I really, really wanted to like this, as someone who was reasonably excited for the Hundred Heroes Kickstarter. But there is barely anything good to say about Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising.
Let's start with positives: the visuals are quite nice, I thought the character writing and characters themselves were moderately good, and there are a couple parts more than 5 hours into the game where I vaguely had a bit of fun once the game actually gives you some mechanical freedom. And on the most basic level, it runs well enough, is mostly functional, and is not glitchy.
...That's about it.
The game is overstuffed with dialogue first and foremost. It almost feels like they wanted to make a prelude visual novel rather than a sidescrolling adventure, and despite the localization adding some much needed flavor, it unfortunately can't save the fact that a lot of the text is spent painfully and needlessly dragging out the basic exchange of information. I started reading every possible text box, but 4 hours in I just had to start skipping stuff that wasn't the main story because they would continuously drag out simple requests or single points of conversation for 3-4+ text boxes.
This abundance of text is especially annoying in regards to fetch quests, which you will be doing 75% of the time you are playing this game. Dear lord there are SO MANY FETCH QUESTS. Are there story events currently happening? The game has now decided to make you completely stop any momentum or intrigue only to send you back to the village for some old guy to tell you his whole life story ending with "get me some wood from the forest". Content! A couple times early on, you will literally do one story relevant thing, get sent to the village for a couple sidequests, go back to do one more thing, and have the exact same thing happen again. It is incredibly painfully bad. To be fair, the sidequests do effect the building of your hub town and that stuff is at least kind of aesthetically cool and gives you a nice pop whenever you upgrade or build a facility, but again, it mostly exists in the form of farming resources for single step sidequests and nothing deeper than that.
This strange pace negatively effects the story on its own, but on top of that Rising is more or less a bog standard adventure to introduce you to the world and characters, some of whom don't even feel like they needed to show up for any reason aside from blatant fanservice intros for Hundred Heroes. There is some lingering intrigue there, but I was not chomping at the bit to get to the 2024 game any more than when I started.
The gameplay itself is incredibly simple and takes such a large portion of the game's full runtime to give you any interesting gameplay options it's kinda insane. It's a basic action platformer, with the gimmick being that you have a party member on each face button, and by timing your character switching you can reduce the downtime between combos. Without a party, the game is exceedingly simple and boring with short combos and standard traversal, and it takes multiple hours to get your first party member and almost half the game to get your second. Just so incredibly strange. Encounter design is also either braindead simple or "we dropped 10 enemies onscreen attacking at once" with no inbetween. Level design is near nonexistent, with vague hints of search-action influence... but really it's just gated linear content. lol
I can't think of much to say about the soundtrack except it exists. Nothing about it stood out as good or bad.
It feels like an exaggeration to say that this game is one of the worst games I've played this year, but I was just so incredibly bored throughout the thing that it's not much of a contest.
Let's start with positives: the visuals are quite nice, I thought the character writing and characters themselves were moderately good, and there are a couple parts more than 5 hours into the game where I vaguely had a bit of fun once the game actually gives you some mechanical freedom. And on the most basic level, it runs well enough, is mostly functional, and is not glitchy.
...That's about it.
The game is overstuffed with dialogue first and foremost. It almost feels like they wanted to make a prelude visual novel rather than a sidescrolling adventure, and despite the localization adding some much needed flavor, it unfortunately can't save the fact that a lot of the text is spent painfully and needlessly dragging out the basic exchange of information. I started reading every possible text box, but 4 hours in I just had to start skipping stuff that wasn't the main story because they would continuously drag out simple requests or single points of conversation for 3-4+ text boxes.
This abundance of text is especially annoying in regards to fetch quests, which you will be doing 75% of the time you are playing this game. Dear lord there are SO MANY FETCH QUESTS. Are there story events currently happening? The game has now decided to make you completely stop any momentum or intrigue only to send you back to the village for some old guy to tell you his whole life story ending with "get me some wood from the forest". Content! A couple times early on, you will literally do one story relevant thing, get sent to the village for a couple sidequests, go back to do one more thing, and have the exact same thing happen again. It is incredibly painfully bad. To be fair, the sidequests do effect the building of your hub town and that stuff is at least kind of aesthetically cool and gives you a nice pop whenever you upgrade or build a facility, but again, it mostly exists in the form of farming resources for single step sidequests and nothing deeper than that.
This strange pace negatively effects the story on its own, but on top of that Rising is more or less a bog standard adventure to introduce you to the world and characters, some of whom don't even feel like they needed to show up for any reason aside from blatant fanservice intros for Hundred Heroes. There is some lingering intrigue there, but I was not chomping at the bit to get to the 2024 game any more than when I started.
The gameplay itself is incredibly simple and takes such a large portion of the game's full runtime to give you any interesting gameplay options it's kinda insane. It's a basic action platformer, with the gimmick being that you have a party member on each face button, and by timing your character switching you can reduce the downtime between combos. Without a party, the game is exceedingly simple and boring with short combos and standard traversal, and it takes multiple hours to get your first party member and almost half the game to get your second. Just so incredibly strange. Encounter design is also either braindead simple or "we dropped 10 enemies onscreen attacking at once" with no inbetween. Level design is near nonexistent, with vague hints of search-action influence... but really it's just gated linear content. lol
I can't think of much to say about the soundtrack except it exists. Nothing about it stood out as good or bad.
It feels like an exaggeration to say that this game is one of the worst games I've played this year, but I was just so incredibly bored throughout the thing that it's not much of a contest.