few moments in-game where instead of a small-scale battle you're fighting a war. Built on a grid system you'll move your troops one space a turn, giving you options to activate abilities along the way.

While the event of large-scale battle is fun there's no actual winning or losing of these battles, at least in the story-based ones. Each is pre-scripted for only a few turns. What might look to have stakes instead just has you running head first into one another activating your abilities until you're taken away from the battle.

Lagging In Strange Places

A strange aspect that I experienced throughout the entire game was also how much time was needed to navigate menus. Between bringing up a menu, navigating to the magic screen, tabbing over to a character, picking a spell, and picking your party each part of the process was met with delay. After 45+ hours playing Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes where using abilities and spells should have been muscle memory I had to always be watching as the game may have lost any of my inputs.

Looks and Sounds Amazing

Two areas where Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes excelled were in its art design and audio direction.

The mixture of 2D sprites in 3D worlds will always be a charming one to me. Each of the character's models is beautifully detailed, and they need to be so you can pick out the main characters as you walk through a town.

All of the different monsters featured in the game were also incredibly interesting and unique. One of my favorite designs was that of a three-headed dragon monster, but the middle head had already been removed leaving a stump in its place. Each new region brought with it unique monsters to gawk and gaze at.

All major characters are fully voiced and you can really tell that everyone is giving it their all. Moments of frustration and sadness can be heard throughout the journey that the main characters go on. This is equally true when characters find their strength and band together to try to save the world.

Even after walking away from the game while playing it this past week the engaging battle theme and overworld themes stuck with me. In the late game, there are also emotional musical tracks with vocals that spur during moments of tension and celebration. These tracks are immediately going to be added to my playlists when available.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review | Final Thoughts

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a game that tries to model everything it does on the Suikoden games of yesteryear. As with many "spiritual successors crowdfunded with big names from the original release attached" this falls into the trap where you see what they're going for, but undershoot the mark at almost every chance.

Suikoden fans will likely enjoy themselves, but won't be overly excited. For others who didn't have much exposure to those particular classic JRPG titles, this isn't going to be the introduction you want. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is another perfect example of a Kickstarter game that hasn't achieved its inspiration and has suffered from stretch goal bloat and scope mismanagement.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes was reviewed on PC with a code provided by the publisher over roughly 46 hours of gameplay. All screenshots in this review were taken by the reviewer during gameplay.