Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes makes me appreciate Sea of Stars even more
Plenty of modern games have tried to recapture the nostalgic retro vibes of early 1990s RPGs. And some are more successful than others.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, out now, is a spiritual successor to the popular Suikoden series. After all, the game was developed by Rabbit & Bear, a studio composed of previous Konami employees who worked on the Suikoden games. With the series having been dormant without any new entries since 2012, it was Hundred Heroes’ time to shine. It sports an excellent story and fantastic worldbuilding, along with a pixel art direction that invokes those feelings of nostalgia.
But with those strengths come some ’90s baggage. Its quality of life is lacking, with aggravating resource management, stingy healing options, and a glut of tired random encounters. Those issues hurt my playthrough, which I said was faithful to a fault in my review earlier this week. Hundred Heroes had the perfect opportunity to bring the spirit of Suikoden to the modern age, but it instead shows the pitfalls of sticking too close to old game design. The best retro revivals capture nostalgia while still pushing game design forward. And there’s no better counterpoint to Hundred Heroes than last year’s triumphant Sea of Stars.
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Moving retro forward
At a glance, Sea of Stars looks like it was pulled directly from the SNES era. It’s painted in faithful pixel art that doesn’t look that far off from Chrono Trigger. The more you dig into its gameplay, though, the more it differs from that game. It doesn’t have random enemy encounters; foes wander the screen and rush at players to initiate battles. While enemies are quite fast and will quickly chase you down if they spot you, at least I know when to anticipate a battle. In Hundred Heroes, I was praying that I wouldn’t trigger a battle when I was backtracking to an inn to
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