Travel back in time to a classic JRPG experience with Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes.
As a preamble, it must be said that no video game exists in a vacuum. They are all influenced in one way or another by the era in which they were developed, the genre and graphical style, and lastly, their legacy. This rings truer than most for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, an exciting new JRPG entry in a series that has its roots back in the 90s.
How far do these games go? Well, tracing to where it all began would be in the early 90s with a little game-changing JRPG called Suikoden, the first of its kind to connect games and characters a decade before Mass Effect was a thing. I mention Suikoden because Yoshitaka Muyrame, the scenario writer, Junko Kawano, the character designer, and other talented veteran developers have worked on this mythical game by Rabbit & Bear.
Add that to the fact that Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes also had an extremely Kickstarter campaign surpassing all of its proposed goals, and you can start to see the picture of the hype behind the universe conspiring to finally see this game happen. So there is no surprise to see that the end product of senior JRPG developers doing their desired project is any fan’s dream.
So, how is Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes? The story begins with the main character Nowa as a recruit in a party with a lycan, a pugilist, and another warrior. As is the norm in these games, they are to explore a dungeon to find what their allies are looking for. Before long, this simple task reveals a deeper geopolitical conflict between nations, in this specific scenario Nowa and his friends are asked to collaborate with the conflicting Empire.
Fast forward six months, and it seems that all political conflicts have been gracefully resolved in peace talks. After the lengthy introduction, you are free to roam the world and solve minor issues before the narrative ramps up again. The open world is just the right size and the random battle encounters are not that frequent to become a nuisance. This is where you can start recruiting comrades randomly found in the world.
True to its name, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes offers up to 100 companions that you can recruit in your playthrough, each with a dedicated voice, personality, and characteristics. To have this many unique characters is a veritable achievement of the game and a real quest to find each and every one. However, recruiting one of the hundred heroes is much easier than how it hauntingly sounds. Most of the recruitment is triggered simply by progressing the story.
The mileage of your enjoyment of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes may vary greatly depending on several factors. Nostalgia, if you have played these types of JRPGs in the past, and how much patience you have for these slow-burning stories. Grinding is a must, and battles do not develop as quickly. Cooking, fishing, and dueling are among the trove of side activities available. If you are having issues in a boss fight, your companions sometimes advise the middle of battle to rethink your strategy and deliver the winning blow.
A dedicated type of gamer criticizes the yellow paint that is commonly used in video games to nudge players where to go, but when you are trying to get your bearings this is a commonly accepted way to help the player. Unfortunately, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes’ commitment to being a fully old-school game goes beyond the aesthetic and gameplay elements, as what is considered nowadays accessibility features for making a more approachable experience are not present here.
In a world where you can cancel random battle encounters, make the fights twice or thrice the speed, and have the option to heal automatically after a battle, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes feels remarkably like an old game. It is of course a design choice to not offer these options, and in the long run, it does help to give that unmistakable feeling of playing a decisively archaic game in 2024.
Before long, the story takes a truly dark turn with war ravaging the nations. This is surprisingly shown by a detailed RTS mode where you control your heroes to fight in a top-down all-out theater of war in which you can see both your allies and enemies engage in intense developments of warfare. With the ultimate goal of making your enemies retreat from the battlefield, a log showing the moment-to-moment actions and soldiers that have fallen as “Heroically killed in glorious battle”, there is certainly no lack of varied combat in Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes.
More than a dozen dungeons each with their unique puzzles await in Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. As a staple of the genre, the obstacles presented in these dungeons are very straightforward, in which you push and pull carts from a mine, for example, to clear up the path for you and your party to move forward. And yet, some of the puzzles are constantly repeated even when you have already solved an eerily similar one just a moment ago.
The map layout is clearly shown whenever you enter a new area so if you feel like exploring off the beaten path you are guaranteed to find a chest with modest rewards like a healing potion or slightly better armor than the one you have. As the corridors are usually tight and there is not much to see beyond the puzzles the surprise encounters are a great opportunity to grind, especially because all of these situations almost always end up in a boss fight.
Appropriately, the music at each moment elevates the gameplay. From the immaculate voice of Sarah Àlainn to the composers Michiko Naruke of Wild Arms series fame and Motoi Sakuraba who previously worked on the Tales Of Series, each town, dungeon, and battle has the perfect mood to make it feel like an instant classic. Paired with the sound effects that feel straight out of 1995, the care put into the overall sound design is a delight to listen to.
As the sprawling JRPG comes to a close, it is evident that the many inspirations it took, beyond the gorgeous art style, were not enough to propel it to new heights. Classic tropes of betrayal, easy-to-spot bosses due to their veneer, and world-saving catastrophes are stories that we have seen a thousand times before, and yet, while it is excellently told in this particular scenario, it is impossible to shake the feeling we have been here before. And quite a few times already at that.
There are plenty of moments where Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes feels like a relic of the past. As if the game’s code was found in an old ’90s PC, polished and adapted to newer consoles. This is not to say that it is a bad thing, but a marvel of our time, baggage, and all. The way they were able to so clearly capture the essence of what a timeless JRPG is here will undoubtedly enrapture a certain kind of player yearning for those golden days when there wasn’t a care in the world and all we had were games.
Decidedly an old-school experience, for people who have complained about how modern gaming is inching more towards mindless action RPGs with no strategy or substance, this is a love letter to them.
