Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes review - gotta recruit ‘em all

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes – old school and proud (Picture: 505 Games)

The spiritual successor to Suikoden gained more than $4.5 million in Kickstarter funding but what can this old school JRPG offer non-fans?

For a genre that’s seemed to have one foot in the grave for the last couple of decades, 2024 has turned out to be a banner year for Japanese role-players. What’s especially encouraging is how varied the games have been, in terms of setting and gameplay, from Granblue Fantasy: Relink to Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Persona 3 Reload, and Dragon’s Dogma 2.

Still to come this year, there’s everything from Akira Toriyama’s Sand Land to Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree and a remaster of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – proving that JRPGs aren’t just turn-based games set in an anime styled fantasy world. And yet Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is almost exactly that, except with a major strategy element that identifies it as a spiritual successor to the Suikoden franchise.

It’s tempting to compare it to the recent Unicorn Overlord, but while that was merely influenced by 16-bit classic Ogre Battle, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes skates close to being an unofficial remake of PS1 game Suikoden 2, with a central hero that looks almost identical and a battle system that goes well beyond being a mere homage. But that’s unsurprising given the pitch of the original Kickstarter campaign and the fact that many of Hundred Heroes’ developers also worked on Suikoden.

Fans have been waiting for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes’ release for four years now, but sadly director Yoshitaka Murayama, who had the same role on the first three Suikoden games, passed away in February. That means he never got to see the reaction to Hundred Heroes’ release but we’re certain that its backers won’t be disappointed with the end result. Especially as there’s already been a commitment that it will continue as an ongoing franchise.

Although the retro stylings are very important to Hundred Heroes’ appeal you don’t need to know anything about Suikoden to enjoy it. Things start off relatively normally for a Japanese role-playing game, as you play a new recruit to a mercenary group acting as a paramilitary force for the so-called League Of Nations, who have a tense relationship with a neighbouring empire. The empire isn’t necessarily the main enemy though, as there’s more complex political machinations going on, revolving around artefacts that allow individuals to use powerful magical abilities.

The key gimmick for both Suikoden and Hundred Heroes is that you can recruit over a hundred allies to your cause and, while you can only use six during normal battles, there’s a strategy level element to the game which is unlike any other similar title. You’re not just recruiting a handful of people to your party but trying to unite whole countries, interacting with individuals but at times directing entire armies, in mini-games that work like a simplified Fire Emblem or Advance Wars.

At the other ends of the scale, you can also end up overseeing duels between feuding characters, although these rely on such a large random element that it never feels like you’re having enough influence on proceedings. More satisfying is upgrading your home base, whose expansion opens up new options, weapons, and several otherwise unrecruitable characters.

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