The late one Suikoden Creator Yoshitaka Murayama brought the crew back together for one last job in 2020: A crowdfunding campaign for a spiritual successor to the popular Japanese RPG series raised $4.5 million, the third-most of any gaming Kickstarter campaign of all time. Four years later, the team at Rabbit and Bear Studios has delivered Eiyuden Chronicle: One Hundred Heroesa good-looking, slightly flawed attempt to recapture the magic of sitting transfixed in front of a ’90s CRT while slogging through turn-based battles, serpentine dungeons and familiar fantasy arcs.
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I invested about 7 hours Eiyuden Chronicle on the PlayStation 5, where the vibrant retro graphics and calming rhythms of PS1-era RPGs are starting to win me over, despite the absolutely laborious entry. You play as Nowa, a young mercenary from a rural farming village whose penchant for doing the right thing ends up entangling him in a geopolitical conflict with an evil empire. He bears an unmistakable resemblance to Tir McDohl from Suikoden 1 And 2as does much of the rest of the world.
Remasters and sequels
While Murayama sadly passed away in February due to health complications, the rest of the Rabbit and Bear Studios team announced There are plans to move forward with a sequel To Eiyuden Chronicle. Konami is also working on its own remasters of Suikoden 1 And 2although we haven’t received any updates on the collection’s release date since then it was delayed last year.
I haven’t played enough to say definitively if Eiyuden Chronicle feels like a worthy successor to those classics, or a hollow facsimile born of an incomplete reunion tour struggling to turn back time. What I can say is that it nails the basics and charm in a way that many other contemporary copycat attempts cannot. The combat is straightforward but sharp, the environments are bright and colorful, and the pixel art contrasts sharply with the 3D backgrounds. Objective markers and autosaves aside, it’s incredibly dated in both form and content.
The good, the boring, the broken
How Suikoden Play, explore cities and chat with random NPCs to recruit dozens of characters to fight alongside you in turn-based battles. Fighters’ stats and abilities are expanded through equipment and runes, but battles are mostly about managing damage dealt, healing, and deciding when to use special abilities and collective attacks. Even when fighting your way through standard random encounters, it’s still incredibly satisfying to see each of the six warriors you’ve chosen fight their way through mob after mob, their experience point meters filling up a little more after each victory.
And while the story so far is a tired parade of clichés, some of the writing and character performances are surprisingly expressive. Nobody talks too much, and when they do, it’s rarely exaggerated or over-explained, even if what’s being said sounds silly, sometimes even intentionally. It’s just enough of an inkling of my personality to help me bond with my growing group of medieval nerds, goofballs, and bullies.
Read more: Why you should play Suikoden IIone of the best role-playing games of all time
My moment-to-moment experience on the PS5 was pretty good. Aside from some occasionally sticky controls, I didn’t notice any major bugs or performance drops, although it’s still annoying that there are any loading screens at all. These seem to be particularly bad in the Switch version of Eiyuden Chronicle. Although I haven’t tried it there yet, early reviews indicate a lot of frame rate drops (the game initially only targets 30 fps), laggy menus and extra long loading screens.
Some players have encountered nagging bugs, like before My city Editor Jason Schreier. A broken cooking mini-game, a messed up random encounter rate, and an un-recruitable character These are just some of the problems he encountered on PC. A representative for the game told me that some of this will be fixed in a day-one patch, including the character recruitment issue that prevents players from learning the true ending. However, there doesn’t seem to be a complete roadmap for upcoming fixes yet.
I’m looking forward to delving deeper into the subject Eiyuden Chronicle, collect more characters and see if it has any tricks up its sleeve to help it get out of the shadow of the creative team’s original RPG masterpieces. For now, it’s great comfort food, like playing a lost PS1 classic that just got a fan translation for the first time. And for a lifelong fan of these gems, that’s enough.
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