Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

I really, really hate giving games a bad rating. I've given thumbs up to games I've basically hated playing if I could look at the experience from an unbiased perspective and see how someone else could love what I didn't. I've definitely enjoyed many games less than Eiyuden Chronicle, but Eiyuden Chronicle has so many unnecessary problems that I feel they need to be pointed out. This game could have been great, but instead it feels rushed and poorly thought through. QUALITY OF LIFE My biggest gripe about this game is that the quality of life aspects are abysmal. I do have to praise the effort put into helping low-experience characters level up quickly, because otherwise getting new characters would feel even more useless than it already often does. There are also lots of ways to farm money, which is nice. Additionally, there are several things I find really annoying that are probably retro throwbacks, but I think if you want more people to enjoy your game you should at least make them optional. One problem that falls into this category is the inventory limit. While it's definitely manageable, you have to leave at least a third of the inventory slots open if you're going to be opening treasure chests. You can't rely on magic for much in this game, so you typically need a lot of healing items (even if you're over-leveled), and what you'll need is rarely consistent. Again, it's not that it isn't manageable, but that it's annoying because you often have to throw things away to make room for a treasure that you probably won't even want. If the game told you what was in a chest before telling you that you don't have room for it, and need to purge something, that would have made a big difference. Instead, it just tells you that you can't fit it, makes you go into the menu system to get rid of something, and then open it to find out you just purged something you'd rather have than another low-tier rune you already have five of. There are lots of things like this that just compound into a lot of frustration. Character movement speed would be reasonable if the environments weren't so enormous. A character movement speed setting would be great, but instead you have to take up a character's only accessory slot or replace a useful support character with Aire who only improves movement speed. (If you got an action speed boost in battle, that would make her feel more justified, but instead I feel like I'm sacrificing better strategy just to take Aire so I can move at a more reasonable speed.) I have about twenty more examples of QoL issues. It's the biggest problem in this game, in my opinion. But, there's limited space here and you probably get the point by now. STORY The story is a fairly generic fight-against-the-empire epic, but the problem is that it's not very well told. It feels well-written, from a dialogue standpoint, but I think this is a compliment owed to the English translator. It's hard to articulate the problems in a categorical way, so I'll give some examples. At one point, you put someone in prison and they escape. This has a major consequence in the story and you can't do anything about it. No one ever notices or mentions the escape happened. You can go to the prison and see for yourself that the prisoner is missing and this prompts nothing from the game. A HUGE moment in the story requires nobody to ever notice the prisoner escaped even though there is basically no way that could happen. This is one of many problems like this. The story often decides things make sense that do not because they have to in order for the plot to function. There are also tons of deus-ex-machina moments that sometimes feel like they shouldn't even be possible. I can't mention specifics without spoiling things, but the gist is that your party will be in a situation where they have no way out and get saved by someone/something that has been established to not be an option moments earlier. MECHANICS AND GAMEPLAY I'd have a lot less to cricitize if this game provided sufficient information about what the player needs to do. The "Card Battle" game (it doesn't have a name) is a really great example of insufficient instructions. The game is actually really fun once you know what you're supposed to do, but Eiyuden doesn't really give you much to go on and assumes a symbol-based help guide will get you the rest of the way. I was able to figure it out, and really enjoyed it, but I shouldn't have had to waste 20 minutes wondering why I kept losing because I wasn't told of the specific mechanics that were required to win. A lot of gameplay is fetch quests, and these get much more annoying than your average fetch quests largely due to inconsistencies. In some cases, if you require the item prior to the request, you need to acquire it again. Sometimes that item can be in your warehouse, but sometimes it needs to be in your stowpack. When the latter, and you need to fetch resources, you have to get all the resources without going back to your HQ or they'll be added to the HQ resources automatically. Normally, you can have resources in the warehouse and they'll still count, but sometimes they don't, and you don't know when this is going to be the case. Significant character recruitment (100+) is necessary in order to finish building your castle/HQ, so you will frequently run into these inconsistencies. You will also find that the game has bugs that never got fixed and some characters become unrecruitable if you so much as set foot in a town before having a specific conversation with a character. I would cut the developers some slack for making these mistakes if they fixed them, but many bugs still exist in this game over a year after its release and they are very well-documented. If the bugs were rare and/or difficult to resolve, that's understandable, but it's not when prevents you from experiencing a part of the game that you paid for. The only saving grace here is that there are too many characters in this game, most of them are not useful, and you'll just collect them and forget them. So, not getting some of them due to bugs is only really a problem because it's 1) annoying/confusing, and 2) the game basically requires you to recruit almost everyone. Battles are also pretty boring. It gets better when your options expand later in the game, but for the most part each party member only has a few options of what they can do and, most of the time, you're not really choosing because what you'll choose depends on accumulated SP. Auto battle, despite looking really detailed and great, doesn't really do what it claims it'll do most of the time (partly due to poor configuration and partly due to bugs). I think games with auto-battle are basically telling you the core gameplay mechanic is tedious and unpleasant, but the battles are fun to watch so it isn't as bad here. It would just be nice if they were actually fun to play and involved even a little strategy. As it stands, you just hit and heal until it ends every single time. It's both easy and tedious. AESTHETICS I don't have room to get into this, but the gist is that there are many different asset types and art styles in this game and it sticks out. The 3D is the worst part of it. The pixel art is excellent, but it feels out of place with the other styles that don't have the same thought and care put into them. Overall, this game seems to know what a great, fun JRPG is supposed to be but then refuses to put in the work to make it one. So, while I wouldn't necessarily recommend against playing Eiyuden Chronicle if this is the sort of game you're looking for, just make sure you're prepared to be regularly annoyed throughout the experience if you decide to play it.