Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes - Review After 100%

[Music] what's going on everybody morom here this time bringing you my review after 100% for a uden Chronicle 100 Heroes a jrpg that seeks to recreate a lot of older jrpg titles and bring that genre forward a little bit especially though it's meant to be a spiritual successor to another game called sui Coden but first to get my usual stuff out of the way I review games after 100% % to set me apart from other reviewers on the platform and while that does include the achievements it also includes a lot more than that there's a video linked below that covers everything I go over and my steam profile is public and linked below as well in the particular case of this game however it's also important to mention that I did get a review copy of this title but only a couple of days before it officially released which is why we're a bit past that point now but I did absolutely get a few days Head Start Over most people which is especially noteworthy because I sincerely doubt I could have 100% this until the embargos lifted because I needed to use quite a few different guides and there's actually a couple of bugs involved in the recruitment of a couple different characters which I learned about with enough time to sidestep so all in all I would say it worked out which is a pretty natural place to roll into the technical state of this particular title and overall I would say it's in a pretty good place outside of a few notable bugs obviously the recruitment issues that I mentioned though I think one of those has already been patched also worth a mention that the default key bindings for this on of course PC and keyboard and mouse here aren't exactly great but seeing as this isn't an action game it's not the end of the world though unfortunately you can't really rebind most of them which can be a problem another noteworthy one that I think may have been addressed already is that the encounter rate was initially tied to your FPS meaning that if you were getting really good FPS you would encounter less enemies though the game does have an option to switch between a 30 FPS and a 60fps mode and ironically I actually really enjoyed this because it meant I could effectively toggle how many Random Encounters I wanted so while technically speaking a bug I kind of turned it to my advantage which was fun so on the technical side of things mostly the game is in a pretty good place but there's certainly a few things to be aware of and at least in my experience there wasn't anything gamebreaking and I haven't really seen anybody report anything of that nature either but with that out of the way let's talk a little bit about what this game is all about and what we're going to be doing now as I mentioned it is largely a spiritual successor of older jrpg games sui hoden to be pacific and it aims to recreate a lot of those feelings we're going to be recruiting up to 120 different Heroes using them to build and staff a town that's going to help us play a part in a large political drama with what I would say feels like a very familiar jrpg plot but before we dive fully into that let's first talk about the difficulty of this game somewhat surprisingly to me this game actually had a few different difficulty options mostly aimed at making the game harder and not just in combat but rather other things as well for instance you can turn on hyperinflation which UPS the cost of basically anything you buy in shops and while I would say that that becomes irrelevant towards the end of the game alongside pretty much all the other non-combat stuff they are interesting options nonetheless now talking about difficulty I will say that this is one of those games that's difficulty is very front-loaded because you're simply not going to the resources or options to deal with things at the earlier stages of the game that you have later on that make walking through the last few bosses even a very easy thing to do and in fact I struggled more with the first few bosses than anything else that the game had to offer moving right along though now let's talk the story setup and my thoughts on it a uden Chronicle takes place in the world of Allon I believe it's called where we play the role of Noah a young man who has recently joined the ranks of the watch a sort of mil group that helps out in what is called the League of Nations a large alliance between a bunch of different nations that is opposite the galdan Empire these two forces have recently come together and Enlisted the watch searching for what they call run lenses Rune lenses are special magical crystals of some description that connect with certain individuals and allow them to wield either magic or simply other physical skills that most people wouldn't normally have run lens is due to the nature of how that works and how inconsistent they are with even the power that they Grant have been the source of a fair bit of frustration in the world right away we learn that the Empire has recently developed a technology called regules that can amplify a run lens's magic and make it available to people who don't have a rune lens which is obviously a pretty major breakthrough in this world in particular though we are searching at the beginning of the game for what they call a primal lens the strongest variant of the Rune lenses one can find and they would like to study it to see if they can enhance this technology further very unsurprisingly after this goes well and you find the lens the Empire uses this new found technology and a couple false flag operations to kick off a war with a League of Nations using a not small amount of treachery in order to do so the bulk of the plot revolves around handling exactly this situation now that's as much as I want to talk about just to avoid spoilers as this game was only recently released after all but that's the general plot setup so some more specific points in particular that I wanted to talk about are that in many ways it's a standard jrpg plot a coalition of forces set up against a big Empire that is doing what Imperial forces tend to do trying to take over and Conquer more and more territory with our rag tag team of Heroes trying to do their best to stop it though I will say it does break jrpg tradition a little bit and that we don't end up fighting God even if there are a fair few monsters in the mix overall though I would say the story is pretty solid I enjoyed it it didn't really blow me away but it definitely has the Hallmarks of the genre to be sure one thing that is definitely noteworthy and that it's hard to avoid when you mention this subject however is that the localization of some of the writing in English is definitely a little bit off personally I found this most noticeable towards the very beginning of the game when they're introducing a lot of characters very quickly and many of them can often sound like you're talking to say a teenager of today's day and age rather than someone who exists in a fantasy world and it can definitely break your immersion a little bit for me that wasn't the end of the world but it can definitely be just off in certain areas another issue though is that at least for me I had a little bit of a hard time connecting with a lot of the characters just because there were so many of them and a lot of them really only have tiny moments that matter when they're introduced and don't really have much to say afterwards and while there were one or two that I could connect with such as our main character Noah it's just very hard to care about that many people introduced that quickly some of whom's job really is only to run a shop in town and that you barely talk to otherwise and while that's fine for characters like that you really only need them to run that shop I don't need them to be a fully fleshed out character it's also a thing that can happen a little bit with the main cast because you're running through so many people even within your main group of characters that it can often feel a little hard to relate to pretty much any of them outside of maybe like the main 3 to five in my case that aside though let's start talking about progression systems progression in this game comes down to quite a few different things really the heroes themselves that you'll be recruiting your town in which many of them will either work or assist you with in some way the levels of all of those characters including the 71 of them that you can use in combat specifically the gear that is on those characters including the runes available to them that their Rune lenses will utilize to grant them abilities so first up let's talk about the heroes 100 20 of them total throughout the game you'll have moments where you're a little more free to roam around and often after each major story event more of these characters become available in the world to you and you can run around and recruit them recruiting them sometimes is as easy as simply talking to them other times you'll have to perform a small task in some way this can be anything from just finding a particular item that drops off an enemy going and fishing something growing your town to a certain size and a host of other things another big aspect of this is your town the thing that serves as our main base this comes into play a bit after what I would consider the First Act of the game so you don't get it right away of course but the town itself has various levels you can talk to a woman named Iris who will bring up the development Studio they call it where you can see the requirements to make individual upgrades to the town you can upgrade the core of your town once you reach certain population levels have recruited enough characters Etc at which point the town gets a bit of a glow up so to speak and becomes less of a castle ruin and more of a castle surrounded by various buildings on a more granular level though this includes all sorts of upgrades to things like your storage your ability to actually carry items for yourself as there is an item limit the storage of the resources your town is going to passively generate individual shops you can make once you've established the trading house alongside a host of other things like for instance upgrading the in to provide you with a place to cook meals a hot spring for character events that can play out you can breed an animal called an egg foot and race them so there's a lot going on in town is my point a lot of these buildings though require you to recruit very specific people to run them and this is where some of the collection helpers if you want to call it that can help you out there is one hero for instance that can Divine where to find other Heroes for you which is especially helpful as you might imagine and eventually if you do enough of this your town is the best town in the game at which point you'll have full access to all the services provided you spend the time progressing it it's also Worth to mention that this thing can passively generate resources for you you're going to need things like Stone Lumber various types of ore and lumber Etc to build all this stuff and it is possible to unlock certain buildings and heroes that will start to generate those things for your town as the population of your town increases and you do these things you'll also be able to start earning currency for your town specifically as well as currency for you and by the time your town reaches level four which is the the maximum and gets everything maxed out you're pulling in a ton of cash every few minutes so the town is a major source of progression throughout the story that kind of touches a little bit of everything else but let's talk about your Heroes now it's important to divide Heroes into I would say combat and non-combat heroes a lot of Heroes are available in combat 71 of them to be specific with the other 49 only being available for your town in some way now your Combat Characters will level up as you kill things increasing their St STS as well and each of them generally is a little bit better at one thing or another or perhaps is a generalist and what they are or are not able to equip via their runes may or may not be a little bit different generally there's a ton of archetypes at play here and because each of these characters does do a little bit something different I think they add a lot to the conversation in terms of adjusting little things about your individual party layout which I thought was pretty cool but a helpful thing when it comes to leveling up all of these characters is a sort of almost rubber band effect that enemies can have you see at the end of the day we're managing a lot of people here and there are parts of the game where you have to manage multiple different teams of Heroes which means quite a few of them are going to need to be leveled up you might be a little worried about the work that's going to go into that but that's where this sort of I guess experience scaling for lack of a better term can catch characters up extremely quickly basically if an enemy is near your level or below it your character will get a relatively small amount of EXP experience from it if however you're fighting enemies much higher level than you you will get a disproportionate amount of experience to what you just killed usually so much in fact and it's divided up amongst your party members to give the lowest party member the most of it which can in some case see them gaining like 20 levels in a single battle if they were severely underleveled and you can use that mechanic to quickly catch up to individual points of the game simply by fighting a few easy trash battles if you will which I think is noteworthy just because we're dealing with so many characters here that a simple way to make sure they're up to speed when you're going to have to control more of them is very helpful but then there's gearing all of those characters unfortunately there's not really much of a fix for this you're going to be controlling a lot of characters they all need gear it's going to cost money and you're likely going to pick a sort of core team that you choose to outfit and everyone else is only going to get updated when you absolutely need that particular character or at least that's the approach I took to it every character that you can use in combat though has a few different slots that they can equip types of equipment too certain characters can only equip certain types of equipment as you might expect so like Mages and the like can't equip heavy armor or Shields things like that there's basically a head chest and shield slot with an accessory slot as well the accessory slot is the most variable with all sorts of different effects that you can put on any given character such as the ability to gain more experience increase the item drop rate from enemies more specific stuff like increasing your stats even so a lot of stuff going on there now you might be wondering about weapons for your individual characters and these you won't be swapping out each character has a set weapon but you will be improving them over the course of the game you do this by finding the Smith in any given Town each one of which has a limit to which they can improve your weapon so initially this is pretty low but eventually gets up to a maximum of 15 at your town Hub this of course though only applies to Your Heroes that actually take part in combat as your non-combat Heroes don't have anything to improve here but then we have our runes this part I would say is the most variable across the forms of progression here simply because as I mentioned what any given Rune lens does for any given person is a bit variable and that's reflected here as any of these characters level up they unlock more Rune slots which have a few different types associated with them that you can slot a rune into this is how your characters are going to learn and access magic or abilities in the case of some characters these runes are actually set in stone for instance Noah learns a couple of different abilities with these Rune slots that can't be changed out some of them however provide passive effects or abilities that you get to choose now my problem with this system is simply that there's usually a very clear right answer here for instance if I've got a Melee character with a low magic skill I'm not going to bother putting Magic on him I'm just going to give him the passive runes that upgrade his stat even farther to make sure he's doing the most amount of damage possible if I've got a Magic character I'm going to either give them the passive magic increase runes or I'm going to give them the type of magic I want them using and that's just kind of a boring system in my opinion I see what they were going for but there's just such an obvious right answer that doing anything besides that would be silly so it is what it is I guess but I would say that's the core of the progression systems to be aware of which brings us to the gaml and world of this title now right away I think as you've probably seen on screen up to this point for me at the very least the game has a very striking mix of somewhat pixelated Sprites with more traditional 3D environments which is an interesting touch and for me at least that landed I kind of liked it it looks a little bit odd but you get used to it pretty quick and while it can cause some slight visual glitches here and there they're minor and for the most part I thought it was pretty Charming otherwise though the game can be divided up in between the Overworld and individual locations in the Overworld we can travel to various locations and each of these individual areas that we can r around in typically represents a nation in the League of Nations there's going to be a handful of locations including towns and dungeons in each individual area and usually something that connects it to another area you could travel to this means that while we are separated by loading screens and the like here and there it is largely a connected World which I thought was pretty cool now before we dive too much into what that world contains it's important to talk about party layout support characters and attendance our poor party is the six characters we're going to be using in combat it's also important if they are in the front or rear as each character's General attack has a short medium or long range which determines who they can attack because if they have a short attack range and you put them in the rear row they can't attack anything so there is that but then we have support characters some characters while not usable in combat can be put in the support slot to provide some sort of passive benefit to your character this can be doing things like activating some sort of damaging ability when combat starts a character that makes you able to double your running speed the Smith who can strengthen your weapons at the start of combat and a host of other abilities really so you do get that support slot to customize a little farther but then there's the attendance slots you see sometimes when you're playing through the story certain characters are required to be there but they're not required to be used in combat because you can instead throw them into the three attendance slots to accompany your party but not actually participate in combat and this is how you're going to get around some of that party management problem I alluded to earlier which overall I thought was a neat feature that definitely helps with some of the party bloat here now from there let's talk a little more specifically much of our exploration and the gameplay and World centers around the League of Nations and while some of this is I would say somewhat standard medieval fantasy type stuff there are more impressive things to be had as each individual area tends to represent its own culture and distinct environment for instance we have the shiar which are shark-like beastmen which took me an embarrassingly long time to put together because they start mentioning the name long before they show what they are but they live out in the desert as opposed to water and they've learned to Craft boats specifically designed to effectively sail across the sand dunes which was fun you can even participate in a few races for them and then you have the nation of ukis which is a bit more Eastern in its environment and architecture and then of course your standard more snowy environments Etc so there's a fair bit to explore just in terms of diverse environments but what is the game actually filled with well as I've already mentioned in quite a bit of detail we've got our main town which is going to act as one of our main hubs that we're going to build up and expand upon but that's far from the only thing to get up to as each Town actually provides a host of different things in terms of mini games and side content to get up to as an example we can breed and race egg feet which are these bizarre eggl looking birds we can of course go fishing which can give us all sorts of fish to then utilize in the cooking which can be either a buff oriented thing where you cook up items to use in combat but there's also a cooking mini game that was initially very horrendous to deal with but a very timely patch adjusted some of the ratings that made it a little bit easier though realistically because of the judges being prone to their likes and dislikes and the fact that they're made up of the heroes you recruit does make it possible to sort of puzzle out an exact food combination for that mini game that pleases everyone and thus will win all the battles for you so there is that there's the shark races that I mentioned there's also a card game miname because of course there is that one's probably the least used overall once you build the card shop in your town you can go there and challenge all the other Heroes you've recruited to a card match if you want but it doesn't really come up there's also the miname of Bea or beama which is like a weird Beyblade knockoff that made me laugh it's probably one of the more substantial side quests with like a whole little Arc to it and it was very humorous and that's not to mention more specific stuff like the hot springs or individual dungeons showcasing what they did with some of the 3D Puzzle environments here as each area generally has some sort of mechanic you'll have to work with when you move through it for instance this Clockwork Tower has both gear puzzles and plants you have to destroy to move forward but then there's a little more interesting stuff like shops and commerce for instance there's this huge trading mechanic the game has where every town has a trade store if you will that sells a variety of trade goods for different prices you can utilize this to trade these things and make a profit off of them if you sell them in the right place this is assisted later on in the game once you get access to a specific hero that allows you to teleport to places instantly named Carrie and thus you can facilitate this trade very easily and it's a good way to make a lot of money but another interesting thing about shops in particular is that a lot of the shops in various towns have what the game calls rare finds things that can show up in their inventory only rarely which I believe is on some sort of timer but I don't know exactly how long so there are a few Dynamic elements to the world that can be fun to mess around with last but not least for this section though we then have the save system I just wanted to point this out really like a lot of older jrpgs this game mostly sees you saving it set points out in the world or when you rested an in you can usually save there as well the game will also autosave but you can't just save freely when you're out in the open world with can be a little bit annoying at times I didn't find it too painful but it's definitely a slightly older way of dealing with things that though does finally bring us to the combat system now unsurprisingly this is a turn-based system utilizing a turn order involving things like damage type armor systems unique battle gimmicks items hero Combos and a few other unique things like duels and we'll talk about the War battles as well though I do want to kick this particular section off with the thing I didn't like about combat and is the fact that at the start of every round you have to pick what your characters are going to do on their turn all at once this effectively means that every single round you have to anticipate what the enemy is going to do which means if you want a Healer to heal that can be a little bit tricky because whether or not you get that heal off before say someone dies or your healer in particular gets attacked is really just guesswork and while you can get used to it and there are specific mechanics you can utilize to make this a little less noteworthy it's a little bit annoying now on its own I don't think that would be so bad until I noticed that your enemies are not beholden to this meaning that for their single Target abilities they pick that Target when they go to attack not before and I know this because if you have a character die resurrect them it's possible for in that very same round for them to get targeted by a single target attack Again by the enemy which means they are not playing by the same rules your characters are which means your inability to react to things in the moment can be the source of a fair bit of frustration especially in the early game when you don't have a lot of options to deal with these things like I talked about in the difficulty section and I think that's a shame because combat does do a lot of things I do really like such as some of the more granular detail of how your combat setup looks who is in what row where are they attacking from what do their abilities look like what runes do you have equipped on them to give them different abilities do you use one of their defensive Maneuvers to mitigate incoming damage do you utilize the gimmick of a particular battle to take advantage of attacking a boss in some way but unfortunately just simply having to deal with not being able to react to those things in the moment does make it feel a bit less impactful overall and that sometimes you're simply rolling the dice whether or not something actually works out which has the side effect of making you feel like you're not really all that much in control of what's happening in particular though a few different things to note is that there are a bunch of different damage types your usual stuff your Elemental things but also different simp simple melee damage types as well so if you're using anything range that typically comes up as thrown some Heroes actually use grapple which along with magic bypasses armor a lot of melee abilities like slashing for instance will actually be mitigated by armor and depending on your character's equipment or the enemies they'll have a little Shield next to their name depicting how much armor they have and you'll deal reduced damage to that enemy with certain damage types until that's broken then there's hero combos based on the relationships between your individ ual Heroes you can use some of your resource to actually instead pull off some combo utilizing all of those characters which can be a little fun and generally you have skill points and Magic points to utilize a lot of this stuff your skill points regenerate as your character just makes regular attacks but your magic points are simply what you have until you restore them with items or rest which means utilizing a lot of magic does have its downsides because there's a limit of how much you can do and all of that is well and good but is unfortunately broken by a few items late game in particular you can find some one-use magical items in the late game one of those items in particular a rune Shard of Earth level five I believe has the ability to just make your entire party immune to the enemies attacks for like three turns which even against late game bosses is like an I win button and those drop regularly from enemies in the iname which I thought was a little bit odd though last note on the regular combat system is that one of the things you can build in your own town is a sort of endless Boss Rush and that's important because while the story will take you to probably mid-50s level 60 the Boss Rush area is where you're going to be able to grind to level 99 and there's even an endless mode so if you happen to enjoy the combat for what it is you can engage in a lot of that there which is where you're going to be doing so after the main story ends because nothing after that point will really give you much experience otherwise but then we have the duels now in certain climactic moments for the story The Game actually doesn't use a traditional battle system it uses their dual system this system is typically a 1V one in which your options are to attack counter or break the goal in duels is to get to where you can break this involves building tension the orange bar under your character this is best done by simply spamming the counter button until it raises but once that tension bar is full to a certain point you can use the break ability which then progresses The Duel I thought this was probably fine for certain storytelling moments but don't think it added a lot to the game gameplay-wise and then right here because I really didn't know where else to put it is the War battle mechanic you see as we are dealing with a full-blown war in many cases some of that doesn't really translate to a small battle with six party members so we get the war screen a lot of these are also dictated by various story moments because what commanders you have for individual units is set by where you are in the story for instance one character might lead a certain lead Legion and thus be able to issue their very specific commands available to that character to your legion also important to mention that the heroes you'll recruit out in the world make up the individual squads of your Legions here that you can then swap out before the battle starts which means the heroes you have recruited have a very substantial impact on the actual battles here otherwise though it's basically down to which units attack who and from what angle there are legion abilities that will allow you to increase your attack lower enemy defenses simply damage them outright or simply position yourself a little better for the most part I was not super impressed with these War battles most of them are Story related which means they're not very difficult to win but I think they do well enough for what they are supposed to be and they do come up a fair bit you can also build a thing in your town which allows you to perform a few different mock battles of this type if you say want more of it but moving right along to the steam deck section of the video now steam deck for particular game is largely a decent experience you can fire it up get a decent frame rate and the game is very playable like that but there are a few different things to note in particular the game thus far is running at about 40 FPS generally on that system which is important because of that encounter bug I mentioned I don't know if that'll be fixed in the future but for now it is what it is it also has your usual stuff like Cloud saves controller support Etc that make it pretty easy to play as most games of this genre typically are one important thing to note though is that the game seems to save whatever your graphical settings are if you were on PC and then switch to the steam deck so if you're moving back and forth a lot that might be a consideration for you as you'll have to change the graphical settings a lot and it's probably worth to mention that there are certain screens of this game that just have a lot of very small text where you're looking at a lot of different numbers for a lot of your different characters which might be hard to read on that particular screen discounting those things however I would say the steam deck is a very approachable way to play this title and something you could definitely do from there though let's talk positives negatives and then ramp this thing up now on the positive side of things I have to say while I didn't talk about it too much in the combat section is that I really liked the gimmick system certain bosses have little gimmicks or things you can attack that aren't the boss that then have various effects on the battlefield and while not a revolutionary idea I did have fun playing around with those in the battles it came up in I also really enjoyed the visuals of this game well it looks like a little odd at first the mixture of sprite based characters alongside 3D environments just really landed for me I thought it looked really cool and reminded me of a lot of those older jrpgs I used to play for myself and despite its issues I did enjoy how much of combat you could customize down to the characters you were using the gear they had on the abilities they may or may not have and while the Rune system I think could simply be more impactful I think if you really want to get very granular in how you approach your combat set setup you can do that and the game provides an outlet for that even all the way up to level 99 via that Boss Rush stuff in your main town now on the negative side of things I do think that the fact that you cannot react in combat but enemies seemingly can or at least are picking people at random when their turn rolls around is frustrating I would have preferred to see that simply let you take your turns as they pop up as opposed to picking everything at the start of the round I also think that while the story was decent it's kind of difficult to care about a lot of these characters because they just get so little screen time or they have very little impact on the story especially when you're managing dozens of them and the party management is also a thing that's hard to defend really because you're just trying to manage equipment and the like for so many characters because even if you're not using all of them you're realistically going to have to keep about 20 of them where you want them if you don't want to run into any problems with the story here and there and that's just a lot to juggle and it gets pretty tedious pretty quickly it's not Impossible by any means and the game does have a few mechanics aimed at fixing exactly that problem it's still an issue all of that though brings me to my conclusion in many ways Auden Chronicle here is a very fun jrpg that reminded me a lot of my initial playthroughs through a lot of say older Final Fantasy games or other jrpgs but I will say that despite trying to modernize the genre and bring It Forward I don't think it really manages to do that if any anything I'd say this game much like basically every other recent jrpg I've seen that's tried to do this feels more like older games than it does anything else but in spite of that it's still a very fun jrpg with a lot of different things to do a big Grand story to tell and outside of a few different minor issues I do largely think that this particular game manages to justify its price tag which just so happens to be $50 us and of course whatever that is regionally for people and for that price I think you're more than getting your money's worth if this is the type of game you already enjoy playing though I do believe it's available on Game Pass as well which means of course that this game gets a buy out of me and that's pretty much going to do it for this particular video I certainly hope you enjoyed it do let me know down below how you feel about this particular title which of course means to like comment subscribe all the YouTube jazz but regardless of any of that truly just thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day [Music]

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 124,539

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, eiyuden chronicle, eiyuden chronicle hundred heroes, eiyuden chronicle hundred heroes review, eiyuden chronicle hundred heroes gameplay, eiyuden chronicle review, eiyuden chronicle hundred heroes walkthrough, eiyuden chronicle hundred heroes ost, eiyuden chronicle hundred heroes ign review, eiyuden chronicle hundred heroes characters, eiyuden chronicle gameplay

Id: uzahCXRZFzY

Length: 32min 40sec (1960 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2024