Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes review: retro RPG falls short

Not everyone is fit for battle, but they can be used as support characters with special abilities. The maid Yulin doubles experience gained when in the party while the butler Janquis doubles money earned at the end of battle. Since players can only carry one support character at a time, they’re required to thoughtfully consider what they want to prioritize in their party setup.

Other non-battle characters can be recruited to help out with Nowa’s headquarters, such as growing crops. The sheer variety of character types is reflected as they all hang around HQ, slowly contributing to the resistance force, adding a layer of camaraderie and immersion to the experience.

Hundred Heroes has plenty of minigames, including rebuilding the HQ itself. Using various resources like stone and wood and recruiting the right characters, the area transforms into a sprawling little town. There’s also a war minigame similar to that of Risk, where players can rally troops to fight off invaders. The more characters recruited, the stronger the forces are. (Faceless NPCs that fight under commanders are actually names of Kickstarter backers, which is a clever reference to the game’s development origins.)

Not all of those minigames are standouts. There’s a sand boat racing one with terrible controls, and with the Switch version’s shoddy performance, it was hard to even complete. One recruitable character is only unlocked by achieving a certain time placement. After many failed attempts, I just threw in the towel and moved on without her.

Teamwork makes the dream work

Nowa travels all throughout Allraan in order to recruit allies to his cause while stopping Aldric’s henchmen from encroaching on various towns and dungeons. Sometimes, there’s no urgency in the plot; that’s Nowa’s cue to go out and recruit more people in order to move it forward. This gives plenty of breathing room in the game’s narrative between all of the political tension.

Recruitable characters aren’t marked in any way on the map or field either. Players have to search through every nook and cranny throughout Allraan; however, their sprites are visibly distinct. See a guy wandering about with a crown and red robes among a crowd of generic looking townsfolk? He’s probably recruitable. When I found a new character to recruit, it felt rewarding, like I just discovered a jewel among a pile of rocks.

Hundred Heroes’ turn-based gameplay, which puts six characters in battle at once, pays off all that work. I love the strategic challenge of selecting different attacks and taking into consideration the timeline of when my allies and enemies will strike. I have to thoughtfully plan out my approach — especially in boss battles — as one wrong move could throw off my rhythm. Nothing is more stressful than scrambling to protect a teammate who took a big hit.

For those who don’t want to flex their brain that much, auto-battle is a useful option. It lets characters act on their own to take out enemies. It’s a great way to turn your brain off if you just want to bulldoze through battles. AI behavior can be tweaked in auto-battle mode too. I can tell my team to use certain powerful spells when there are more than four enemies on screen. This really helps so that your magic user doesn’t decide to just use their most-MP-consuming spell if there’s only one enemy left on the field.

Other battle twists make the core combat system even more engaging. There’s a system called Hero Combos, where certain character pairs will fire off cinematic teamwork attacks that deal tremendous damage to monsters if they’re both in the party. Hundred Heroes’ excellent mix of character sprite art and 3D environments make moments like that a dazzling sight to behold.

Quality of life features are sorely lacking across the board. The most egregious omission is that save points don’t restore HP and MP upon interacting with them. This presents a huge problem when I reach the end of a lengthy dungeon at the save point right before a boss fight, and my party isn’t in any shape to tackle it. In all of these situations, I had to backtrack all the way back to a town, sleep at the inn to restore my party, and then haul my butt back to the save point all the while trying to minimize the number of random encounters I trigger. That’s how a lot of old RPGs work, so decisions like that may delight some. For me, it’s just a good reminder of why evolution is a good thing.

In Suikoden games, there are usually recruitable party members that provide these kinds of features. In Hundred Heroes, you meet someone who has teleportation powers. That’s how the party unlocks fast travel. There’s also a woman who joins if you place her as your support character, giving the ability to rearrange your party at save points. If there’s a support character that restores HP and MP at save points, I have yet to easily find such a needed power. While this kind of worldbuilding and implementation is admirable, I just wish some of these abilities were just standard features instead of being conditional.

That annoyance is compounded by several instances where Hundred Heroes will throw in a gauntlet of battles, often having me fight up to four waves of enemies in a row without the opportunity of healing, saving, or using items in between. One time, I didn’t have enough healing items for a boss fight so I had to reload a previous save to purchase them, and then repeat the entire war minigame prior to that boss battle. Those frequent pain points single-handedly drained my enthusiasm.

Hundred Heroes doesn’t perform well on Switch either. Thankfully, there were a few patches that were pushed out during the review period that alleviated some early issues. A five-second delay from pressing the menu button to that menu popping up has been cut down to one second. Some gripes still exist though, such as frame rate stuttering while roaming the open world and some egregious pop-in problems. Trees and bushes appear out of nowhere, and long loading times between going through different areas persist.

As a Suikoden successor, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is perhaps faithful to a fault. Its war story is better than those found in most Fire Emblem games, and its vibrant cast of characters are a highlight. The turn-based battle system is one of the best I’ve experienced of its kind in recent years, too. It’s just a shame that frustratingly retro RPG design and lacking quality-of-life features put a damper on the whole journey. With a few adjustments, Nowa’s story could’ve been a better tale to bring back home from the frontlines.