Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review

ign.com:

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