Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
is a classic rags to riches tale, only about an entire army. The game follows Nowa, a new recruit in a local army who is tasked with cooperating with the larger empire’s special forces team. While that could have put him at odds with Seign, a rising talent that leads that team, what ensues instead is a bonding moment that sets the tone nicely for the entire campaign – that two opposing sides could find compromise rather than conflict.The story might feel like a typical hero’s journey at first, but as you peel back the layers, you’ll start to understand that there’s more to the main cast and why they fight for what they do. Unlike its spin-off prequel, the hack-and-slash side-scroller Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, Hundred Heroes mainly operates as a turn-based RPG. You control a party of six characters that you can swap around before or after battle, each with their own stat distributions and abilities that set them apart from others.
Like the name “Hundred Heroes” might suggest, there are over a whopping 100 characters that either fill a role in your town or fight at your side. It’s a bit like Pokemon with soldiers, but there are different requirements for each one if you want to catch ‘em all. Some might join you immediately after you speak to them, whereas others could request that you come back after you get stronger. Some of these allies fight at your side, and others eventually run stores at the castle town that acts as your home base. Finding elusive recruits entertained me between story chapters, both as a way to gather valuable materials and learn more about the world.
Hundred Heroes also has a strategy RPG portion that appears after the central war in its story begins, mostly when facing enemy generals, where you control armies of soldiers on a grid-like map and command them to attack enemy legions. Major characters act as commanders with impactful special abilities like lowering enemy defenses or HP to secure an advantage before an invasion.
You will also participate in “duels” during major plot points, usually with one main character facing a rival or antagonist. In these duels, you can choose to either attack to deal damage and raise a Tension gauge a little, or counter to take less damage from an attack and build a larger amount of Tension. The idea is to whittle down the enemy’s health enough to reach the Break marker on their HP bar, which lets you use a stronger Break attack to finish them off. Alternatively, maxing out the Tension gauge enables you to deal a similarly devastating blow.
Hundred Heroes’ campaign takes somewhere around 40-60 hours to complete, depending on how much time you spend recruiting characters, upgrading your castle, and playing minigames. Some of the side quests are easy to complete, like defeating specific enemies for drops that potential allies request before joining your party. Others feel like a never-ending mystery, like my quest to find a lucky fish for my fisherman friend.
Despite eventually enjoying it, Hundred Heroes suffers from a slow start that initially holds it back. At the beginning, I was unimpressed with the amount of backtracking it took to get between destinations, especially with the random encounters that interrupted my journey. Hundred Heroes doesn’t clearly spell out the solution to every puzzle, either, so you sometimes need to pace through cities over and over before stumbling upon a solution. It took me 15 hours just to unlock fast travel, which I only found by chance while wandering the streets of one major city. At that point, things really started to open up, letting me satisfyingly teleport between towns to recruit new allies, but that amount of time is a lot to get through before a payout.
Still, it was worthwhile to see this thrilling tale of multiple countries fighting back against a tyrant, with a mixed bag of twists along the way. Some left me scratching my head wondering “why,” while others had me cheering from the sidelines. The big villain is one-dimensional in his lust for power and doesn’t leave much to play with in terms of motive, but the actions of the people around him are more compelling. Some characters struggle in interesting ways between obligations to their home country and a desire for justice, while others are bystanders only emboldened into action after watching the efforts of your passionate team.
While following an endearing troop of misfits and their quest to overthrow a corrupt ruler might sound like every other kingdom-based RPG, the balance between the personal struggles of its characters and the story of the overarching war was quite entertaining. Some parts of that tale feel weaker than others and suffer from a few pacing issues, like one major faction only coming to light as part of the overarching plot halfway through the campaign, but there’s enough build-up and loss that the victories always felt worth it. At the start, I felt like I was fighting in a stranger’s war – by the end, I was invested enough that I was eager to see them win.
