u/AlwaysTouchingGrass

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a 2024 jrpg drawing inspiration from the Suikoden series, to the point that they share a director.

Probably important disclaimer: I've never played a Suikoden game. I have played Eiyuden Chronicle Rising, however, so I didn't go in completely empty handed, although that game is completely different from Hundred Heroes. Just don't expect comparisons to the "source material" as it were.

Anywho, back to EC: while I haven't played Suikoden, I have played my fair share of classic jrpgs, and EC is absolutely harkening back to the days of yore. If the game wasn't so visually impressive, you could easily believe that it was released on the PS2, and that comes with all of the positives and negatives you might imagine. Took me about 50 hours to finish the game, but there is more meat on the bone if I wanted to go for 100%ing recruiting, side activities, etc.

What Works:

Visuals: EC uses a pixel art, semi 2D/ 3D artstyle that is a constant feast for the eyes. Environments are beautiful, towns have a solid sense of scale, and character models look amazing, especially in combat. I was never disappointed with the visuals.

The Setting: The setting of the world allows for a large range of environments, from your typical high fantasy castles to more industrial areas. The variety of species on show is pretty crazy too.. with a good mix of human and anthropomorphic races that keep things interesting. At one point my party was a wolf, a kangaroo, a samurai, a Sailor Moon-esque magical girl, a little tree guy, and a normal human.. and most impressively is that none of them really feel out of place. there are some characters that are kind of pushing it, but they don't rock the boat a ton.

The Sound: The music is phenomenal, even if it can get a little repetitive. The sound effects during battle are punchy and fit the action being done, and the voice acting is a mixed bag of quality overall, but at the end of the day, I was just happy most of the game was voiced.

The Combat: For the first 10 hours or so, I thought the combat was relatively dull, able to use the 'auto' option for 95% of combat encounters since no one really had any abilities to manage, and enemies didn't pose much of a threat. However, after the first chapter you're pool of available units expands, as does their ability pool (called rune-lens here), and you start to get more toys to play with. Enemies start to become more of a threat so picking your targets become more important. While overall, I don't think EC ever gets hard, there is a joy to be had in optimizing your party to deal the most damage. At the end of the day, the fun in combat came from trying new party combinations, and less from challenging battles.

Castle development: I love any system that allows you to build up a base of sorts, and EC has a really good system in place. Use resources that you find around the map and a currency unique to castle development lets you turn your busted up town into a thriving metropolis. It starts a little slow (which is common theme in the game in general) but once it gets rolling it is a treat.

What Works, with Caveats:

Recruitment: I played this game without a guide, and I felt like 70% of the recruitable units were easy enough to figure out. However, the other 30 were either tucked away in areas you'd have no reason to visit without the knowledge that they were there, or had some convoluted steps that were tough to follow, especially before you unlock fast travel (more on that later). So, overall not bad, but just slightly frustrating. On a positive note, I don't think any unit can be missed, so there's at least no pressure there. On another plus, the game has a really strong experience catch up system, so if you recruit a unit that 20-30 levels below your team, they'll close that gap in a handful of fights, making it easy to try new dudes.

Most of the Side Content: the Bakugan knock off and the card game are fine, but largely forgettable. Getting to actually play them is more complicated that it should be.. especially the process of earning new tops. They come as random drops from monsters, but I didn't get my first drop until almost 30 hours into the game. Offering a way to buy tops, and adding an indicator over which NPCs you could play against would go a long way.

The Story: Generally pretty good, albeit basic. Its your typical "small down guy with a heart of gold takes down the evil empire" plot, but it well told enough and most of the characters are sort of interesting. Overall though, its not going to be something you think about once you finish the game.

What doesn't work:

The pacing: Above all else, the pacing of the game makes it tough to recommend to someone without having to say the dreaded phrase "it gets better after the first few hours." Except in EC's case, things don't become consistently good until about 15 hours into the game. The first 15 hours are a sort of slog, with ample backtracking, limited enemy variety, limited characters available for your own party, a small pool of recruitable units, you name it. BUT once you hit a certain story beat at that 15 hour mark, the game opens wide. You get access to a fast travel that cuts down/ fully eliminates required backtracking, your party starts to become more deadly, the pool of recruits gets blasted wide open. It becomes so much better, but asking 15 hours of a player beforehand is a tough sell.

Inventory management: This never gets easy, its always a hassle to get your best gear on your active units. This does get easier once you can fast travel back to base, but its still annoying to make a change to the characters in your party, warp back home to move armor and rune lenses around, and warp back to where you want to be. Part of the problem is the limited inventory space you have while traveling, which makes it hard to keep useful equipment on hand. They could have solved this by just unequiping characters as they leave your party, or adding an outfitting option in the party management screen. Its also kind of lame that every characters weapon is just upgraded in a completely linear fashion.

The duels and the MASSIVE BATTLES: Visually cool and used as a way to add some gravitas to key story moments, they just kind waste your time. The duels just seems completely RNG and as far as I can tell, they don't even matter if you win or lose. The other side of the coin is the srpg style battles that play out at other key moments, while less RNG dependent are also just kinda there. I would have rather just had normal fights

In conclusion: Eiyuden Chronicle Hundred Heroes ended up being a rather enjoyable game. Once all of the systems get up and running, it has a very addicting loop of recruiting units, assembling those units into the most powerful combo you can, and using resources you find to build out your home base. It does ask the player to get through about 15 hours of less stellar fluff before everything gets fully operational, however, which can be daunting. I was luckily craving a classic style JRPG, so I didn't mind but ymmv.

Playing this has rocketed the Suikoden games up my must play list, however, so maybe that'll be on deck for the next time I'm in a classic mood.

Thanks for reading!

I was sold on two of Atlas Fallen's "unique" selling points: Gliding on sandy environments to explore a cool world, and its limb-breaking combat against towering monsters. While both of those elements are present, they're under utilized, which overall drags the experience down to be unfortunately forgettable.

The world is in a constant state of ruin because of an evil queen and an evil God that demands.. sand tributes or something. The plot is sort of forgettable, so please forgive me for not remembering the specifics, but just know it doesn't matter all that much.

Anywho, the game opens with an unnamed protagonist (literally called an Unnamed) working as a slave in a sand mine or something, when they find a MAGIC GAUNTLET that just so happens to be possessed by a different, good God named Nial. The gauntlet gives the Unnamed a name -- Gauntlet Bearer -- and the power they need to save the world.

What follows is roughly 20 hours of exploring a few sandy open zones, fighting big sandy monsters with big sandy weapons, and finding sandy mcguffins so you can use new sand powers to move on to the next zone.

The combat remains the highlight throughout - with the big sand monsters all providing unique challenges because of the limb breaking way you have to kill them. Each monster has one or more body part that has to be destroyed before you can deal a killing blow, and its pretty fun to figure out how to target those spots while dodging and air dashing around. You have 3 weapons at your disposal, an ax, a whip, and fist, and each handle differently and are best used in different situations.

You also have abilities that you charge up by landing hits, and as you fill up you power bar, you'll also start activating more passives, but youll also start taking more damage. It should turn the combat into a balancing act of high risk, high reward combat where you're at your strongest while you're enemies are at their deadliest, but in practice it doesn't feel that way.

First problem: you have virtually unlimited healing items, so you never really feel like you're in danger. You charge up your healing flask by landing hits, and you're hitting so frequently its almost always charged. Second: the abilities you can use are also wicked strong, charge up fast, and hit multiple weak points at once.. which renders the core conceit of the combat kind of moot. You never need to engage with the balancing act. Overall its a pretty okay system, but you can see the glimmer of what would be a great one, which is almost more frustrating.

Outside of combat, you're exploring pretty big maps, finding treasure chests that don't really have anything worthwhile in them, and solving puzzles for more passive abilities. The cool sand surfing mechanic is cool.. but there are surprisingly few areas where you'll be doing it. Its often faster to just jump and use your air dashes, or simply sprint. Its a small thing, but again, it takes something that could have been unique and makes it boring.

Overall, its an OK game, but there are signs of what could have been a great game. The combat is cool.. but it could have been great if they have doubled down on its unique ideas. The exploration could have been fast and unique, but its just your bog-standard open world.

Of the gauntlet-based video games that released in 2023 (Atlas Fallen, Forspoken, and Immortals of Aveum), Atlas Fallen unfortunately falls at the bottom of the pack. Forspoken, for all of its shortcomings, has incredible combat, and Immortals has a fun spin of fps gameplay. Both do something that stands out, which Atlas is sorely lacking.

A demo for the game Entropy released yesterday, and I just wanted to give it a shout out since it's likely going to slide under a lot of people's radars.

Entropy is developed by Lovely Hellplace, whose previous "big game" was Dread Delusion. While light on actual RPG mechanics, I think Dread Delusion absolutely nailed the atmosphere, story telling, and sense of exploration that made it a great game.

Fast forward to Entropy, and the bones of Dread Delusion are apparent to anyone that's played. It maintains that chunky ps1 era look, with an absolutely weird world that it drops up into. Big difference this time around though; instead of being a first person Morrowind inspired game, Entropy is calling back to old school jrpgs.

And it works surprisingly well. The turn based combat feels good, although the demo doesn't really get that deep. But it has a wide range of weapons, armor, magic types. A cool thing is your party is mostly made up of mercenaries that you pay a percentage of your spoils after a fight.

These guys are expendable too. While it didn't happen to me in the demo, they can permanently die if they fall in combat, or they might end up with permanent injuries. One of my guys ended a fight with an amputated arm, and he was just like that for the rest of the time he was in my party.

I'm curious how that's going to play out, since some of your party members seem like actual characters, with their own stories etc, so I wonder how they'll write around that if they die. But it's a cool idea.

The magic is cool, there is still a sense of exploration with treasure chests hidden off the beaten path.

Anyway, it's got a world map like old final fantasy games, the vibes are just as cool as Dread Delusion, and the writing seemed as good as DD as well. Hopefully they can pull it off when it releases, cause it seems really cool.

Hello all. The Surge 2 premium edition is currently on a pretty big sale on PS5, and I'm wondering if anyone has played it recently that could give an updated review. What's changed since release, etc.

For context, I liked the vibes of the first Surge, but never played further than the first boss. I just remember something about the game after that point was more annoying than fun. But I did like cutting mfers arms off to steal their pneumatic drill.

I'm also not a big time souls guy, but I do occasionally dabble. Last year I finished Lords of the Fallen after getting that for a good deal, and before that was Dark Souls 3 a while ago when *that* was on sale (you might notice a pattern). Other than that I haven't really gotten deep into the genre, outside of trying various souls likes that came to ps plus back when I had that.

So anyway, what's the deal with the surge 2? Worth a buy?