Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes review – gotta recruit ‘em all-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes – old school and proud (Picture: 505 Games)

The spiritual successor to Suikoden gained more than $4.5 million in Kickstarter funding but what can this old school JRPG offer non-fans?

For a genre that’s seemed to have one foot in the grave for the last couple of decades, 2024 has turned out to be a banner year for Japanese role-players. What’s especially encouraging is how varied the games have been, in terms of setting and gameplay, from Granblue Fantasy: Relink to Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Reload, and Dragon’s Dogma 2.

Still to come this year, there’s everything from Akira Toriyama’s Sand Land to Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree and a remaster of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – proving that JRPGs aren’t just turn-based games set in an anime styled fantasy world. And yet Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is almost exactly that, except with a major strategy element that identifies it as a spiritual successor to the Suikoden franchise.

It’s tempting to compare it to the recent Unicorn Overlord, but while that was merely influenced by 16-bit classic Ogre Battle, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes skates close to being an unofficial remake of PS1 game Suikoden 2, with a central hero that looks almost identical and a battle system that goes well beyond being a mere homage. But that’s unsurprising given the pitch of the original Kickstarter campaign and the fact that many of Hundred Heroes’ developers also worked on Suikoden.

Fans have been waiting for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes’ release for four years now, but sadly director Yoshitaka Murayama, who had the same role on the first three Suikoden games, passed away in February. That means he never got to see the reaction to Hundred Heroes’ release but we’re certain that its backers won’t be disappointed with the end result. Especially as there’s already been a commitment that it will continue as an ongoing franchise.

Although the retro stylings are very important to Hundred Heroes’ appeal you don’t need to know anything about Suikoden to enjoy it. Things start off relatively normally for a Japanese role-playing game, as you play a new recruit to a mercenary group acting as a paramilitary force for the so-called League Of Nations, who have a tense relationship with a neighbouring empire. The empire isn’t necessarily the main enemy though, as there’s more complex political machinations going on, revolving around artefacts that allow individuals to use powerful magical abilities.

The key gimmick for both Suikoden and Hundred Heroes is that you can recruit over a hundred allies to your cause and, while you can only use six during normal battles, there’s a strategy level element to the game which is unlike any other similar title. You’re not just recruiting a handful of people to your party but trying to unite whole countries, interacting with individuals but at times directing entire armies, in mini-games that work like a simplified Fire Emblem or Advance Wars.

At the other ends of the scale, you can also end up overseeing duels between feuding characters, although these rely on such a large random element that it never feels like you’re having enough influence on proceedings. More satisfying is upgrading your home base, whose expansion opens up new options, weapons, and several otherwise unrecruitable characters.

Conscripting new allies isn’t just essential for progress (those not being used in your current party can quickly level up by pairing with someone more experienced) but it’s one of the key motivations for the whole game, encouraging a Pokémon-like obsession with recruiting everyone possible. Some you do just for the novelty of them being a shark-person or an out-of-place luchador, while others have genuinely interesting backstories and personalities.

Naturally, they all have their own different specialities when it comes combat, even if you’ll inevitability start to rely on a familiar team of six for most turn-based battles. Right from the start, these can be run on autopilot but that doesn’t mean combat is mindless, as enemies fight in two rows, just like your allies, which means you have to prioritise targets carefully. Even so, there’s an option similar to the Gambit system from Final Fantasy 12 that allows you to customise the AI of each character to a useful level of detail, so using the autopilot option still involves some strategy on your part.

Graphically, the game is something of a mixed big. The 2D sprites are charming and full of character, and some of the 3D backdrops are impressively detailed. Others are not though, and the camera is universally poor. Despite being fixed most of the time, it constantly manages to trip over itself, obscuring your characters or pointing at nothing.

That’s not a big problem though and instead the sticking point for many will be that the game uses random battles, just like Suikoden 2. Most modern Japanese games gave up on the concept a long time ago but as you wonder around Hundred Heroes’ world you can get randomly interrupted by enemies and forced into a battle at almost any time.

The frequency at which this happens is generally much lower than older games but the biggest issue, and the reason we’ve never accepted the arguments in favour of random battles, is that it discourages exploration, as you realise walking over to a nearby area and poking about is inevitably going to result in at least one or unavoidable battles.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes – the 2D sprites are charming (Picture: 505 Games)

Another irritation is how slow-paced and vague the plot and objectives are for the first dozen or so hours, especially given that there can be a lot of back-tracking and fast travel doesn’t unlock until almost the halfway point.

The fans that helped to fund Hundred Heroes are going to be fine with all that but it’s unlikely to be forgiven so easily by others, especially as the amount of level grinding needed is more than most modern role-players, even if, again, it’s still less than in the 90s.

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Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is exactly what it promised to be when the project was first pitched for crowdfunding, and there’s clearly going to be a lot of happy fans now that it’s finally ready for release. It’s an enjoyable game for everyone though, even if at least some knowledge and appreciation for old school Japanese role-players helps to smooth over what can be an uneven experience.

What this isn’t, is the modern re-envisioning of Suikoden that the concept deserves. It’s hard to imagine that coming from original publisher Konami but, equally, Hundred Heroes is far more interested in recreating the past than it is forging the future.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £44.99
Publisher: 505 Games
Developer: Rabbit and Bear Studios
Release Date: 23rd April 2024
Age Rating: 12

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