Upon booting up Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, the first thing that the player is greeted with (after the obligatory publisher and developer splash screens and logos) is a black screen with white text that reads, “With our appreciation to all JRPG fans.” Call me a cynical killjoy, but I couldn’t help but find that black screen a bit cloying on my initial start up of the game. Going in, I knew that Eiyuden was billing itself as not only a spiritual successor to the beloved Suikoden series of games, but that it was also aiming to carry on the torch of RPGs from the PlayStation 1 era in general. A tall order, of course, especially when so many other Kickstarter-backed games have similar ambitions that are rarely, if ever, met. It doesn’t help that I find myself a partially lapsed fan of the genre, really only sinking my teeth back into RPGs in a bigger way with 2018’s release of Dragon Quest XI.
The first few hours of the game didn’t do much to assuage my concern over that statement being mere pandering. Like many games of its type, Eiyuden starts off slow, with lots of dialogue and a copious amount of systems and characters to setup and establish in a world filled with factions, magic, and a whole menagerie of different anthropomorphic animal races, from wolves to kangaroos to foxes. It somehow manages to feel both overwhelming and pedestrian at the same time, like a cover band playing only the hits, and just a bit too enthusiastically at that. I started pre-emptively bracing myself for the gaming equivalent of a few dozen hours of Dave Matthews Band, but with a mercenary kangaroo character (aptly named “Garoo”) as a slight salve.
But my thoughts lingered with that opening statement of appreciation for the majority of my playthrough. Every time I met a cool new anthropomorphic animal party member, faced down a screen-filling boss complete with unique gameplay mechanics, saw a melodramatic wartime-anime plot twist play out in the story, or politely groaned at one of Lian’s overzealous lines, I kept thinking about that initial bootup screen. What started off as trepidation on my part to fully engage with the game on its own merits gradually, over the course of nearly 50 hours (with plenty more left to do, if I so choose), melted away to understanding. Understanding that the opening screen is not merely empty pandering. It’s a declaration of intent from the developers that, in just one short sentence, lays bare everything you really need to know about the game: Eiyuden Chronicle was made with a love and passion not just for fans of RPGs but for a bygone time in video games as a medium. Care absolutely oozes (I use that word in the best way possible) out of every character’s pixel animations, gorgeous character portraits, and line of dialogue. Even when the game is playing “only the hits,” it’s in service of making you a mixtape to let you know it cares.
Take the battle system. You select what actions you want your entire team of six to do at the start of a turn, with what kind of action (normal attack, rune lens abilities, defence, or using an item) determining where that character’s action slots into the turn order. Casting spells generally takes a bit more time for your character to pop, while defensive abilities bump a character’s priority to the top of the list. This allows for a decent amount of thought and strategy without feeling overwhelming or confusing. If you’re a real RPG head for this kind of stuff, you can even program the way you want each party member to fight and set battles to be played out automatically. Think more along the lines of Golden Sun than Final Fantasy, albeit Golden Sun with over 100 recruitable party members and infinitely more customisation and build options for your characters, and you’re getting there.
It sounds like pretty standard turn-based fare, and yeah, it’s not really doing much new in the space. But the fast turn-around on encounters (I basically never took more than two turns to finish any fight that wasn’t a boss encounter), coupled with the vast array of ways in which you can customise each and every character, created an addictive loop of going out into the world, finding new characters to recruit, oohing and ahhing at their character portraits, and then figuring out ways in which I could forcibly slot them into my current team. Because, come hell or high water, I’m definitely going to use a shark dude who speaks like he’s a pirate and swings a ball and chain around as his main weapon.
Sorry if I keep coming back around to the characters in this game, but that’s where Eiyuden Chronicle shines brightest. Due to the sheer number of potential party members and the nature of the story the game is telling, not everyone gets an equal chance to shine. That luchador you find hanging out on top of a snowy mountain that challenges you to a duel? He may not have a tragic backstory full of dead brothers and burned-down villages, but he is, in fact, a luchador party member in a turn-based RPG. What’s not to like? Every single character is lovingly (and enthusiastically!) voice-acted and gets more opportunities to speak than you might think. Recruiting as many characters as I could very quickly became my main goal, and, as someone who’s fallen off of the Pokémon waggon hard over the past five years or so, this aspect of the game quickly became an intense form of both pure joy and stress relief for me, with shots of serotonin deftly silencing my brain hum each and every time the fanfare played that indicated I had just been joined by a new character. Oh, and a quick tip if you haven’t played the game yet? Make sure you find and recruit Reyna as soon as you can. And then thank me later by sending cash.
The love I have for the cast of characters extends beyond just their character portraits and utility in combat. As someone who finds stories in JRPGs to be extremely hit or miss, I didn’t have very high hopes coming into Eiyuden Chronicle on this front, especially knowing that it was trying to tell an epic story of empires and nations at war. Colour me pleasantly surprised, then, to find that I was fully engaged with the story the whole way through. The game’s writing works in extremely large brush strokes, to be certain, but the tale it’s telling is genuinely interesting, at least if you’re willing to sell yourself on the fiction of it all. I found Perrielle to be the most compelling of the main cast, as she’s a character that’s able to see through and accurately predict human behaviour and uses that to sensationalise reality to benefit her cause and battle an empire way above her proverbial weight class.
A lot of the game’s most dramatic moments are played out in an entirely separate, secondary battle system that works like a simplified strategy game. While I never really found these to be very interesting from a gameplay perspective and in fact thought the actual battle sequences to be laboriously long, it was worth it to see all the twists and turns of betrayals and spur-of-the-moment alliances played out in a grander scale theatre of war, especially when dramatic swings in the tides of battle were accompanied by equally dramatic upheavals in music choice.
There’s even a third (!) type of battle system in place in Eiyuden Chronicle, a relatively simplistic duel system that pops up half a dozen times or so in the course of the adventure. These amount to selecting to attack or counter based on which line of dialogue is spoken before your turn, and yes, this amounts to a lot of trial and error. But the game is so forgiving with most of these, and the ensuing clashes of characters are the most Newgrounds circa 2004 over the top anime melodrama through battle, that it’s hard to be mad at it.
Rounding out the rest of the gameplay systems in the game is an entire suite of (mostly optional) minigames, ranging from cooking to multiple forms of racing to… Beyblade? If I’m honest, minigames are generally the things I get least excited to engage with when it comes to most RPGs, and 120 hours of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth earlier this year have scarred me for life on that front. Indeed, almost all of the missing party members on my save file are attained through these various side activities. I don’t begrudge their existence, though, and I imagine if I were a kid or teenager playing through this, I’d already have multiple GameFAQs pages queued up and bookmarked, ready to go and minmax my way through an entire new game+.
That is, for me, the true meaning of the appreciation screen that you see every single time the game is launched. Those words, while simple and straightforward, made me analyse a lot of the things the game was doing through a different lens than I otherwise would have. They allowed me to get lost in a game that wasn’t overly concerned with holding my hand, to the point where I was reminded of just how deeply I fell in love with the PlayStation 1 era of Final Fantasy games and proceeded to go out of my way to rent any and every JRPG I could find at my local Blockbuster. Funnily enough, I never did stumble onto the Suikoden games back then, and playing Eiyuden Chronicle made me really, really wish I had. This genre really cemented my love of the entire medium of video games when I was younger, and it was genuinely therapeutic to be able to realise just how much I’d missed playing games like it.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes isn’t going to appeal to everyone. I know that’s an obvious statement, but really, for a game like this in particular, I think you need to understand the language of RPGs to have that true appreciation for everything the game is going for; newbies to the genre need not apply here. But if you do have that base level of understanding, I think you’re in for a massive treat with Eiyuden. I can’t wait to see what the developer, Rabbit & Bear Studio, does next, but in the meantime, I’ve got plenty of other RPGs of the PS1 era to catch up on and find new appreciation for.
Release Date: Out Now
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Price: £44.99
Many thanks to the publisher for the review copy
Version Tested: PS5
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