tohya.net
The HD era hasn't exactly been a blessing for japanese roleplaying games. If asked today what the best games in the genre were, I'd still come up with a list of games that were released ten to twenty years ago. Apparently I'm not the only person to feel this way, because Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes has everything that made me genre stand out during its golden time. From the simple turn based battle sytem that doesn't require a degree in spreadsheet analysis to make sense of, to the classic world map, strong characters, strong writing, the absence of to-do lists and a plethora of mini games — this title is almost sure to give everyone who grew up with the genre a good time. And it certainly did so for me, to the point it had me feel slightly sad that it was over after clearing it. But at the end of the day Eiyuden Chronicle is a game with origins in a Kickstarter campaign. Like most crowd-funded games it's rough around almost every corner and severly lacking in many aspects that unfortunately hold it back from being a stand-out title of its genre.
Eiyuden's main problem is that its developers put too much effort into the games' gimmicks (such as town building and various mini games), while they should have focussed more on polishing the main campaign. The story is good at its core, but its presentation falls flat. It rushes through the prologue in no time, to the point where major events early on feel unnatural and forced. While the writing does pick up from there it never reaches the peak of Suikoden II. The antagonist is written well, but the majority of his nasty actions are never shown to the characters, let alone the player. His wrongdoings are only portrayed through exposition. When a village gets burned down, nobody dies and you can travel back there almost immediately to find it in perfect shape. Generally whenever the opposite faction takes over a location you can still travel there anytime to find the place safe and in order.
Even with towns under direct attack there is never a corpse to be seen or a scream to be heard. The sound designers of roleplaying games a few generations back imitated the sounds of war drums and marching soldiers to put atmosphere into games such as this (or directly inserted sounds of clashing swords and people screaming). Meanwhile Eiyuden plays generic character themes during a major invasion event. I don't know if these problems stem from a lack of talent in today's developers, a lack of production budget allocated on the main campaign or the developers being too afraid of an M rating, but in any case the direct consequence of this safe and lackluster design is that it becomes very difficult to get emotionally invested into the plot, no matter how good the writing and characters otherwise are. The game is not too long and a lot of play time is wasted on slow menus, pointlessly long animations during the war battles, an abundance of flavor text and too many recruitment quests. Eiyuden would be easily improved by cutting down on those aspects and inserting a few more chapters into the main story.
Supposedly there are also technical problems on some platforms, that may or may not have been ironed out with patches. All I can say here is that when I played the game on PS5 roughly 4 months after its inital realese everything worked fine for me.
But putting those problems aside, I still enjoyed Eiyuden Chronicle overally. Characters have strong personalities and a lot of care and attention was put into making them all unique and stand out in their own way. Most parts of the game were just the right level of challenge (on hard mode) for me to enjoy the dungeons without having them feel terribly tedious. Eiyuden's visuals are pleasing, this one got the 2D-HD style down better than most competitors. The main theme may be a bit all over the place, and the music does not always deliver the right atmosphere, but thinking of town music and the battle music the soundtrack mostly delivers and is overally very good. The combat is simple but fun with lots of customization that does not feel overbearing. And even if lacking in secrets it's always nice to have a classic world map to traverse.
Eiyuden Chronicle is a solid JRPG that understands the genres strong points and is not afraid to boast with them, even if they may seem old and dated to younger generations of players. It's biggest weakness is that it is too lighthearted for its own good. There's a lot of potential here that was unfortunately not brought to full fruition, but the game is still very enjoyable and almost a safe recommendation for every fan of japanese RPGs.