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Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising review: a flat prequel to next year’s Suikoden successor Hundred HeroesSidequest: The Game
Sidequest: The Game
Eiyuden Chronicle: Risingis a bit of a weird one. Originally conceived as a Kickstarter stretch goal forEiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, the next JRPG fromSuikodencreator Yoshitaka Murayama, this smaller, more action-focused RPG has become both an official prequel to Hundred Heroes and a kind of intermediate stop-gap designed to tide players over until the main event next year. Focusing on the back stories of just a handful of the titular hundred you’ll be meeting in Rabbit & Bear Studios' spiritual successor to Suikoden (the first of which memorably had a whopping 108 recruitable party members), Rising has the air of almost required reading for players eager to return to the lavish, retro worlds Murayama built his name on.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising - 28 Minutes of Developer Gameplay (60FPS) (ESRB)Watch on YouTube
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising - 28 Minutes of Developer Gameplay (60FPS) (ESRB)
I kid you not, the first ‘main’ quest of this game is to find someone’s cat. Then it’s fetching a girl’s dad from the next street over, then chopping some wood in the forest. Eventually you’re allowed to fight a boss (a tree, for yet more wood), but it’s quickly back to collecting stones, mining some ore, and gathering mushrooms and such like. On it goes with all manner of artificial obstacles thrown in your path to prevent you from exploring anywhere you’re not meant to go just yet, and the constant back and forth between the town, forest and mine gets tiresome very quickly.
There’s no denying Rising’s handsome presentation, but the amount of back-tracking you have to do will make you sick to the back teeth of it.
In its defence, there’s a single, glimmering nugget to be found in its rote combat system, and that’s its Link Attacks. With your three main characters' attacks mapped to X, Y and B on your game pad, switching between these at the right time will initiate a supercharged team attack that slows time for mega hit points. The more you develop your town, the higher the number of Link Attacks you can perform in one go, too, giving you some, albeit tenuous, incentive to persist with those interminable sidequests. But this too falls victim to the game’s poor sense of pacing. What should feel like a dramatic combo attack just becomes a faster way of killing off multiple enemies at once when you’re so overpowered, robbing it of all impact even in its more scripted battle arenas.
Some of Rising’s boss fights do have an impressive sense of scale to them, but they’re over almost as soon as they begin.
Despite all of this, though, I wouldn’t say Rising has killed off my interest in Eiyuden Chronicle entirely. Indeed, part of me (however small) is still looking forward to seeing what Murayama has in store with Hundred Heroes when it arrives next year, especially when itsgorgeous art directionlooks set to give even Square Enix’s luscious HD-2D games likeOctopath Travelera real run for their money.
In the meantime, though, Rising is definitely not the required must-play you need to absorb beforehand. After all, we don’t even know what role CJ, Isha and walking talking kangaroo Garoo (yes, really) will even play in Hundred Heroes yet, let alone whether they’ll be interesting enough to warrant buying a whole prequel game for (and on the strength of this current evidence, almost certainly not). Instead, I’d wait and see what their deal is in Hundred Heroes before bothering with this one, and only then if you’re really desperate for some switch-off-brain button mashing fan service. It does have the added benefit of being on Game Pass if you’rereallycurious, although whether it will still be here once Hundred Heroes comes out remains to be seen. Still, as we discussed at the beginning of this review, there are some things in life that are just better off forgotten.
