Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising

Genre: Action-Platformer / Action-RPG

Players: 1

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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!

When Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes‘ Kickstarter was seeking contributions for the planned spiritual successor to the cult classic RPG series Suikoden, one of the stretch goals was an additional game that would act as a prologue for that project. The stretch goal was met, and in 2022, two years before Hundred Heroes would see release, we got our hands on Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, a game blending Action-Platformer and RPG elements, released on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

Rising follows CJ, a young adventurer newly-arrived at a mining town seeking treasures said to be found nearby, only to be stifled in her endeavors by the town’s less than welcoming policies towards adventurers, requiring them to run errands for the town to even be permitted to go treasure-hunting nearby.

What this means is fetch quests. Lots and lots of fetch quests. And not only fetch quests, but fetch quests where you’re constantly interrupted by dialogue, with each bit of conversation slowly replaced by the next, tempting players to just skip it entirely to move things along. It’s a shame too, because if they do that, they’ll miss one of the game’s better qualities, as its characters are pretty likeable, and there is indeed some amusing dialogue, you’ll just have to live with it coming to you at a snail’s pace.

The game’s various quests have you going back and forth to different parts of the town as well as the local forest, quarry, and other areas populated by hostile creatures, each of these separated into multiple areas. And every time you change locations, you have to wait through a pretty long loading screen. You can cut down on these loading screens a bit by using fast-travel to go directly where you want in town and in completed dungeons, but this only helps somewhat.

A typical quest in the game has you talking with one person (slow conversation) who will point you to the person or people with the quest, traveling there (loading screen), talking to that person (slow conversation), going to where they direct you to go (usually multiple loading screens), fighting a few enemies and picking up the materials they drop (which you cannot collect until they’ve fully dropped and stopped moving), getting to the specific thing you’ve been sent for (slow fade out then fade back in to a cutscene / slow conversation), then picking up the thing you need, getting a notification that you’ve gotten the thing (which makes you wait for a moment for it to clear), heading back to the quest-giver (multiple loading screens), talking with them (slow conversation), and getting notified that the quest is complete (which makes you wait for a moment for it to clear).

All of that just to get a local resident some wood from the forest or defeat a troublesome monster.

This all might be worth it if the minute-to-minute gameplay was great, but there’s really nothing stand-out here. The main character has a two-hit combo and a clunky dash move, and while you do get additional abilities later when adding allies you can instantly swap between to lengthen that combo and utilize other special moves, the core gameplay never really feels like it improves. And while there are also some RPG elements here too, those aren’t particularly satisfying either… and much the reason is that you spend far less time doing any of this than you do waiting through loading screens, notifications, and slow conversations.

It’s not like this was a low-effort work, either. The presentation here is quite good, with beautifully-designed 2D characters against some nicely-detailed 3D backgrounds with good lighting and some subtle animations too. And this is all backed by a soundtrack that’s mostly very nice. Unfortunately, I don’t think the town theme is one of those nice tunes, and that’s what you’ll be spending much of the game listening to, but there is good music here.

Unfortunately, while the presentation is overall excellent, this game is so frustrating and tedious to play that being pretty isn’t anywhere near enough to save it. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising makes you slog through an absurd amount of filler to get to the meat of the game, and once you get to that meat it’s so scarce and uninteresting that you can’t help but be upset at all the time you wasted getting to it. The Nintendo Switch has plenty of great Action-Platformers, with and without RPG elements, that don’t waste your time, so go play one of those instead of this.

tl;dr – Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is an Action-Platformer with RPG elements with a great presentation, but this game’s pacing is absolutely abysmal, forcing you to sit through countless loading screens, slow-moving conversations, and other speed bumps to the point where the actual gameplay seems scarce, and even when you do finally get to it, it doesn’t seem anywhere near special enough to be worth all the tedium. Skip this one.

Grade: D+

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