Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes review

Exceptional

by MrSpanky

Suikoden 6

Finally the spiritual successor we all waited for. A new classic and a reminder that indie games and passionate developers are the real future of gaming.

PROS:
- Visuals
- Combat
- Characters
- Party formations
- Home castle expansion
- Minigames (cooking!)
- World map
- Music
- Most voiced characters
- Leveling area and challenges

CONS:
- No quest log to track 100+ characters
- Slowdowns and frameskips on menu exit
- Usual Unity engine aliasing issues
- Bugged footsteps sounds
- Unbalanced and challenging encounters on normal difficulty
- Mages and mana only good for healing
- Small backpack on account of high items usage do to difficulty spikes
- Early Proving Grounds dungeon difficulty in combo with limited backpack is not a fun experience
- Default running speed too slow (requires one character with permanently reserved slot)
- Story and dialogues
- Main characters minimal arc development
- Animated scenes slowdowns and crashes
- Endgame movie freeze requires skipping dialogue
- Freezes on a specific savepoint (Old-Town) and randomly on other savepoints
- High resource Combos underwhelming
- Lack of speed-up for minigames or skip button on a 2 out 3 victory or defeat
- Some voiced characters and stereotyped accents
- Some minigames time commitment and rewards not worth the effort
- Castle personal room lacking sleep option
- Misleading trading UI
- Secret bosses bugged at the time of review

Its a visual feast for eyes and ears and since the core loop of the game is combat, party formations and recruiting characters it hits the spot.

Old-school is cool until you realize what makes it great and what was uncool even back in the day. Lack of rune swapping on the fly is annoying.

Random battles can be hit or miss based on unbalanced difficulty and happen on a regular twenty seconds frequency.

A, initially, limited backpack could be fine if the game unbalanced difficulty didnt require you to fill it with healing items. Later on with support companions, teleporting items and abilities it gets better, but reaching that mid-game is sometimes tedious.

Once access to the castle and its expansions are granted the real fun begins and with the unlock of the training area the difficulty spikes can be out-leveled.

The stereotypical story and the average dialogues are not a selling point and although some hoped for a Suikoden 2 quality of writing, we have to with the industry standard.

The pokemon type racing minigame time commitment is too high for the limited rewards and the small fixed number of races usage per leveled pet.

The footstep bug is particularly annoying as you can clearly hear them fade out during loading screen when exiting a town on foot.

Lastly, what was disappointingly missing is a more then deserved farewell and thankyou message to the director Yoshitaka Murayama, who passed away only a few months before release.

In the end, despite the long list of cons, which where listed in hopes that some get acknowledged and fixed, the end result is a magnificient jump into nostalgia and an easy Game Of The Year.