A Hundred Hours of Procrastination
My first impressions of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, Yoshitaka Murayama’s 2024 spiritual successor to the Suikoden series, were exceedingly positive. Retro but in the right ways, Eiyuden Chronicle has all the hallmarks of a fun and fascinating, reasonably challenging, super-cosy JRPG experience, but my initial positivity was curbed somewhat by some mechanics and gameplay directions that caused the game’s pace to almost grind to a complete halt, and while the lengthy campaign is still soaking up plenty of my precious gaming time (I think I’m about halfway through the story right now), I’ve been finding it a bit of a chore to get through of late.
You see, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes tasks the player with recruiting over one-hundred “heroes” to the player character’s faction, many of which are capable of taking part directly in battles. If you’re like me, you’ll feel obliged to locate and recruit every single one of them. This is fine when it’s just a case of locating a more colourful and detailed sprite in one of the various settlements or dungeons dotted around the map, realising that this means it’s likely a recruitable character, and doing a quick quest to get them on board, but many of the characters are hidden behind lengthy side activities, and this is where my problem lies.
The in-game card game is fine, but that doesn’t mean I want to play it for hours on end. I’m really not interested in playing the Bakugan rip-off (give me “Tin Pin Slammer” from The World Ends With You any day of the week). Fishing is an RPG staple at this point but Eiyuden Chronicle’s take on the noble pastime is hardly riveting, and the saga-like cooking “mini-game” and side-quest can get scraped directly from the plate and into the bin, thank you very much. I want all of the characters though, so I guess I’ve got to engage deeply with all of the above. What was that about a quest to save the free nations from a scheming noble wielding the full power of the Empire’s armies? I can’t remember, I’ve been so busy miserably playing with my little spinning tops that the main story feels like a barely-remembered dream.
The actual RPG gameplay of Eiyduen Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is great; the graphics are pleasing, the character sprites are awesome, the music is lovely, developing your own town and castle is actually a worthy side activity, and the actual battles are fun. I was concerned that the vast number of recruitable characters would just result in a whole host of sidelined party members who never get the chance to shine, but thanks to the guild missions and the odd larger-scope battle where party members act as lieutenants for squads of soldiers, those unappreciated companions will still pop up here and there even if they never get a chance to do a dungeon delve with the protagonists.
Sure, it has its share of jank, can occasionally feel sluggish, and has some archaic systems, but it’s all part of the old-school charm. The full package is very positive, and classic RPG enthusiasts are sure to have a great time. However, as an adult with a wife and a child, a job, friends, other hobbies and other games to play, I like it when video games respect my time. I don’t have a problem with long games, but only if they’re naturally long and don’t feel padded out by backtracking and faff. If you want to get all of the potential party members and town helpers, Eiyuden Chronicle is very much padded out by backtracking and faff.
The card game is fine, and I wish it was the only minigame included. It can be a bit of a time-sink, but the pacing of the adventure would have been so much more agreeable if it was the only time-sink. Get rid of the egg-monster races that feel completely superfluous, get rid of the Bakugan-like “Begioma”, because the characters it introduces feel out of place and take away from the game’s more serious story aspects (and also the actual minigame is boring), and please, for the love of all that is sacred, get rid of the cooking side-quest.
There’s this recruitable chef character, you see. His name is Kurtz and he can provide the party with stat-boosting meals. This is fine, but he also comes with a completely nonsensical and lengthy side-quest where various rival chefs (often with completely ridiculous voice acting) will turn up at the inn demanding a cook-off. What follows is a “mini-game” where you just have to tap a button a lot, and a food-tasting session that takes far too long to get through and is almost completely random as to whether you’re going to win or not. A waste of my precious time, but if I want all the characters, I’ve got to engage.
For me, this is Eiyuden Chronicle’s main downfall; if you want to recruit all of the characters (and why wouldn’t you? It’s kind of the game’s thing) then you have no choice but to engage with all the nonsense, and the story’s pacing suffers hugely, as will your enjoyment level. A perfect example of a game that does too much, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is great, but it could have been so much better if it was a bit … less.
My intention with Eiyuden Chronicle from now on is to play it sparingly when I have a bit of free time and maybe get through the second half gradually in between other games (like the upcoming Metroid Prime 4: Beyond), but when you only have an hour or so spare for a session and you check off another two or three card battles and then find another goddam rival chef waiting for you at the inn it’s way too easy to lose this hour without engaging with the campaign or even with the battle system once.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes looks set to become one of my most-played games of the year, but I kind of resent it for this. When I think that I’ll have sunk more hours into it this year than I sunk into the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom I find that thought distasteful, as those games were far more worthy of my time. I still like Eiyuden Chronicle, I really do, but it’s just not designed for a busy, popular, handsome man-about-town like myself. If you have a job, a significant other, or some semblance of a social life, maybe don’t get involved with this one.
Played on Nintendo Switch 2