Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

TLDR, a JRPG with good music, visuals, and a decent story, but tries a little too hard to be Suikoden. A solid 6.5/10 To start off with, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes slightly suffers from trying too hard at being a Suikoden reboot, instead of building itself up as its own series. While it is a different story with new characters and a new world, there are a couple of instances where it is very obviously reusing characters/plot lines. I'm sure new fans that have never played any of the Suikoden titles wouldn't care, but as someone who DID play 1-4 of the Suikoden series, it is a little disappointing to see things that are a little TOO familiar. My biggest problem with the story isn't that it pretty much has the same plot points as the first couple of Suikoden games, but that it fails at getting me to believe that these characters care about each other. There is little (if any) build up with the majority of the main cast surrounding Nowa. Lian, who is a random stranger that you meet at the start of the game acts more like Nowa's annoying little sister, rather than someone he just met five seconds ago. Instead of building her up and giving her anything meaningful to do in the story, she constantly acts like an annoying child and has no character development . Meanwhile, his actual littler sister, Leene, feels more like a random minor character than someone who he's supposed to have a preexisting relationship with. I could really tell that they wanted to make Nanami 2.0 (from Suikoden 2) but instead just made one of the most annoying characters in this game. Another issue I have is that everybody as soon as they meet our protagonist just becomes best friends with him and then has no compelling plot reasons as to why they let him be the leader besides "He's cool and wants to make an alliance to fight the bad guys." Like I said earlier, it really feels like they wanted to reboot the Suikoden story line without actually doing any of the heavy lifting that made Suikoden good in the first place. With saying that, EC:HH still managed to hold its own ground as its own (potential) series and did a decent job at making me care about the majority of the characters (not Lian) and also got me onboard for most of the story! Fortunately, the creators learned from the past games and you aren't forced to use any characters that are plot relevant as you can just shove them into the attendants (extra) slot in the party. Although, I do wish that some of the side characters got more moments to shine than just the two or three scenes that they would pop up in. It really felt like they could have done a better job with the story if they just axed about 20 of the random minor characters that had nothing special about them and had nothing to do with the plot. Reminder, this games has 120 (yes) recruitable characters that you need to have to get the true ending of the game. My BIGGEST gripe with this game is that it makes you waste almost two hours doing its awful beigoma (beyblade) mini game. I truly wish that it would have taken the same route that it did with the card mini game and only make you do two or three matches of it to get the characters related to said mini game. INSTEAD, the creators decided it would be a fantastic idea to not only make you do around 25 matches of said mini game to get TWO characters, but to also make it so that you have to grind to get the best beigoma pieces to actually win the matches, right as the story is really making its way towards the climax. It honestly ruined the story momentum for me and I truly wish that they don't do this in any future installments. I don't mind having silly side plot for the minor characters but it should not take this much time to get through it. Now, since I'm done complaining I do want to say I did really enjoy the graphic style and the soundtrack! I did also enjoy the new gimmick mechanic in the battles! However, I do wish that they had continued to use the gimmick mechanic towards the later half of the game in the boss battles, as most battles after the halfway point don't use it. Finally, I wanted to talk about the DLC. It honestly seemed like Marisa's and Seign's chapters should have been in the game originally and seemed more like cut content than actual DLC. I did enjoy Seign's chapter but Marisa's chapter really seemed rushed and not really written well (Which is disappointing, as I do like Marisa and the Guardians as characters). Out of the three of them, I feel like Markus's chapter is the only one that seems like real DLC, since it wasn't relevant to the main plot, but instead fleshed out the backstory to Markus and one of the other minor characters!