“Huh, they sure took their sweet time with this intro” was my reaction after the initial 10 to 15 hours of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. It’s been a long while since I played an RPG that didn’t throw me directly at the heart of a conflict, or that 3 hours in you’re already intertwined with a massive plot in which you have to stop a big corporation / nation / evil entity to take over the world. Yoshitaka Murayama’s — most notably known for Suikoden II — swan song feels different, more than “retro”, if that term has any weight to it nowadays, it feels comfortable enough to cater to an audience that won’t mind sitting and getting a good dose of exposition before the next major plot beat. And that settles Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes apart from so many RPGs from the past decade.
It’s not to say that RPG fans are lacking in choices regarding titles. You have your Final Fantasy, Falcom keeps pumping out massive stories that I hope one day to finish (it will surely help if each game isn’t 100h+), indie developers try to carve their own path with unique mechanics or a fresh perspective on story and / or mechanics. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes doesn’t do any of that. While the game caters to a lot of Suikoden II veterans, I recall little of the franchise. It’s been more than a decade since I played the original and whilst I recall the major plot points, I played through Eiyuden Chronicle with fresh eyes.
If anything, Rabbit & Bear Studios title plays it extremely safe in terms of the main plot. You see the world through the eyes of Nowa, a small village kid that seeks to make a name for themselves and be by fate or luck, is a central part of a war between major empires. Again, if you played enough RPGs, you saw or read this story and you know how it will play out. Not that there won’t be one or two interesting twists, but don’t go in expecting something that will change your perspective on life. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes shines on the small things, when Nowa has small talks with his fellow companions, on the worldbuilding, on how each town has its unique flavor to it.
The idea of “recruiting” over 100 heroes put me off at first. “You can’t make something of this scale and still keep a semblance of quality”, I thought at first, but Rabbit & Bear Studios pulls it off for the most part. Each hero has a bit of story attached in a way that it makes you compelled to hear what they have to say, what their background is, what they’re fighting for and what their values are. Some did have a bigger treatment than others and it shows.
Early on I was tasked with recruiting my party — Eiyuden Chronicle’s way to showcase the 100 heroes system. A “simple” errand, but enough to see that one character had superficial writing that would appear at major plot points or after battles, while another character wouldn’t stop talking. One character was a hunter, while the other was a magical girl (please do not confuse with a magic girl, I mean a magical girl in the Sailor Moon sense). Needless to say, that the magical girl was the one that I kept in my party for a big chunk of the game — even if she was annoying at times.+
Once the game starts rolling after the 10 to 15 hour mark — that depends on how much time you’ll spend exploring or doing mini games and tasks — is that the “100 heroes” premise shows its true potential. After a big moment in the story, you’ll have yourself a vast city to upgrade, dozens of side quests, hundreds of minor tasks, many minutes of talk and exposition.
Reader, you have no idea how much I missed this kind of mechanic in RPGs. I missed exploring an overworld map that felt big and not just a board that feels like it was stretched thin in favor of random battles. I missed checking every nook and cranny for some silly upgrade that, although not needed to finish the game, I craved for it. My “completionist” instinct kicked in, in a way that I didn’t feel like since Xenoblade Chronicles. And that’s almost 10 years ago. I knew I would sink over 100hrs in Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes and so I did.
Rabbit & Bear Studios also doesn’t shy away from the idea. Quite the contrary, it motivates you to take a deep breath and take in the world and its characters. “Take this, take this world for you to explore filled with interesting characters and situations. Do it in your own time, don’t rush it, but also don’t feel bad if you missed out on something.”
While I have my share of complaints regarding the gameplay, mostly are minor quibbles that come with a game that’s very rooted in mid to late 90s RPG design. Temper your expectations regarding battles and customization. It is straightforward as it gets.
The battles themselves, outside major boss battles, aren’t hard per se. While I played on hard, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes does the “the enemy has bloated HP” in most situations. The game offers an “auto battle mode” that can be slightly customized, and I did make a good use of it in dungeons to get through them at a reasonable pace.
By reasonable I mean, get ready for sprawling dungeons midway through the game that are both aesthetically beautiful as they are complex to navigate. Even the most linear ones will have some sort of puzzle or hidden shortcut that you will have to figure it out in order to progress. Outside one early in the game that tested my patience with some obnoxious design, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes more than makes up for it with good rewards and amazing boss battles. Again, if you are looking for something that is as in depth as the early Shin Megami Tensei or a typical Dungeon Crawler, you are in the wrong spot.
Even the “War” scenarios, which have you taking the leadership of armies to repel or retake a region, are straightforward. The AI will do predictable moves, and all you need to do is counter it. And, even if you fail, the AI will repeat the same actions again. It serves as an exposition piece rather than a true war scenario, but it is fun, nevertheless.
But again, it’s all about balance. Whenever I felt a bit down that I was auto battling too much, the war scenario dragged on, or the dungeon was taking longer than I thought, the game throws a boss battle that always have a special “gimmick” to test my skills. You cannot auto battle your way through (well, you can try), but it’s such a refreshing take rather than pure brute force. Sometimes you are tasked with avoiding a specific attack, or hitting a switch, opening a chest, messing around with the order of attack of the boss.
On the other hand, it highlights some of the game’s biggest “weaknesses”. As I said, this game is rooted in late to mid-90s RPG design. That includes non-regenerating HP and MP, no XP if one of your party members ends up KO’d after a battle. And not getting an inch of XP after a boss battle just because one of your characters got hit in the last round almost wanted me to restart the entire encounter. But thankfully, there are many other heroes to fill that role.
In some ways, I think it is the intended design since Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes has a sort of “shared XP” system. Even the lowest character can catch up to the rest of your squad just by defeating a couple of monsters in an overworld battle. Take it, for instance, that most of your party is around level 50 and one character is level 20. It takes around 2 to 5 battles to get that one low-level character to level 45 or 47. So, do not be afraid of swapping out characters. If anything, I incentivize you to do so you can learn more about them.
Yes, I know, I am going to talk about the characters; I apologize if I sound redundant, but the heroes, the world and its overlapping stories are what makes Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes such a joy to play. At one moment I am in this huge army battle trying to overtake a region, the other I’m playing a card game or racing against other characters in the desert.
The game strikes a delicate balance between these situations where one does not invalidate the other. Yes, there is a war raging, but people are living, people need to live how matter ugly things get. No, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes does not get “political” — whatever this means in gaming terms since it’s such an empty statement for a lot of games and developers alike — but its story of war and bonding together with people gave me pause.
In a world where I wake up in an almost constant hellscape of climate change, massive floodings in South America — in my country, Brazil, — war-torn countries, mass genocide, where do I find the will to write? To write about video games, such a superficial and needless topic. “Here I am, writing about an RPG while the world is burning up” was recurrent feeling while drafting this critique.
But then I look at how Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes displays that, yes, there are ugly things in the world. There always will be — and people to fight for it — but also these same people also need rest, also need entertainment, also need to spend their time with silly card games or racing. If that’s not worth writing or living for, then what is it? Does one desire for reform and equality invalidates all their other needs?
“Cozy,” that’s a word that I kept reading about for the past 5 or 6 years with no recognizable definition. To some, it means a farming game with barely any conflict, an escapade from the world’s never-ending turmoil. To others, a label that can apply to every pastel looking game, to a smaller percentage, is a marketing tool to be used for a specific audience.
Now that the credits rolled more than a week ago and I look back on my time with Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, I guess this means “cozy” to me. It’s not about ignoring your feelings and the state of the world — that’s useless. It is acknowledging that, yes, things can be horrible, but they can also be beautiful.
Rabbit & Bear Studios crafted a world where both sides live in a constant state of push and pull, and both the main character and the so called “100 heroes” are part of it. But every single one of them has their own voice, feelings, needs. That you must fight for what is right, and that will not be easy, but also you need respite, to look back at your accomplishments and even lie down a bit and see that you did what you could with the resources you had at that specific point in time. Yes, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes plays it safe, but that does not mean it won’t move you to tears and won’t make you realize how much you missed — or how much you miss — doing certain things both in a game or in real life. Be it grouping up with a bunch of characters to overthrow an evil empire or watch as they take a moment to wind down and talk about life stuff. Sometimes, all you need is a group of friends and hope to change, even if that change is small in the grand scheme of things. Just don’t give up hope.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
