As a backer and a big fan of the Suikoden games I was super excited for this. In many ways it feels straight from the early Suikoden days of 1 and 2 which I found to be good and maybe not so great. There were much QoL and felt like of the era(which I normally love) but it felt odd in places. I didn't mind the localization though at times the dialogue would be a bit cringe but nothing on a Working Designs level.

As for my biggest complaint about the game are the bugs, while most I got through okay there was a soft lock I encountered literally 3 hours before the ending and had to go back to a save hours before it. It pulled me out of the game as by this point the story finally got me. I struggled at times to get into the story and only about half way did it start to get a bit interesting.

Still I was able to enjoy the game despite its flaws and the amount of love that went into this is felt. If there's one thing it really did for me was want to go back and replay the Suikoden games.

Molto bello graficamente ma a normale è davvero TROOOOOOPPO facile, così tanto che mi stavo proprio annoiando. Giusto il primo boss è stato un minimo stimolante, mentre tutti gli altri incontri li vincevo sì e no con uno o due colpi.
Avrei potuto avviare una seconda run a difficile visto che ero comunque all'inizio, se solo non fosse che nel gioco non si può skippare nemmeno UN SINGOLO DIALOGO.
Visto che le cose stanno così credo che lo riprenderò fra un bel po' di tempo, anche se mi stava intrigando lo stile e la storia.

My biggest disappointment of 2024. I was only looking for a good story and a modern jrpg. This game failed me in both regards.

I get that they tried to appeal to the older audience but this isn't 1991, there's no need for having to walk around town for 10 minutes to get to a save point. Random battles are also completely dated if done like this. Doing puzzles is a complete nightmare because you're constantly getting battles pop left right and center plus finishing those battles takes forever even on auto.

Menus are slow, combat is terrible (also slow and with no option to speed up), magic is complete garbage...

The story is just... There for the sake of being there? It takes FOREVER to start and even when it does the game refuses to make any character interaction interesting from the getgo. Nowa spends 5 minutes with this guy and suddenly they are besto friendo's!

As I said HUGE disappointment. I hope the sequel is at least decent.

De uns anos para cá, tenho me distanciado bastante de JRPGs, apesar de ser um gênero que amo de coração. Eles obviamente não foram o primeiro gênero que joguei em minha vida de gamer. Porém, quando era criança, lembro muito de jogar diversos jogos do gênero no meu PS1, a grande maioria totalmente em japonês. Então, tenho um certo amor pelo gênero. Recentemente, finalizei o Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes através do Game Pass. Acho que, de maneira geral, tudo que me faz lembrar daquela época de ouro de JRPGs do PS1, eu senti jogando esse game. Certamente, de maneira geral, o jogo é tudo o que eu queria. Dito isso, se você quer reviver essa sensação, este jogo certamente é para você. Se você ama JRPGs da era de ouro dos anos 90, este é para você. Se você ama pixel art incrível, uma história épica e um mundo em que você pode se envolver profundamente, dê uma chance a esse game. Certamente é um jogaço e que vale muito a pena ser jogado. A única razão pela qual não dou uma nota 10 são os bugs. Mas, fora isso, é uma das melhores experiências de JRPG da atualidade.

The writing is so bad, I couldn't continue playing (No, it's not about the localization). Nowa and Seign meeting for the first time and spending one mission together and suddenly they're best friends is just one example.

The game feels so half-baked the sprites don't even have a proper running animation during cutscenes.

I respect and appreciate the devs for making this game and I think Suikoden 2 is one of the best RPGs in the 90s, but imho this isn't a worthy successor to Suikoden.

Hopefully the sequel they're making is much better than this one and I'm still willing to give the sequel a chance.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes asks the important question, "What if you had an RPG with 120 party members", and answers that question to my knowledge the best that it could have given that challenging question. However, I still ask, was it worth it?

While the game boasts a large cast of mostly likeable characters where many of which end up serving a sizeable role in the story, most of these characters end up being one-dimensional save for a handful. As there is not enough time for them to change. Furthermore, most of these characters would have simply been put into NPC roles in a normal RPG if not for the fact that they now are NPCs... but also get to be in your party in a limited fashion. Still, it manages this fairly well in balancing them through having six main party slots, a support slot to allow non-combatant characters to join the party, as well as attendant slots if you don't want a plot relevant character to be in your primary party but still need to keep them around for the story. This all comes together giving a possible order of 10 party members which helps a lot in giving you space to experiment with them, and also to give them relevant party space compared to some other RPGs that attempted really large party sizes in that most of them were not able to give as much screen time and relevance as this game does even with significantly smaller casts. There are some creative ways to force the player to experiment and also to use more characters than a simple 6 from start to finish as well, which helps a lot in making you care about more than just your initial six. With so many to choose from, each player will settle into who they prefer.

The characters also come into the base building, which can be enjoyable apart from how constricting it actually is compared to how it originally appears, as all future upgrade materials are locked behind locations that you only get after completing specific chapters. Carefully keeping players "balanced" to be at about the same level for base building until they can advance the story in order to unlock more materials to expand.

This is where the major problems come in however. Pacing is all over the place, as key parts of an RPG are locked behind getting characters into your party and recruiting them to unlock things at your base of operation. Fast travel for one, is something locked at the 15 hour mark for when you unlock a character that gives you this ability, which means if you do a lot of side content before getting her, you'll be doing a ridiculous amount of backtracking, which the game points out in its story as a problem that you have to solve with this character. At which point... Why couldn't you have unlocked them much sooner? There are many aspects of the game that feel tedious and time-wasting in the same way, like the beigoma minigame that is a ripoff and worse version of Beyblade (There were WAY BETTER Beyblade games on the Gamecube and they didn't even bother to learn why those games were decent before implementing this half-assed minigame that is required to be completed for the true ending). Beigoma are rare items dropped by enemies that are required for the minigame, but you cannot collect them even from enemies that would normally drop them until you reach a certain chapter and can unlock the minigame with the two party members associated with it, meaning you have to then backtrack to get the beigomas you didn't originally get because it wasn't possible to get them. The very boring cooking minigame (That is required to do for the true ending), has long load-screens and is mostly RNG apart from selecting meals that are bland in order to appease the most characters, with a 15 minute timer you have to wait between matches before you can continue the sidequest. Star items, of which some are required to fully experience some minigames are items that randomly can spawn in shops and if played the way the game is meant to be played, are a random chance you check back on every 30 minutes (Unless you savescum which is clearly not intentional). Not to mention the atrocious load times on Switch and Playstation 4 which cause you to waste even more time as most stores require a long loading screen, most minigames require a long loading screen, fast traveling requires a long loading screen, etc. And so much more random things to get in the way of your progress and cause tedium and pointless timewasting.

Speaking of the minigames and all the sidecontent itself... It is pretty poor. The best of the games, the card game and the theater are completely optional, with the card game not even being required to be played any more than the tutorial match since unlocking the related character is done through collecting 120 cards, which is done through purchasing card packs. There is no traveling to fight card opponents, they are all your characters in the base in a drab and boring menu, and you can easily just buy as many card packs as you want to win against all of them for pitifully weak rewards that range from potions to the equivalent of phoenix downs. So there is absolutely zero incentive to play the minigame beyond it being the funner one of the lot. The theater is surprisingly dense, with a ridiculous amount of effort put into it with every character being voiced for every theater role in a goofy way that allows you to see their characters shine which makes it the most entertaining minigame in the post game... And for what? You have to earn the theater scripts by doing the tedious savescumming at shops, and you don't earn anything meaningful by doing all the plays with S-ranks. Then, that leaves the egg-racing which is one of the worst of the breeding racing minigames in RPGs I have seen, with a requirement for you to have every egg race 6 times in races that last for 2 minutes (With long load times before start and finish) to get the option to feed them, and only after they are done being fed from 6 races, can you breed them... With another egg that also did 6 races. With S-rank eggs basically being required to get the actually good items you can't just farm, that are still not that significantly good or worth it for hours of wasted time on an unfun uninteractive horse-racing minigame. What about beigoma? The game that is pointless to do early on because all your combatants will have rank 2 beigoma, which decimate your starting beigoma no matter what strategy you put into it since the game is mostly just about stats and type-match ups vs. any player input. Making it questionable why they even bother letting you do it without letting you farm beigoma ahead of time. Or how to advance the beigoma storyline you need to win matches against worthless jobbers in every city before the story beigoma characters will even give you a chance to stretch it out as much as possible (Which I remind you, is required for the true ending). What about the cooking minigame? Which is just you picking the same two safe meal options with one that you think your specific contestants will like (They probably won't even like it even if you pick something that tastes similar to their favorite foods), and then mashing the X or A button for a minute and... That's it. The main challenge comes from the RNG of which of your characters get chosen as judges. Do it 15 times while having 15 minute increments between each of them for more pointless time wasting (Which is required for the true ending). These things shouldn't have been mandatory, and more than that, more time and effort should have been put into all of them if they were going to make it into the game period. So much effort was put into the theater which I love, which could have just been put into the other minigames to make them better and more enjoyable instead of slogs.

Speaking of slogs, the gameplay: While I did enjoy the overall gameplay of the game, there was much to be left desired. Every character is viable, but certainly some will be a lot better than others, especially at different points of the game. Most characters are nearly identical apart from having maybe one unique skill on each character (If they're lucky), and none if they're unlucky. The most blessed ones have two or more unique skills, because SP is the name of the game up until the end game. Magic is nearly worthless until the end game with all magic doing pitiful damage and only being useful for healing. Until the end game where it becomes an unstoppable and overpowered force, meaning all your magic characters early on are weak, and endgame are your most busted. SP then is the game changer, where characters that have good SP skills are your champs, with the major thing to focus on being extremely powerful hero combos depending on team comp, and ignoring the ones that are useless since they do just about as much damage as a regular attack, same as early game magic. With so many characters and selecting their actions before each turn, there is some strategy and some fun ways to manipulate the system, but its still too slow. They did some smart techniques to make combat go faster, and it still isn't enough, as you'll want to be using the auto-battle through most of the game, which is not a good sign. Some of the boss fights are designed horrendously, with the worst ones at the start of the game, with one where the HP balancing felt off with one character having as much HP as mid game bosses in the second major boss fight, and the other having a complete RNG left or right choice that if you're unlucky means you have a very long drawn out fight. I really want to love the battle system, but it's poorly implemented even though it had good ideas for how to deal with having so many party members.

The game is also very buggy as of me writing. I had experienced over 20 crashes costing me progress, with 2 soft-locks on my PS4 version. With the auto-save being so slow with periods where it wouldn't autosave for 3 hours at a time, this was completely unacceptable.

Then... What's the point? I've been completely negative in this review until now, so why did I bother finishing this game? Well, primarily the presentation. The voice acting of every single character, the theater, the visuals, the animations (Albeit you can clearly see when they ran out of time with some cut scenes where the characters don't have running animations), and heart of this game kept me going. Its very pleasant to look at, to hear, and to experience in that way, and if not for that I would have stopped playing long ago. The duels while suffering the same problems as all the other minigames give cool one on one spectacle fights, same with the war scenarios which feel like you are leading armies even if it was rather slow and pretty thoughtless. As well, the story was alright.

The story is pretty generic, but with nice twists and turns, some nice political drama, and good character moments. I particularly enjoyed Perrielle through the story, and how each leader of the League of Nations were distinct in their failure against the fascistic Aldric who was a fun campy villain. My major complaint would just be the lack of commentary on some issues, while there is mention of racism against the animal folk of the game, its not really felt as much as it should be and could have been pushed more along with asking questions about the Alliance and Guardians instead of them being purely "good guys". Feels a bit too clean when we had drama of Seign overcoming his allegiances. As well... The end game feels a bit rushed, with a missing prince plotline that is mentioned but never elaborated on or seen beyond just being told it was done off screen. Similarly, at the start of the game when a villain has someone in their grasp they just let them go without question? You can feel where they ran out of time.

So, we return to that original question. "What if we had an RPG with 120 party members?" Well, the real answer is, we'd get an RPG where characters fight for screen time, at least half if not more will be required to dip out of the story and have no presence to avoid bloating, and we'll end up with a story where not very much of consequence can happen because that'd remove characters from that big 120 character selling point on the back of the box. I just don't think its worth it in the end, even if Eiyuden Chronicle did it in probably the best hypothetical way I could think of. This game isn't that bad, but the tedium and chore it is to play certainly drags it down a lot, especially with its technical problems. There is heart here, and I want to like it a lot more, but I can't bring myself to. I'm curious to see how the Suikoden series matches to this game, so I'll likely be looking at those games after playing this. All in all, a very low end 3/5.

Esse é um relato esquisito, mas por qual razão esquisito? Porque esse jogo não é bom. Ponto. Dito isso, passei os últimos dias completamente preso nele e jogando sem parar em cada pedaço disponível do dia.

Quais razões tornam ele ruim?
- Batalhas aleatórias, sim muitas e muitas batalhas aleatórias tornando-se uma provável causa de aneurisma em cenários de puzzle.
- Movimentação lenta, os personagens se movem no cenário como se não tivessem uma preocupação na vida.
- Ritmo lento da história, é lento até pra um JRPG.
- História bobinha, apesar de acontecimentos mais "maduros", é sem pé nem cabeça e não chega em canto nenhum.
- Não é um jogo polido e aqui eu não me refiro a bugs de lançamento (que infelizmente são comuns), as mecânicas simplesmente não foram trabalhadas adequadamente. Minigames extensos e chatos demais, que simplesmente não funcionam direito e claramente não tiveram o tempo devido na produção

Mas, apesar disso tudo, foram horas e horas de diversão. Tal qual um amigo meio bobinho e chato, mas que no fundo no fundo é legal e o legal desse jogos são duas mecânicas: recrutar personagens e expandir seu castelo. No fim, não recomendo pra ninguém, nem mesmo um fã inveterado de JRPG, mas eu não posso negar que jogarei a sequência e que me diverti bastante com esse daqui. Ah, faltou apontar que a batalha final é bastante decepcionante, mas o que é um pé sujo de lama para quem já caiu de cara nela?

I am a big fan of Suikoden 3 and 5, those being the only I have played, so I was excited for this and the 1 and 2 remaster. After having played 12 hours of the game I can say that it is pretty good. But ultimately I decided not to continue. Here are my thoughts and reasons.
Starting with the graphics, which is something I don't typically mention in reviews, the art seems all over the place. Some things are pixelized and some are not and that looks very out of place to me. The voice acting isn't as anime as some jrpgs (I'm looking at you xenoblade) but it's not great either. Some of the dialogue and certain voice actors are good and got me to laugh.

The combat is...well, there is an auto-battle button and it does a lot of heavy lifting. In an area, once you get appropriately leveled and know what to expect from certain enemies you just turn that bad boy on. There are random encounters, which in some complicated maps makes exploring feel more punishing than rewarding. For example there is a puzzle trial area that is pretty big and there still random encounters. Resources can be VERY precious because of this. The combat is very basic though. What I really dislike is that you need to choose everybody's action before any actions can take place. This causes some irritating situations like, one character misses an attack, but your follow up character is attacking another enemy cuz you expected the previous enemy to already be dead. Or, you want to resurrect a character and then heal that character however you literally cannot do that because you cannot select to heal a member that is KOd.

Some boss fights have gimmicks. They are called gimmicks... The game calls them gimmicks. You select an action prompt that says "gimmick"... I am not shitting you. Idk how interesting they get later in the game but the two that I did were just ok. For instance, there is a lever and if the lever ends on your side of the battlefield rocks will drop on you.
Another annoyance I had with the gameplay is that there is a turn order outline at the top of the screen (I like that) but the order in which you select actions is based on the order of your party. What often happened to me was my big bruiser was in the front line so I picked his action 2nd but in the actual turn order his action goes last. There is no way to get around this. This is just an artificial "complexity" of the battle system. In most fights this doesn't matter so it is a trivial matter.

NOW. Let's get to my favorite part about games. Story, World, and characters. The story theoretically is something I should enjoy. Nations, politics, war, backstabbing. There are a few reasons I don't enjoy it. First, it's the typical trope that everybody for some reason is appointing you- an early twenties newbie- with all the responsibilities of the world. Everybody says your capable and you've got talent but... based on what? What did my character do to give you this impression. Second, why is everybody so god dam lighthearted? We are at war people! Villages have burned, cities taken over. Presumably many people have died. Yet, here we are as jolly as can be. It seems very low stakes for a story about a war to maintain your freedom against an empire. Third, there is no story character I really like besides Ymir but he is not a driver of story. Just a guy who will be around to snark. Also, the reason I like him is because he patronizes me for being "the wonder boy" or something like that.

So I decided to drop it. Kinda bummed, but hey. Now I can spend time doing something else.

The translation is questionable for sure. It certainly would be nice to have a more literal translation as the creators intended.

There are also other issues I have with the game as well such as some of the mini games being a bit long for their own good. Being mini games its easier to over look this though.

That being said, I can't recall a game I've played recently that invoked such a nostalgic feeling when playing it. If you didn't tell me the title of the game, I would tell you for sure this was a Suikoden game. As was intended. But I didn't think it would do it so well.

I would strongly recommend this to anyone that loves the Suikoden series. It is absolutely worth your time!