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Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes - Review Thread
- Thread starter --R
- Start date
I'm stuggling to think of any Kickstarter spiritual sequel that would be widely seen as a 10/10 even just for people who backed it. I imagine a lot of the mainstream reviewers might not have Suikoden experience etc. so that doesn't help. But also we have plenty of Suikoden fans saying that it's not up to par. So the review score sounds about right? That doesn't mean some people won't enjoy it more/less.
As a person who loves all Suikoden games, yes even 4, I feel like I am obligated to try this, and well... I like 4, so chances are good I'm gonna like this one also, lol.
This was a good read and I think it's quite accurate. Thanks for sharing!
Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes Review | TheSixthAxis
In the runaway Kickstarter hit, Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes, you’ll recruit more than 100 heroes to bolster an army of resistance.
www.thesixthaxis.com
6/10 from our reviewer.
More mixed than I was expecting though most of the big negative are actually what I was kinda looking forward to (basically a classic JRPG warts and all).
Based on the steam forums (I haven't looked at reviews) I'm assuming a lot of negative reveiws are specifically upset about translations from JP to EN. I personally didn't find the examples given to be a problem, and I would have been playing with EN voices and subittles so I'd never have known anything about it if I didn't see no fewer than 6 separate threads bitching about it. It's way overblown in my opinion, but I can't help but wonder if that's where some light review bombing is coming into play.
The english voice work and translation are fantastic and a highlight of the game
There are plenty of issues but I don't consider this one of them
Hmm... The animation is awesome and its very pleasing to play
The main issue for me is depth and balancing. Especially early on. It's pretty one track for a bit. It's why a lot of people are going with the Hard difficulty to up their challenge. Very old school where the depth comes over time and the dungeons are about inventory management, prep, and general endurance. Encounter rates are fair though.
I really wish the characters had more unique abilities. I get that with 100 heroes you can only give everyone so much but as of now each character gets 2-3 unique characteristics about them. Be that attack type, stat spread, unique ability or unique skill. Sometimes all of those things in one and sometimes only some of those things.
The rest comes from gearing and runes for customization. It ain't much but it has become enough to keep me engaged and thankfully there are plenty of other aspects of the game that drive you forward. I hope that if they make another that they spend more time diversifying characters and builds. I have said this before but it was quite jarring coming from the complex team building of Unicorn Overlord to something far simpler like this.
I'm playing on Hard. It starts slow, but around the time you unlock your base it starts to ramp up significantly and be very enjoyably challenging. But not in an HP sponge way or anything. The enemy AI can be quite smart and deadly.
It's just the new venue for culture war garbage. Just like with Unicorn Overlord recently. Chuds who don't even speak Japanese or grasp its fundamental differences from English outraged over localization not being equivalent to what google translate says is a direct translation.
Then there's the right wing grifter subsection upset at pronouns being mentioned in a completely innocuous way, labeling the game as "woke."
You might not but the media illiterate chuds who didn't pay attention to any of the Suikoden game stories sure do...
Yeah, I don't get it - I don't really even understand where the energy to be this upset about something so stupid comes from. How can it be sustained for so long? Exhausting.
Yeah I took a quick peek at the reviews and every single negative review I saw includes a blurb about "localization". Sure it's possible the localization is bad (haven't played it yet myself), but in general this has become a new code word for anti-woke CHUDs. I highly doubt the localization is PS1 JRPG era level of poorly translated.
I'm about 20 hours in (started over the weekend thanks to kickstarter). It does a fairly admirable job of capturing that Suikoden feel, even if it is inferior by comparison. The side activities have been a letdown, though. Specifically fishing and that spinning tops game. Forget the name of it.
I kinda hate to say it, but I was enjoying Rising far more than Hundred Heroes at this point in my playthrough. Which is bonkers.
I kinda hate to say it, but I was enjoying Rising far more than Hundred Heroes at this point in my playthrough. Which is bonkers.
I just hope that the story is great. Not many reviewers mentioned it, but I noticed that "Better than most Fire Emblem war story" line which made me pause for a bit.
Heh, the reviews read like how a lot of JRPGs were reviewed back then. This game truly is a throwback to that era.
The complaints about QoL stuff is (understandably) through the lens of modern standards. Would be great if it were more modern but personally I don't mind any of it as I grew up on that stuff and still play those games regularly today.
The complaints about QoL stuff is (understandably) through the lens of modern standards. Would be great if it were more modern but personally I don't mind any of it as I grew up on that stuff and still play those games regularly today.
So true it hurts...
Illusion of Gaia and Suikoden 2 literally made me want to learn Japanese (amongst several other reasons) and now I TL for a living.
Without having played it yet myself but seeing some comparison screenshots it honestly reads to me like a mix of "If I had been on this, I would have asked the editor to calm down." and "This is literally how you add flavor to a language that doesn't have honorifics and deliberate speech patterns that convey a ton of meaning." Mainly tilted in favor in the latter.
EDIT: If I may wax a little philosophical on localization and its reception in general, I think one of the main issues is that story is not the same as dialog. All of us 30+ folk who grew up with games from the 16 and 32-bit era don't remember how lacking in dialog the games were; this was made jarringly apparent to me after starting up a replay of the OG FFVII after finishing Remake. That game is sparse and that was a larger and longer game for the era.
Frankly, a lot of the games from said era had great stories and memorable characters, but the dialog writing (both in J and translation) was lacking both in volume and oftentimes quality. I think our imaginations filled a lot of the blanks in from the sparse writing that was there.
All this is to say, it's entirely possible to have a great story with middling to even poor dialog. I think a lot of people complaining about intent and how things weren't like that in the "classics" are forgetting just how sparse the writing really was.
Now that narrative-driven games can and are generally expected to be more wordy, we encounter many different takes on localization and it definitely raises some hackles, all the more so for the more niche games that wear their country of origin a little bit more openly on their 袖 and for those fans who wants things to feel a bit closer to that. since those older translations, for better or worse, captured to a degree, the country of origin in a curious way.
One final note: This commentary was specifically about those who wonder why certain decisions are made during localization and also why things are so "different" from the classics. This does not take into account bad faith chuds, because, they aren't worth taking into account.
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I don't think the localization is "bad" -- it just looks like creative liberties were taken to help add some flavor/personality to the characters. Some work, some don't, but the outrage I've been seeing seems really overblown. I'm now about 15 hours in and haven't run into anything that has jumped out at me. I'm playing with the Japanese voice and English text. I have a very low level understanding of Japanese, and even when I notice things don't match, it doesn't bother me. This happens so often with localizations that it surprises me a little bit that it's *this* game that's setting folks off.
A 76/77 is an okay score. MN9 has a 52 on OC, Shenmue 3 a 68. The closest is Yooka-Laylee at 72. Considering the game was developed by a mostly new team, with leads that haven't made a game on this level for over a decade, through COVID, working on six platforms, on a KS budget, while the writer/studio president was seriously ill, it didn't work out terribly. Minus Murayama dying, obviously. Some of the things dragging the game down in reviews include very fixable issues on the PS5 and Switch versions (the latter with its double whammy of optimization, and the encounter rate bug that some reviewers thought were an intentional part of the game), but also some things that aren't flaws like random battles or the large roster (seriously, what an asinine critique of a Suikoden-style game).
I don't think there's a trend at all. Bloodstained, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, Torment, Psychonauts 2 (not KS, but crowdfunded still) have all been successful. Some things worked out, some things didn't. Even Broken Age with its famously troubled development ultimately released to a 79.
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