Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review (Switch eShop)

The PS1 played host to a staggering number of memorable and influential RPGs, one of which was Konami’s Suikoden. After that strong debut came a handful of sequels that eventually puttered out during the sixth generation of consoles, and Konami has virtually abandoned the series since. Not ones to be stifled, some key members of the Suikoden crew eventually left Konami and founded a new team called Rabbit & Bear, which started a successful crowdfunding campaign for this spiritual successor called Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. After a four-year development cycle, Eiyuden Chronicle is finally in our hands and while it has its share of issues, this is overall a deeply enjoyable and nostalgic JRPG that we’re sure is going to get a lot of love.

The story is set in the fictional land of Allraan and begins by focusing on the rising tensions between the powerful imperial country of Galdea and a neighboring province called the League of Nations. Though there are technically three protagonists to this narrative, your main character to begin with is Nowa, a chipper young man from a quiet border village who joins a small peacekeeping military unit for the League of Nations. Nowa and his band go about their business quelling bandit raids and helping people to the best of their ability, but soon find themselves caught in the middle of much larger political tension that eventually gives way to war between the Empire and the League. To reclaim his homeland and avenge his losses, Nowa thus sets out to build a resistance and defeat the Galdeans.

Though it feels like the pacing of the narrative can move in fits and starts in a lot of places, we admire the scope of the story here. Any way you cut it, properly balancing over a hundred unique characters and detailing all the various international conflicts affecting them is a tough ask for any writing team, and whatever depth is lost in the overarching plot is found in the individual characterization. Though not every member of the titular hundred heroes is equally fleshed out, there’s nonetheless a ‘core’ cast here that develops naturally as they experience the war together and grow closer because of it. It’s a solid story all around, then, if one that feels unwieldy every so often.

Gameplay follows the traditional JRPG template of visiting towns, clearing out monsters in dungeons, and slowly exploring a grand world full of adventure and potential. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but the gameplay loop is executed well here, buoyed by the ongoing character recruitment system. As flagged in the title, there are over a hundred party members you can persuade to your cause, and while not all can be brought into battle, they add a lot of variety to the adventure.

Some party members are the reward offered at the end of their own meaningful sidequests, such as an early recruit who we helped through a dungeon in a brief subplot so, together, we could defeat the monster at the end, while others will join simply by triggering a brief cutscene after walking by them. Admittedly, those that fall into this latter group feel a bit like leftovers from cut content, but we nonetheless appreciated the relatively brisk pace at which you’re meeting and engaging with this colorful cast. Though some of the characters are a little shallow and defined only by their gimmick, each one is memorable and adds something worthwhile to the growing ragtag bunch. Our favorite recruit was a sweet, gentle healer you meet relatively early who flies into an unfettered rage at the slightest provocation.

As you crawl through the endless dungeons scattered throughout the land, you’ll often get pulled into random battles which are the most obvious homage to Suikoden. Here, you command a team of up to six characters, three in the front and three in the back, in turn-based combat. A timeline at the top of the screen will always show you the order in which enemies and allies will act, and while you can’t mess around with this like you could in something like Grandia or Octopath Traveler, it lets you prioritize enemies during battle.

Something we particularly enjoyed is the boss fights, which often feature a “Gimmick” that changes how you approach them. Not only are these battles a good test of your team-building capabilities, but these Gimmicks can add a wholly unique dimension and an almost puzzle-like element. One boss has a series of rock walls that targeted characters can hide behind while another sees your foe operating a machine that does big damage but can be turned against them if you engage with it at the right time.

At key boss fights in the story, you also engage in dramatic one-on-one duels which operate on an almost rock-paper-scissors-esque system. Here, you have to carefully plan when to press the offensive on your opponent and when to counter an impending strike, all in the hopes of building up to a big ‘Break’ attack to shatter their guard and drain their health bar. These duels often feel just as tense as the story paints them to be, and we particularly appreciated how they also act as a sort of dialogue-filled cutscene taking place between the dueling characters.

Outside the typical JRPG gameplay loop, there are also a few other mechanics worth mentioning. At major story points you’ll sometimes find yourself pulled into a large-scale battle in War Mode, which plays out like a mini-Advance Wars-style fight where party members each command their own platoons that you order around on a small grid. Routing foes this way can be fun, but the battles are too small for deep strategizing, and it can get a little dull watching all the combat animations play out while you twiddle your thumbs and wait for the game to give you back control.

Additionally, there’s some town-building gameplay that acts as an extended sidequest incentivizing you to routinely return to base. Here, you can invest resources and assign new recruits to build up various parts of the village, granting some gameplay benefits while also acting as a fun time sink as you decide on how to decorate the town. It’s clearly not the main focus of the adventure, but we appreciated having a ‘home’ to return to after completing another quest, and it’s rewarding to see it grow and flourish over time.

Eiyuden Chronicle was obviously created as a loving homage to JRPGs of yesteryear, but sometimes it feels like it adheres just a little too much to some of the more tedious and archaic elements of the genre. One early quest sees a character asking you to travel to a specific dungeon to retrieve three boar skins before he’ll join your crew. Of course, this dungeon is all the way on the other side of the map and you can’t fast travel to it, so you have to walk all the way there and then literally run around in circles once inside, hoping that the next random encounter will feature the required enemy. What should be a five-minute errand at most thus becomes a 15-to-20-minute exercise in tedium, and there are a lot of points where the game drags things out like this without justifying the added length.

So, from a purely design and mechanical perspective, Eiyuden Chronicle is a pretty decent JRPG, but one place in which the Switch version drops the ball pretty hard is performance. Unfortunately, this game simply doesn’t run well on the Switch, and you’re reminded of this almost constantly throughout the adventure. Though the frame rate targets 30fps, the only time you’ll actually see it anywhere near that is when you’re in a really small and static area, like an item shop. Everywhere else, the frame rate will often take enormous dives into much choppier territory, and it’s especially noticeable in most dungeons and all of the overworld.

We wish frame drops were the extent of the technical issues, but there’s unfortunately more to cover here; the load times are uncomfortably long and there are loads everywhere as you progress. For example, you’ll be hit with a loading screen of anywhere from four to seven (!!!) seconds every time a random encounter triggers, and you’ll have to sit through another one just as soon as the fight is over. Sometimes the fight itself is shorter than the load times.

This problem with loading even extends to aspects you wouldn’t expect it to, such as the menus. Every time you open the main menu to tinker with your inventory or party setup, you have to sit through a short, but noticeable load for literally each individual tab on the menu and you’ll have to endure those little loads anew every time you close and reopen the menu screen to do something else. Over the course of 50-or-so hours, that could add literal hours to your play time.

The technical issues don’t stop there, either, as there are also occasional soft locks which force you to close the game, praying that there was a somewhat recent autosave. We encountered a particularly egregious example of this where the game got stuck in a loop on a loading screen after completing a nearly 40-minute gauntlet of skirmishes, boss battles, and plot-heavy cutscenes with not a single save crystal in sight. Of course, upon reloading, we discovered that the game’s last autosave was only just before all this kicked off.

Though we feel it would be hyperbolic to call Eiyuden Chronicle a technical disaster on the Switch, its performance is certainly not good, and we’re hoping that the team is working on patches to bring it up to an acceptable level. None of the issues here (with perhaps the exception of the soft locks) are outright game-breaking, but they all combine to make for something that feels like a distinctly substandard experience on Switch. Despite all the issues, we’d say that Eiyuden Chronicle is still well worth your time if you’re a JRPG fan, but we’d encourage you at minimum to wait a bit past launch to see if these problems get cleared out. They could be worse, sure, but they could also be a lot better, and it’s rather disappointing to see an otherwise wonderful game released in such a state.

Performance woes aside, Eiyuden Chronicle otherwise features excellent presentation. The visuals call to mind the art styles of other modern retro RPGs such as Octopath Traveler II and Star Ocean: Second Story R, meshing highly detailed 2D sprites with 3D environments and models. Though the 3D stuff feels a little too blocky and murky, the high-quality spritework helps to distract from this, overall leaving a good impression.

The soundtrack is similarly pleasing, featuring a satisfying array of music that adequately captures the scope of the adventure while also leaving plenty of room for its quieter moments. Whether you’re hearing the rousing track that first plays when you enter the overworld or the woodwinds-laced music of entering another village, it feels like the music really adds that needed extra layer for enhancing immersion. Overall, it’s a very relaxing collection of tunes, but it fits the tone of the narrative well for the most part.