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Image: 505 GamesIf you’ve ever played a Suikoden game, it’s hard not to tear up at the opening sequence of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes.
It’s particularly hard watching this following the passing of series creator and the director of this spiritual successor Yoshitaka Murayama at the age of 55. Character montages, a swelling orchestra, sweeping shots over vast plains, mountains, and deserts, and battles between friends and foes – this is a snapshot of Murayama, and Suikoden’s, legacy.
It’s impossible to separate Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes from its inspirations; Murayama, who formed Rabbit & Bear Studios to create this game, wrote and directed Suikoden and Suikoden II for the PlayStation (and partially worked on Suikoden III before leaving the project mid-way); Junko Kawano was the lead artist on the original Suikoden and returned to produce IV, Tactics, and V; and Osamu Komuta worked as a programmer on IV and directed Tactics and Tierkreis. Junichi Murakami, the last founder of Rabbit & Bear, is mentioned in the credits of V, and is known for directing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. All four are prominent names from Konami’s — and Suikoden’s — past.
Ahead of the game’s release on 23rd April 2024, 505 Games offered us the chance to go hands-on with a Steam beta build. And while the hugely successful Kickstarter, trailers, and promotional material have made it clear, finally getting a chance to play this turn-based RPG homage made it abundantly clear: Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is Suikoden in all but name.
Eiyuden Chronicle, Rising
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes’ beta is essentially the opening section of the game. Consisting of about the first five to eight hours of gameplay, it gives you a really good sense of what to expect. Lots of characters, political tensions, friendships, silliness, and plenty of solid turn-based combat.
That makes it pretty different to the tame, and brief, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, a prequel that was more action RPG and focused much more on a single community rather than an entire continent. Hundred Heroes is much larger in scope, as you’d expect. In the beta, you have access to multiple towns, two full dungeons, a couple of linear branching paths, and an entire world map. A JRPG world map in 2024? Beautiful.
Image: Nintendo Life / 505 GamesNowa is the focus of the opening hours of the game – a young boy from a small border village, Nowa is selfless, kind, and a self-proclaimed “meddler”. He differs from Suikoden series protagonists who are almost always silent, and his personality is infectious. After joining the Watch, a group of mercenaries, Nowa finds himself cooperating with the empire to investigate some ruins. On the mission, he befriends Seign Kesling, a lieutenant in the army. And the discoveries they make are the focus of the rest of the game.
A JRPG world map in 2024? Beautiful.
We’re already in love with the handful of characters we’ve managed to spend some time with. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes hasn’t sacrificed any old-school JRPG silliness for a more mature plot; we’re sure one is waiting for us beyond the first few hours, but we could watch martial arts specialist Lian tease Nowa for hours. Every single person, from Seign’s perceived haughtiness to the wolfman Garr’s grumpy “father of the group” attitude had us charmed from the get-go.
A Woven Web
The beta is split into two halves – the first few hours focus on the story and act as a sort of tutorial for the game’s combat mechanics. The second part unleashes you as Noah and the Watch onto the world, to recruit allies to the cause and get a sense of just what awaits in the main game.
If we can gush for a moment, it’s an absolute joy to have a fully-explorable world map in a turn-based JRPG for the first time in a while. Wandering the plains of a shrunk-down world as a little sprite never gets old. It’s one of the defining features of any JRPG from our childhoods, and here, it’s yet another way that Hundred Heroes wears its heart, and inspirations, on its sleeve.
Image: Nintendo Life / 505 GamesThe combat is probably the first place you’ll spot those Suikoden threads the most. You can have up to six characters in battle at once – three in the front, three in the back. At the start of a fight, you can instruct your characters to use normal attacks, use skills via the Rune-Lens menu (equipable items that grant skills and magic to your characters), or use a unique defense command that can range from dodging magical shields, and even charging up attacks, depending on the character.
Rune-Lens attacks cost SP, which you recover by performing regular attacks. Some magic-based skills such as healing spells and elemental attacks consume MP and SP, making resource management key to fights. This only really becomes an issue with high-cost healing spells as MP-healing items were a bit scarce during our time with the game, but there are more than enough HP-healing items to balance things out.
Image: Nintendo Life / 505 GamesYou can see the turn order of every character and enemy at the top of the screen, so planning out your character’s attacks to prevent your foe from making a move is crucial. It adds a little element of strategy to battle, and you can even affect the turn order depending on your actions. It’s simple but extremely effective, and watching the turn order play out after you’ve made your choices is satisfying – particularly with some of the stunning spritework and animations on offer.
Stars of Destiny
We got to play around with ten characters, and all of them felt a little bit different. Nowa is a fast attacker who balances offence and defence perfectly. Garr, a wolfman, is a mostly pure physical attacker and much slower than Nowa, but his Rune-Lens skill allows him to boost his attack for three turns. Then there’s Mellore who specialises in light-based long-range attacks and can hit the front or back row of enemies regardless of where she is.
Image: Nintendo Life / 505 GamesSome characters will eventually get access to Hero Combos, deadly attacks that combine two or more characters’ skills at the cost of both their SP bars. Nowa and Seign team up for a powerful group-wide attack, while Nowa and the marital artist Lian pair up for a combo with a potential critical hit. These are fun additions and are a nod to Suikoden’s Unite Attacks, but as with its spiritual predecessor, many of these are more for their stylish animations and added effects than their damage.
Hundred Heroes wears its heart, and inspirations, on its sleeve.
Having played a few Suikoden games before, we know how crucial team composition can be – particularly as your party grows. We didn’t get to play around much here because of the way the beta splits the characters – we had seven in the second part after recruiting some extra characters, so picking between having two mages or having a mage and a ranger was the only real choice we had to make here.
Image: Nintendo Life / 505 GamesThe ways you recruit these additional characters can be pretty varied. The short-tempered cleric Francesca might be our favourite just because of how her personality can do a quick 180 at the click of a finger, but her recruitment quest simply requires you to trigger a cutscene. In contrast, for Mellore, you need to follow her and go through a dungeon to defeat a boss to get her to join the Watch. It’s exactly the kind of side questing and exploration that we adore here.
Reminiscence
The towns and dungeons of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes also borrow from the classics in the best possible ways. The base town, where you spend the majority of time in the second half of the beta, is huge but it’s also filled with people to talk to, shops to visit, and lots of beautiful visuals. Honestly, the blend of pixel art and 3D backgrounds works incredibly well and creates a cosy, nostalgic, and modern look that we love.
Suikoden staple stores such as Rune-Lens shops, Appraisers, trading posts, and blacksmiths are present – we got rather excited when we spotted the appraisers shop for the first time, but we were quickly disappointed when we found we had nothing to appraise! And the towns vary from small farming hamlets to bustling cobbled streets.
Image: Nintendo Life / 505 GamesThe dungeons are similarly simple and evocative of the golden era of JRPGs – branching paths with simple puzzles, hidden treasure chests, and random encounters (with a reasonable random encounter rate, to boot). One dungeon sees you pushing minecarts around, while another had us memorising short passwords. None of these will be designed to break your brain; they’re fun and breezy.
Days Past
There’s a lot we love about Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes so far, but a few things are missing for us. While the combat here is engaging, Suikoden games are known for their snappy menu-based combat, and while Eiyuden Chronicle certainly attempts to follow that tradition, at least in the beta, things are a bit slower than we’d like. Going through six characters’ attack options feels a little sluggish. Auto-battle is at least an option – and it’s highly customisable, meaning you can set character priorities and actions – but going through one round takes a longer than expected.
From what we’ve seen so far, however, this is a legacy Murayama-san, and the team at Rabbit & Bear can be proud of.
This is perhaps most noticeable with bosses, which add gimmicks to vary up the fights a bit more. For the first boss, you need to pay attention to which column the boss is going to attack and hide behind rocks. For an optional boss, you must choose whether to summon a magical hammer from a left or right book to hit the boss as it emerges from the ground. The latter of these gimmicks came entirely down to luck, and there were no indicators as to where the boss would pop up. So while we applaud the variety, it didn’t always work.
Image: Nintendo Life / 505 GamesThere are also a few other elements that, while not commonplace in RPGs back in the ‘90s, certainly feel a bit missed here. As far as we can tell, you can only save your game at save points or in Inns, meaning there’s no saving on the world map. Rune-Lenses can only be equipped in Rune-Lens stores. And you have limited, if shared, inventory space. It’s more generous than it was in the original Suikoden, and we imagine you’ll be able to expand it later on in Hundred Heroes, but we ran out of space once or twice during our seven hours with the game.
Still, those seven hours we spent with Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes’ beta only offered us a slice of what the full game has to offer us. We’re promised base building, minigames, and over 100 characters to recruit, ranging from party members to shopkeepers and more. And with the carrot dangling some more serious plot moments from the end of the beta, we’re eager to see what the rest of the game has in store for us — and how it plays on Switch.
From what we’ve seen so far, however, this is a legacy Murayama-san, and the team at Rabbit & Bear can be proud of.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes launches on the Switch eShop on 23rd April 2024. Will you be recruiting those 100 next month? Let us know in the comments.
