Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

(Note: You can see a video review of this game. Please check it out here!)

Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a Kickstarter-funded Turn-Based JRPG designed to be a spiritual successor to the cult classic Suikoden series, helmed by the director of the first two games in that franchise. However, players needn’t have any experience with those games, nor do they need to have played the predecessor to this game, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, as this game stars a different protagonist with a story starting out elsewhere in the same world.

The story here follows Nowa, a young man who is a new recruit to a paramilitary mercenary organization called The Watch, with this game’s opening following his group as they set out on a joint venture representing their League of Nations alongside a military delegation from the neighboring Galdean Empire led by Seign, an honorable man well aware that those he serves may have less-than-honorable intentions. Their mission is to scout out the location of a local rune barrow and uncover the treasure that may be housed inside. While this cooperative venture is framed as emblematic of a new peace between their two nations, Seign and a few others who are perceptive and experienced in such matters sense that a greater conflict may be on the horizon.

It’s a promising start to a story, but Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes has some pacing issues that intersperse the game’s overarching story with all manner of side-quests, distractions, and busywork that can often mean you’ll spend hours of time between moments when you actually progress that story. This is in addition to other pacing issues I’ll get to in a bit, but we need to start with Hundred Heroes’ key feature, and arguably one of its contributing problems.

Like the Suikoden games that preceded it, one of the signature features of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is your ability to recruit a massive number of characters into your group, with the game boasting 120 recruitable characters, with six of those characters being in your party at any given time, with a few extra capable of being assigned as support characters, with some characters exclusively being support characters. All of this gives players a great deal of freedom to mix-and-match their perfect party combination, but it also causes numerous problems.

Just outfitting that many characters is an ordeal, especially when shop menus only allow players to purchase items one at a time (apart from item shops, which let you buy in bulk, something that just proves the game could let you do this in other shops, but chooses not to). In fact, there are multiple “quality of life” issues in Hundred Heroes, such as the game being very stingy with where it allows players to save (unlike most JRPGs, you cannot save on the world map, only at inns and designated save points in dungeons).

However, getting back to the story, Hundred Heroes runs into the same problem I had with Chrono Cross – many of these characters seem to have little connection to the game’s main plot, or to each other. You’ll recruit some automatically at various points in the story, recruit some via side-quests, and recruit some simply by talking to them. But many will seem to join up with you for little reason other than “I have a feeling I should join you” or “fate told me so”, and while having one or two characters join the main cast for vague or mysterious reasons might simply be indicative of that character’s unique personality, in Hundred Heroes it’s not a rare exception but the norm.

When one of the first characters you recruit in a medieval fantasy story that’s generally aiming to be serious in tone is a Sailor Moon-style fantasy girl claiming to be fighting for “love and justice”, it definitely feels like the game is trying to tell you not to take most of its characters seriously.

At the very least, the game’s battle system is decent enough, combining a character attack timeline, abilities that charge through normal attacks, Chrono Trigger-style combo attacks, a convenient auto-battle system that lets you delegate fights with lesser enemies to pre-arranged battle strategies, and boss battles making use of a “gimmick” system that adds a unique element to these boss fights. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s anything revolutionary, but what’s here is pretty satisfying.

The presentation, also, is mostly quite excellent, though there are some caveats to that, including a major one I’ll get to in a bit. This game uses pixel art 2D characters in a 3D world with some really nice lighting and water effects and “tilt shift” blurring to add dimension, with the end result looking vaguely similar to the “HD-2D” style that Square Enix has made popular on the Nintendo Switch. This makes the game a visual feast for the eyes much of the time.

It’s not bad on the ears, either, with a very nice instrumental soundtrack and mostly good voice acting, particularly for Nowa and Seign, whose personalities really shine through thanks to nicely-nuanced voice acting. And while I do think that some of the game’s characters can be grating (aforementioned “magical girl” Mellore being one of the major ones), for the most part the voicework here is excellent.

However, now I need to dig into the bad stuff here. Let’s start with the visuals – while this game mostly looks great, it has a pretty nasty issue with pop-in, particularly on the world map, with trees popping into existence frequently and not far from your character. There are also moments of noticeable slowdown here and there, though this doesn’t affect the gameplay.

What does affect the gameplay are the loading times – both those involving a loading screen, but especially those that don’t. You’ll see loading screens lasting a few seconds whenever you move from one location to another. These are irritating, but not damning. The real problem here are the extremely frequent times the game just freezes for a moment because it’s loading something. Often when you’re about to start an in-game plot event or even opening a shop menu, your character will stop and stand in place for a few seconds doing nothing before the game continues.

That’s not the worst part, though. The worst part is that this also happens every time you open your menu, and what’s more, it happens every time you shift from one menu screen to another… and you can’t just go to the menu screen you want, you have to shuffle through them until you can get to the one you’re using.

If you’re following, then picture this: you just want to buy the three weakest members of your party a new piece of armor to shore up their defenses. You open the menu to check their stats, but need to wait a few seconds for the menu to open. You scroll over multiple times to get to the equipment menu, each time having a pause of a second or so. You look at the characters you want to outfit, then exit the menu. Talk to the shopkeeper, which freezes the game for a few more seconds. Look over the goods and buy the item you want… going through the buy-confirm text three times, one for each purchase. Thankfully, the shopkeeper lets you equip it to the member you want right there, and asks if you want to sell the armor it’s replacing. You’re not sure, maybe another party member could use that armor… but to check it you’ll have to go back into the equipment menu to compare and contrast with what the other party member is wearing.

Now look at that paragraph above, and picture yourself doing this numerous times throughout the game multiple times over for dozens and dozens of characters. Ugh.

Despite all of this, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes isn’t a terrible game. The presentation is great, the combat is enjoyable, the main story is interesting, and at least some of the characters are really likeable. It’s just unfortunate that this game, and particularly the Nintendo Switch version of the game, makes players trudge through both nasty performance issues and some remarkably boneheaded design choices to enjoy those good parts of the game.

I genuinely hope that Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes gets a sequel that addresses the problems this game has, and spends more time developing its roster of heroes to ensure they’re more closely tied to both each other and the plot, because I feel that if they can get this right they’ve got something very special on their hands here. And even as-is, this is still an enjoyable JRPG, provided you have the patience to put up with its issues. However, if possible I would highly suggest you play this game on another platform, where I can only hope that the game’s performance issues aren’t so prominent.

tl;dr – Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a Turn-Based JRPG created to be a spiritual successor to the Suikoden series, and as such it features a huge roster of 120 recruitable characters. There’s a lot to like here, with good combat, an interesting story, and a great presentation, but the game suffers from massive pacing issues, far too many characters that seem disconnected from the plot, and some really awful performance issues on Nintendo Switch that make even using the game’s menus a horrible slog. I do think the good outweighs the bad here, but this is definitely a far lesser game than it could have been, and it’s one you may be better off getting on another platform.

Grade: B-

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

I’ll cut to the chase here. The Nintendo Switch release of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes doesn’t see any noticeable improvement to framerate or resolution on Nintendo Switch 2. But then, that’s not the question that most people will have about this game on Nintendo’s new hardware, is it?

Okay, let’s look at loading times then. And we’ll start with the usual stuff I check for loading time improvement: How long does it take to load the game to the main menu (or in this case, the company logos just before it), and how long does it take to load into a game. For the former, the Nintendo Switch version took 24 seconds to get to the studio logos when loading up the game. On Nintendo Switch 2, 12. Loading up a game file is comparably quick at 5 seconds, but Nintendo Switch 2 shaves it down to 3.

However, that’s not the main question regarding this game on Nintendo Switch 2 either, is it? No, the main question is in regards to all the little delays when doing simple things like exploring in-game menus, buying things from a shop, and going from one location to another. All of these on their own may just take a few seconds, but over time they add up to such a major annoyance that it was one of my biggest problems of the game.

However, it would be difficult for me to test a bunch of little things and see how long each of them takes, especially when each individual thing is over within a few seconds. So I set up a little test course of sorts here. On both Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, I stood outside an armor shop to start with. Then, upon starting a timer, I tried to do all of the following actions as quickly as I could: enter the shop, buy a helmet from the shopkeeper, exit the shopkeeper menu, open the character menu, change over to the equipment menu, equip the helmet, exit out of the menu, and leave the shop. As soon as I was back outside, I stopped the timer.

The results? On Nintendo Switch, this took me 38 seconds. On Nintendo Switch 2, it took me 25 seconds. It’s… well, honestly not as dramatic an improvement as I could have hoped for. I still noticed pauses here and there, especially when I first tried to speak with the shopkeeper. However, those pauses were now overall shorter. And across the course of the entire 40 hour+ game, even if you’re only saving ten seconds off of every minute of play time, that’s over 6 hours of wasted time you’ll be getting back playing this game on Nintendo Switch 2 instead of Nintendo Switch.

So even though Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes still has issues, and the improvements don’t entirely address the biggest issues, they still make a huge dent in the problems this game had. And this makes it much easier to appreciate the game underneath all of those issues.

tl;dr – Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a Turn-Based JRPG created to be a spiritual successor to the Suikoden series, and as such it features a huge roster of 120 recruitable characters. There’s a lot to like here, with good combat, an interesting story, and a great presentation, but the game suffers from massive pacing issues, far too many characters that seem disconnected from the plot, and some performance issues on Nintendo Switch (much-improved but still present on Nintendo Switch 2). I do think the good outweighs the bad here, but this is definitely a far lesser game than it could have been.

Grade: B

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