Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review
Jess Reyes
This RPG is a sprawling epic with a slow start.
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IGN
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a classic rags to riches tale, only about an entire army. I didn’t know what my team would end up looking like when I started recruiting dozens of unique characters – however, as more fighters joined my cause, from a two-faced healer with a brutish side to a magical girl with a hero complex, this unpredictable journey started to take shape. The scale of the story grew with every chapter, folding in more countries and people that would eventually turn my ragtag team into a proper battalion. That sizable cast and loads of side content can add fluff to the campaign, with half-baked elements like encounters that rely on RNG to drag things down a bit. But for anyone willing to hold out long enough, Hundred Heroes’ slow burn eventually lights into an impressive fire.

Hundred Heroes follows Nowa, a new recruit in a local army who has been 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. For example, Lian is a hard-hitting fighter with weak defenses, while Garr is a sturdy tank with decent offense but no magic. These are the types of pros and cons you need to think about when building a team, though Hundred Heroes will give you so many characters to choose from that you can completely ignore most of them. That’s fun mechanically, but it does mean some feel like they are there just to serve a temporary purpose in the plot.

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.

Sometimes a chapter will put specific characters on your team for story reasons, which forces you to experiment with new allies. Some even have “Hero Combos” they can only use with certain teammates, which range from abilities that deal more damage than the two attackers would on their own to ones that can hit all enemies at once while buffing allies at the same time. The specific ability depends on the heroes, but I found that most of my team comps ended up being similar in the end. I generally used characters with high attack power to defeat tough enemies, enough survivability to resist strong attacks, and healing capabilities to keep the team alive, which made many of the most unique characters feel more like gimmicks than necessary tools.

You will likely find a steady team that serves your needs by the halfway point of the roughly 50-hour campaign, though you’re free to shake things up with other characters as you wish. There is no “exp share” mechanic that enables you to keep your benched characters at the same level as your traveling companions, but Hundred Heroes has a strange leveling system that enables weaker characters to quickly catch up to teammates when facing enemies at a much higher level than them. That means they can suddenly be on par with higher level teammates after just a few fights, which is a slightly confusing but appreciated touch that makes it easier to experiment if you want to.

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. My go-to strategy was ganging up on enemies to quickly lower their HP, forcing them to retreat, and then reallocating my armies somewhere else afterward. Events can even pop up during these battles, like enemy generals joining the fray or split second betrayals, which add spice to the mix but often make your tactical decisions more straightforward. While intimidating, I never had an issue operating on the fly.

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.

However, whether the enemy attacks or counters is entirely up to chance, which can feel unfairly random. I’ve only won half of these duels as a result, and the others found ways to excuse my loss as part of the plot. By the end, I leaned toward constantly attacking to get a head start in damage, but even that is a simplistic strategy. Thankfully, it’s not a huge deal that these are left up to chance because there aren’t significant losses that would force you to restart a duel, but it’s still frustrating to lose based on a bad guess. That makes duels seem more like a story tool rather than an actual challenge.

Gimmicks can appear in the regular turn-based boss fights, too. Most of them worked as obstacles that I needed to plan around during battle, like setting aside one character to flip a switch for a secret weapon between turns. However, gimmicks based on random chance could increase a battle’s difficulty without adding any interesting strategy. One early fight encouraged me to pick between two hammers that could potentially deal three times the damage of one of my units to the boss. The boss popped up on either the left or right side, and only the hammer closest to it would be able to hit it. If you picked the wrong hammer, then you would waste one character’s turn and have to survive the fight for a longer amount of time. But similar to the duels, there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell which one is the right pick, which leaves the difficulty up to chance rather than any particular strategy.

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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 - including a top-spinning one called Beigoma that’s very reminiscent of Beyblades. 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. That said, the campaign doesn’t force you to complete any specific side quest – though it might encourage you to recruit a certain number of allies before advancing to the next chapter.

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.