Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review – The Stars Of Destiny Have Aligned

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes exists within a niche inside a niche. It’s a sprite-based JRPG that acts as a spiritual successor to the Suikoden franchise. As beloved as those games may be, they were never well-known outside a pretty dedicated fandom.

While Suikoden seemed happy to exist on the fringes, appealing to a particular brand of hardcore fan, Eiyuden feels poised to make a bigger splash than its spiritual predecessors ever did with its day-one Game Pass launch.

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Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Laughs In The Face Of Nostalgia

Don’t Call It A Comeback.

Eiyuden is set in a fantasy world that is teetering on the edge of war. You’ll take control of Nowa a self-admitted meddler and eternal optimist. It isn’t long before Nowa is thrust into the role of leading the resistance against the increasingly aggressive Galdean Empire. Unsurprisingly, this is a very Suikoden-esque setup. But that isn’t the only element Eiyuden borrows.

A Finely Tuned Combat Engine That Rewards Tinkering

Eiyuden’s combat engine is largely taken from the Suikoden franchise wholesale. Like those games, the combat is focused on positioning, and constructing teams to take advantage of the three ranges units can fight at while emphasizing the use of the ever flashy team-up attacks and rune abilities.

As Eiyuden often does, it iterates thoughtfully on this established formula, adding a turn-order indicator into the mix. Through the use of various skills, you can manipulate your unit’s position on the tracker, giving you the opportunity to interrupt an opponent’s attacks before they have a chance to act. This proves to be an engaging addition to Suikoden’s already great turn-based combat engine. Additionally, Eiyuden adds gimmicks, which are interactions unique to individual bosses that help add a light puzzle-solving element to these encounters.

Battles are further enhanced by what I suspect may be a controversial element for some: Eiyuden limits your carrying capacity. This means that you will often have to think carefully about which recovery items you bring into a dungeon. You won’t want to fill your inventory either, as you’ll probably want to leave spots open for the treasures you’ll encounter while exploring. This is a great way to help balance enemy encounters, preventing you from overly relying on healing items, while also giving you a strong sense of progression when you eventually increase your pack size. That sense of progression is a huge part of Eiyuden. The growth you feel throughout your journey is palpable and in lockstep with the narrative.

But that isn’t all there is to the gameplay. You will also experience incredibly cinematic one-on-one duels, where you will need to interpret what your opponent says in order to choose the appropriate action, as well as the large-scale encounters, which play like a simplified strategy RPG where you will move units along a relatively small grid. Both of these tertiary styles of combat are largely reserved for key moments in the story and are leveraged brilliantly to increase or shrink the scale of these encounters. The duels feel intimate, while the wars feel epic. The duels in particular make excellent use of the camera’s dynamism, giving them a real cinematic flair.

Spritework With A Cinematic Flare

Speaking of the camera, it feels more alive here than in any sprite-based game I’ve ever played. Even in random encounters, the camera chooses the most cinematic angles, often placing certain party members in the foreground. This all serves to enhance the overall aesthetic. Not that the gorgeous sprite work was in need of any enhancements, as Eiyuden’s gorgeously animated sprites stand out among the crowd.

Octopath Traveler popularized the HD-2D style with its keenly nostalgic modernization of SNES-style sprites, but Eiyuden takes its own approach toward HD-2D. The sprites here are big and bold, and they are all painstakingly well-animated. This helps Eiyuden feel very much like a Playstation 1 title with all the limitations of the hardware removed. This is the Platonic ideal of what a spiritual successor should look like.

The staggering number of incidental animations you will encounter boggles the mind. Sprite-based games tend to recycle animations liberally, but Eiyuden isn’t interested in picking its shots: this game is packed with bespoke animations. Every party member you acquire has unique attack animations, and there are well over a hundred of them to recruit. This is an experience that goes above and beyond with its gameplay, visuals, narrative, and so much more.

A Rich World Lined With Novel Experiences

It isn’t just in the graphical department where Rabbit And Bear has gone above and beyond. Eiyuden is a game stuffed with engaging side content. A big part of the game is locating the titular hundred heroes and recruiting them to your cause.

Beyond that, you’ll build out a castle to house your heroes, play a surprisingly compelling card game, play a rebranded version of Beyblade (I swear to god I’m not making this up), race shark-manned sandships, and even compete in an Iron Chef-esque cooking competition. That’s not even close to all the side games, by the way! All of this content is surprisingly compelling and gives the game that much more variety.

While there is a lot to draw curious eyes here, I suspect the element that will keep people engaged will be the strong writing. Above all else, that is where Eiyuden shines. This is an uplifting tale lined with optimism that feels sincere without ever being saccharine. Eiyuden’s script has a great sense of comedic timing that is happy to be silly, yet isn’t afraid to be somber. Those more dour moments work because of the levity that surrounds them.

This quality of writing extends to the characterizations as well. Nowa is courageous and heroic while also being a giant dork. The people around him believe in and support him, and bully him relentlessly. Best of all, their relationship with Nowa doesn’t define them. They aren’t falling over themselves to hoist him on their shoulders. Each character feels distinct, and despite having to share the center stage with a hundred or so characters, they all feel shockingly well-realized.

Eiyuden chose the most difficult path forward. Every element of the game invites comparisons to one of the most celebrated RPGs to ever be released. Yet, in spite of the odds, it manages to meet that challenge head-on. Pound for pound, Eiyuden stacks up to its predecessor pretty favorably.

It provided me with the type of tingling excitement that only the best games have ever managed to instill in me. You know an RPG is special when you feel a sense of loss whenever you aren’t playing it, and I always felt drawn to it while away from my console. Hell, I feel its pull even now.

Murayama and the rest of the fine folks at Rabbit And Bear did it. They’ve created a masterwork. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes may have one foot firmly planted in the past, but make no mistake, its other foot is lunging forward into the future.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

Reviewed on PS5

Pros

• Beautiful implementation of HD-2D
• Fantastic gameplay that builds upon its Suikoden roots
• Well-written, consistently funny, and tremendously uplifting

Cons

• Minor bugs on the PS5 version
• Certain uncompromising elements may put some gamers off

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