Suikoden 2 Review

[Nickie Koskinen]

EiyudenChronicles: Hundred Heroes is designed to bring players a modern take on a classic JRPG experience. Get ready to lead 100+ playable characters through a war-torn world only you can save. Switch version reviewed. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a bit of a weird one. Originally conceived as a Kickstarter stretch goal for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, the next JRPG from Suikoden creator Yoshitaka Murayama, this smaller, more action-focused RPG has become both an official prequel to Hundred Heroes and a kind of intermediate stop-gap designed to tide players over until the main event next year. Focusing on the back stories of just a handful of the titular hundred you'll be meeting in Rabbit & Bear Studios' spiritual successor to Suikoden (the first of which memorably had a whopping 108 recruitable party members), Rising has the air of almost required reading for players eager to return to the lavish, retro worlds Murayama built his name on.

Only this isn't being made by Murayama and the rest of his former Suikoden crew at Rabbit & Bear. It's Natsume Atari who have lead billing here, with Murayama operating in a supervisory role while development on Hundred Heroes continues. It also doesn't have anything in common with the JRPG series that Eiyuden Chronicle proper is meant to be doffing its cap to, swapping Suikoden's turn-based battles for real-time monster biffing, 2D dungeon crawling and a heavy emphasis on building up your hub town by completing ream upon ream of sidequests. I'd even go as far as saying Rising is more sidequest than main quest all things considered, especially in its early hours, and the end result is a game that falls into exactly the same pitfalls that I Am Setsuna and so many other 'modern classic' JRPGs have done before it. Namely, it resurrects what should have been left dead and buried, and adds nothing of its own to keep things interesting, making it feel more like a relic of a bygone era than warm, fuzzy nostalgia play.

I'd maybe feel more generous toward Rising if it weren't for its blasted stamp card. In-game, this serves as your ticket into the mysterious nearby Barrows, a labyrinth of underground tunnels and treasure troves that adventurers flock to from all around the world in order to make their fortunes. Heroine CJ is one such scavenger hoping to make it big in New Nevaeh, but before the town's weirdly tax-obsessed (and probably secret Tory) acting mayor Isha will grant her entry to them, she must prove her worth by collecting stamps. And to collect said stamps, CJ must perform all manner of busy work given to her by the local townsfolk. In other words, the stamp card is a glorified sidequest counter, and if the 30 blank spots on your initial 'silver' card don't strike fear in your heart, wait until you're presented with the 50 checkmarks that accompany your respective gold and platinum cards.

I kid you not, the first 'main' quest of this game is to find someone's cat. Then it's fetching a girl's dad from the next street over, then chopping some wood in the forest. Eventually you're allowed to fight a boss (a tree, for yet more wood), but it's quickly back to collecting stones, mining some ore, and gathering mushrooms and such like. On it goes with all manner of artificial obstacles thrown in your path to prevent you from exploring anywhere you're not meant to go just yet, and the constant back and forth between the town, forest and mine gets tiresome very quickly.

It takes a long time before Rising really lets you off the leash to explore the Barrows at your leisure, and when the main story does finally kick in, any last remaining shreds of good will have already been crushed to dust by its overwhelming tedium. Even battling its monsters fails to inspire much excitement. Not only are they so toothless and ineffectual that most can be dispatched simply by mashing a single button, but the resource-driven economy of its various shops and weapon upgrades also makes it ludicrously easy to get ahead of the curve, turning you into an unstoppable powerhouse that minces everything in their path with just a few hits. I died precisely once during my time with Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, and that was at the beginning of the game when I didn't manage to chug a potion in time when fighting that aforementioned tree boss. Since then, it's been an absolute cakewalk.

In its defence, there's a single, glimmering nugget to be found in its rote combat system, and that's its Link Attacks. With your three main characters' attacks mapped to X, Y and B on your game pad, switching between these at the right time will initiate a supercharged team attack that slows time for mega hit points. The more you develop your town, the higher the number of Link Attacks you can perform in one go, too, giving you some, albeit tenuous, incentive to persist with those interminable sidequests. But this too falls victim to the game's poor sense of pacing. What should feel like a dramatic combo attack just becomes a faster way of killing off multiple enemies at once when you're so overpowered, robbing it of all impact even in its more scripted battle arenas.

Despite all of this, though, I wouldn't say Rising has killed off my interest in Eiyuden Chronicle entirely. Indeed, part of me (however small) is still looking forward to seeing what Murayama has in store with Hundred Heroes when it arrives next year, especially when its gorgeous art direction looks set to give even Square Enix's luscious HD-2D games like Octopath Traveler a real run for their money.

In the meantime, though, Rising is definitely not the required must-play you need to absorb beforehand. After all, we don't even know what role CJ, Isha and walking talking kangaroo Garoo (yes, really) will even play in Hundred Heroes yet, let alone whether they'll be interesting enough to warrant buying a whole prequel game for (and on the strength of this current evidence, almost certainly not). Instead, I'd wait and see what their deal is in Hundred Heroes before bothering with this one, and only then if you're really desperate for some switch-off-brain button mashing fan service. It does have the added benefit of being on Game Pass if you're really curious, although whether it will still be here once Hundred Heroes comes out remains to be seen. Still, as we discussed at the beginning of this review, there are some things in life that are just better off forgotten.

The result of an incredibly successful Kickstarter in 2020, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a spiritual successor to RPG series Suikoden. Interestingly enough, in 2022, Konami announced that they would be releasing a remaster of the first two Suikoden games, and so we won't have long to wait before the old that's new again can be compared directly with a modern interpretation. Unfortunately, Hundred Heroes leans far too heavily into old genre trappings and suffers major performance issues on Switch. As a result, I'm left pinning my character-collecting hopes on the forthcoming Konami remaster.

Eiyuden Chronicle tells the story of Galdea, a world on the verge of a war between the powerful Empire and the Alliance determined to resist. Among the expansive cast is protagonist Nowa, who ends up being thrust into the leadership role as more and more people and factions end up relying on him and raising him up. As the story progresses, you'll spend a fair bit of time recruiting others to your cause, and while it's fun to meet new characters and learn a bit about them, the size of the cast means that basically everyone presents at merely a surface level. The character interactions lack the type of depth that make better RPGs stand out.

As a Kickstarter backer who's played a bit of his copy and found it rather slow and tedious, I did. Any game where you're encouraged to just use the Auto Battle instead of actually engaging with the combat system is a game with deep-seeded problems. It's actually pretty amazing how consistent all the reviews of this game seem to be thus far. I have too many good games in my backlog right now to devote time to mediocre ones, but I'll get to playing my copy "for real" at some point in the future.

I'm rather incredulous at the devs allegedly already starting work on a sequel, because I don't think this game is going to do as well as they seem to think it will.

Okay, this was totally supposed to be a review of Gone Home (made possible thanks to a new computer capable of running modern games), but nostalgia beats novelty. Especially when it comes to the Suikoden series, which is officially my favourite game series of all time.

Despite my usual skepticism of re-releases as craven cash-grabs (how many times can I buy Chrono Trigger or FFIV, after all?), I think this is a hugely positive development for Suikoden II because of its prior unavailability and its potential to show the developers that yes there is a market for this series and please Konami make Suikoden VI because I will pay all the moneydollars for it.

When it comes to RPGs Konami was not the first name most would point to, at least in the mid-90s. While they had built up a steady reputation for creating some of the best action platformers around they tended to stay away from role playing games in the west. Overseas Konami had a long association with the genre dating back to the Famicom. Dragon Scroll, Madara, and Esper Dream were some of the titles we missed out on. In 1995 Konami created Suikoden, one of the closest any new series has ever came to reaching the same height as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

And to think we almost missed out on this great series in the US! Loosely based on the Chinese novel Shui Hu Zuan, Suikoden would arrive before Final Fantasy 7 would create a large market for RPGs in the US. Like many my initial exposure came from the many frequent import previews in Diehard Gamefan. Where everyone else only gave it a brief caption they did multiple deep dives on what made it unique. I would not be surprised if their coverage helped convince Konami to take a chance on the game in 1996. It definitely paid off as Suikoden sold well enough that we received nearly every further release in the series.

3a8082e126