Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes - Review After 100%

What's going on now, everyone here? This time I bring you my

review

after 100% of a uden Chronicle 100 Heroes, a jrpg that seeks to recreate many older jrpg titles and advance that genre a little, especially although it is intended to be a spiritual successor. to another game called sui Coden, but first, to get out of the way, I

review

games after 100% to differentiate myself from other reviewers on the platform, and while that includes achievements, it also includes a lot more than that. a video linked below that covers everything I review and my Steam profile is public and is also linked below 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 ago. before its official launch, which is why we're already a little past that point, but I absolutely got a few days of Head Start over most people, which is especially noteworthy because I sincerely doubt I can get 100% this until the embargoes are lifted because I needed to have to use quite a few different guides and there are actually a couple of bugs involved in recruiting a couple of different characters that I learned with enough time to avoid them, so overall I would say it worked, which which is a pretty natural place to film. on the technical state of this particular title and overall I'd say it's in a pretty good place, aside from a few notable bugs, obviously the recruiting issues I mentioned, although I think one of them has already been patched, too It's worth mentioning that the default key bindings for this on PC, of ​​course, and the keyboard and mouse here aren't exactly great, but since this isn't an action game, it's not the end of the world, although unfortunately you can't relink most of them, which can be a problem.

Another point worth mentioning that I think has already been addressed is that the encounter rate was initially tied to your FPS, meaning that if you got a really good FPS you would encounter fewer enemies, although the game has an option to switch between 30 FPS and a 60fps mode and ironically I really enjoyed this because it meant I could effectively toggle how many random encounters I wanted so although technically speaking it was a bug I turned it to my advantage which was fun so on the side technical things, mainly the game. It's in a pretty good place, but there are certainly a few things to keep in mind and at least in my experience there was nothing game breaking and I haven't seen anyone report anything of that nature either, but putting that aside, let's talk a bit. little about what this game is about and what we are going to do now, as I mentioned, it is very much a spiritual successor to the older jrpg games, sui hoden to be pacific and its goal is to recreate many of those feelings that we will recruit up 120 different

heroes

and we will use them to build and staff a city that will help us play a role in a large political drama with what I would say looks like a very familiar jrpg plot, but before we dive headfirst into First let's talk about the difficulty of this game.

Something that surprises me, actually this game had a few different difficulty options, mainly meant to make the game harder and not just in combat but in other things as well, for example you can activate hyperinflation, which UPS the cost of basically anything you buy in stores and while I would say that becomes irrelevant towards the end of the game, along with almost all other non-combat things they are interesting options, but now, speaking of difficulty, I will say that this is a In those games, the difficulty is very intense because you just don't resort to resources or options to deal with things in the early stages of the game that you have later, which makes walking through the last few bosses even very easy.

There's something to do, and I actually struggled more with the first few bosses than anything else the game had to offer moving forward, though now let's talk about the story setup and my thoughts on it. I think a uden

chronicle

takes place in Allon's world. is called where we play the role of Noah, a young man who has recently joined the ranks of the guard, a kind of military group that helps in what is called the League of Nations, a great alliance between a group of different nations. which is opposite to the Galdan Empire, these two forces have recently joined forces and have recruited the watch in search of what they call race lenses.

Rune glasses are special magical crystals of some description that connect with certain individuals and allow them to exert magic or simply other physical abilities that most people would use. Lenses typically haven't been run due to the nature of how they work and how inconsistent they are even with the power they grant. They have been the source of quite a bit of frustration in the world. We immediately learn that the Empire has developed recently. a technology called regules that can amplify the magic of a rune lens and make it available to people who don't have a rune lens, which is obviously a pretty important development in this particular world, although at the beginning of the game we are looking for what Call to a primary lens the strongest variant of the Rune lenses that one can find and they would like to study it to see if they can improve this technology further, as expected, after this goes well and they discover that the lens that the Empire uses this new found technology and a couple of false flag operations to start a war with a League of Nations using no small amount of betrayal to achieve it, most of the plot revolves around handling exactly this situation, that's all what I want to talk about, just to avoid. spoilers since after all this game was recently released but that's the general plot setup so some more specific points in particular I wanted to talk about are that in many ways it's a standard jrpg plot , a coalition of forces set against a large Empire that is doing what Imperial forces tend to do: trying to take over and conquer more and more territory with our ragtag team of

heroes

trying to do everything they can to stop it, although I will say which breaks jrpg tradition a bit and we don't end up fighting God even if there are a few monsters in the mix overall, although I'd 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, for sure. What is definitely noteworthy and hard to avoid when you bring up this topic, however, is that the localization of some English writing is definitely a little off. Personally, I found this most notable towards the beginning of the game, when we're introducing a lot of characters very quickly and many of them can often seem like you're talking about, say, a modern-day teenager rather than someone who exists in a world. fantasy and can definitely break your immersion a bit for me.

That wasn't the end of the world, but it definitely may be off base in certain areas. Another problem is that at least I had a little trouble connecting with many of the characters just because there were so many. of them and a lot of them really only have little 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 was able to connect with, like our main character Noah, it's just very hard to care. that a lot of people showed up so quickly, some of whom's job is actually just running a store in town and who you barely talk to otherwise and while that's fine for characters like that, you really only need them to run that store.

They don't have to be a fully developed character, it's also something that can happen a bit with the main cast because you meet so many people, even within your main group of characters, that it can often be a little difficult to relate to. to pretty much any of them outside of maybe like the main 3 to five in my case, aside from that let's start talking about the progression systems, progression in this game comes down to quite a few different things, really the heroes themselves that you will recruit. city ​​in which many of them will work or help you in some way with the levels of all those characters, including the 71 that you can use in combat, specifically the equipment that those characters have, including the runes available to them that The runic lenses are will be used to grant them abilities, so let's talk about the heroes first. 100. 20 of them in total throughout the game.

You'll have moments where you have a little more freedom to roam, and often after each major story event there will be more of these. Characters are available in the world for you and you can run around and recruit them. Recruiting them is sometimes as easy as simply talking to them, other times you will have to perform a small task in some way, this can be anything from simply finding a particular character. item that leaves an enemy going and fishing something that grows your city to a certain size and a host of other things another big aspect of this is your city which 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 understand it right away of course, but the city itself has several levels.

You can talk to a woman named Iris, who will show you the development studio, as they call it, where you can see the requirements to make. individual upgrades to the city, you can upgrade the core of your city once you reach certain population levels, have recruited enough characters, etc., at which point the city shines a little, so to speak, and becomes less of a ruin of a castle and more of a castle surrounded by various buildings on a more granular level, although this includes all sorts of improvements to things like your storage, your ability to carry items for yourself since there is an item limit, the storage of items. resources that your city will passively generate individual stores. you can do once you have established the trading house along with a number of other things such as upgrading the entrance to give you a place to cook, a hot spring for character events that can unfold, you can raise an animal called an egg .

Walk and compete with them, so there are a lot of things happening in the city. My point is that many of these buildings require you to recruit very specific people to manage them and this is where some of the collection assistants, if you want to call them that, can help you. There's a hero, for example, who can guess where to find other heroes for you, which is especially useful, as you can imagine, and eventually, if you do enough, your city will be the best city in the game, at which point you'll have access complete. Access to all services as long as you put in the time to progress.

It's also worth mentioning that this can passively generate resources for you. You will need things like Stone Lumber, various types of minerals and wood, etc. to build all these things. It is possible to unlock certain buildings and heroes that will start generating those things for your city as your city's population increases and you do these things. You will also be able to start earning currency for your city specifically, as well as currency for yourself. and by the time your city reaches level four, which is the maximum and has everything maxed out, you're earning a ton of cash every few minutes, so the city is an important source of progression throughout the story that somehow it touches a little. about everything else, but let's talk about your heroes, now it is important to divide the heroes into, I would say, combat and non-combat heroes, many heroes are available in combat, 71 of them to be specific and the other 49 are only available for your city in Somehow now your combat characters will level up as you kill things, also increasing their St STS and generally each of them is a little better at one thing or another or maybe it's a generalist and what they can or can't equip through their runes may or may not be a little different, there are generally a lot of archetypes at play here and because each of these characters does something different, I think they add a lot to the game. the conversation in terms of adjusting little things about your individual party design which I thought was cool, but something useful when it comes to leveling up all of these characters is a sort of almost rubber band effect that enemies can make you see when End of the day, we're managing a lot of people here and there in parts of the game where you have to manage several different teams of heroes, which means some of them will need to level up.

You might be a little worried about the work that's going to go into that, but that's where, I guess, this kind of experience scaling, for lack of a better term, can catch characters extremely quickly, basically, if an enemy is close to or below your level, yourcharacter will gain a relatively small amount of experience experience if, however, you are fighting enemies of a much higher level than yours, you will gain a disproportionate amount of experience to what you just killed, usually from In fact, it is divided among your party members to give the largest share to the lowest party member, who in some cases can see them. gain like 20 levels in a single battle if they were way under leveled and you can use that mechanic to quickly reach individual game points just by fighting some easy trash battles, which I think is worth noting just because we're dealing with so many characters here.

It's very useful to make sure they're up to date when you're going to have to control more of them, but then you have to equip all those characters, unfortunately there's not much of a solution. for this you will control many characters, they all need equipment, it will cost money and you will probably choose some kind of core equipment that you will choose to equip and all the others will only be upgraded when you absolutely need that particular character or at least that is the approach I took, each character you can use in combat, although it has a few different slots in which they can equip types of equipment, certain characters can only equip certain types of equipment like you could.

Expect mages and the like to not be able to equip heavy armor or shields, things like that, there's basically a chest and shield slot with an accessory slot, plus the accessory slot is the most variable with all sorts of different effects that you can put any given character, like the ability to gain more experience, increase item drop rate from enemies, more specific things like increasing your stats, still, there's a lot going on there now, you might be wondering about the weapons for your individual characters and these you will earn. You won't change each character, they have a set weapon, but you will upgrade them throughout the game.

To do this, find the Smith in any given city, each of whom have a limit to which they can upgrade your weapon, so initially this is quite low, but eventually maxes out at 15 in your city center. This of course only applies to your heroes that actually engage in combat, as your non-combat heroes have nothing to upgrade here, but then we have our Runes, this part I would say is the most variable in all of them. the forms of progression here simply because, as I mentioned, what any given Rune lens does for a given person is a bit variable and that's reflected here when any of these characters level up, they unlock more Runes. slots that have a few different types associated that you can place a rune into.

This is how your characters will learn and access magic or abilities. In the case of some characters, these runes are actually carved in stone, for example, Noah learns a couple. of different skills with these rune slots that cannot be changed, some of them, however, provide passive effects or skills that you can choose now. My problem with this system is simply that there is usually a very clear right answer here, for example if I have a melee character with a low magical ability. I'm not going to bother putting magic in it. I'll only give him passive runes that further boost his stats to make sure he's doing the most damage possible.

I have a Magic character. I'm either going to give them passive magic boost runes or I'm going to give them the type of magic I want them to use and that's a bit of a boring system in my opinion. I see what they were looking for, but there's such an obvious right answer that doing anything else besides that would be silly, so I guess it is what it is, but I'd say that's the core of the progression systems we should Keep in mind, which brings us to the gameplay and world of this title right now, I think, as you've probably seen on screen up to this point, for me at least the game has a very striking mix of somewhat pixelated Sprites with 3D environments more traditional, which is an interesting touch and for me at least I liked that, it looks a little strange but you get used to it pretty quickly and while it may cause some slight visual glitches here and there, they are minor and for the most part part, I thought it was nice.

Otherwise, while the game can be split between Overworld and individual locations in the Overworld, we can travel to multiple locations and each of these individual areas we can roam through usually represents a nation in the League of Nations. a handful of locations including towns and dungeons in each individual area and usually something connecting it to another area you can travel to, this means that while we're separated by loading screens and the like here and there , it's very much a connected world, which I thought. was pretty good now, before we dive too far into what that world contains, it's important to talk about party design, support characters, and support.

Our poor group are the six characters that we will use in combat. It is also important if they are in front. or back as each character's overall 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 back row they can't attack anything so that's it but then we have support characters some characters, although they can't be used in combat they can be placed in the support slot to provide some kind of passive benefit to your character, this can be doing things like activating some kind of damaging skill when combat starts, a character that allows you to double your running speed, the blacksmith who can strengthen your weapons at the start of combat and a host of other skills, so you get that support slot to customize a bit more, but then there are the assist spaces you see sometimes when you're playing the story.

Certain characters are required to be there, but you don't have to use them in combat because you can instead place them in the three support slots to accompany your party, but not participate in combat, and that's how you'll move. Some of the group management issues I mentioned above, which overall I thought were a cool feature that definitely helps with some of the group bloat. Now from there, let's talk a little more specifically about a lot of our exploration, gameplay, and world hubs around the League. of Nations and while some of this is, I would say, standard medieval fantasy type stuff, there is some more impressive stuff, as each individual area tends to represent its own distinct culture and environment, for example we have the Shiar, who They are shark-like beastmen. which took me an embarrassingly long time to put together because they start mentioning the name long before showing what they are, but they live in the desert instead of water and have learned to make ships specifically designed to navigate effectively through the sand. dunes which was fun you can even take part in some races for them and then you have the nation of the ukis which is a bit more eastern in its environment and architecture and then of course your standard snowier environments etc. so there is a lot to explore. just in terms of diverse environments, but what is the game really full of?

Well, as I already mentioned in quite some detail, we have our main city that will act as one of our main hubs that we go to. to build and expand, but that's far from the only thing there is to do, as each city actually offers a number of different things in terms of mini-games and side content to take advantage of, as an example, we can breed and compete with paws of egg which are these strange birds that look like eggs, of course we can go fishing, which can give us all kinds of fish to then use in cooking, which can be something geared towards improvement in which you cook items to use in combat, but There is also a cooking minigame.

At first it was very horrendous to deal with, but a very timely patch adjusted some of the ratings, making it a little easier, albeit realistically, due to the judges being prone to their likes and dislikes and the fact that that are made up of heroes. that recruits makes it possible to figure out an exact combination of foods for that minigame that pleases everyone and will therefore win all the battles for you, so there are the shark races that I mentioned, there is also a card game, Miname, due a Of course, one is 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 game if you want, but not really appears. the name Bea or beama which is like a weird Beyblade knockoff that made me laugh is probably one of the more substantial side quests with a whole little arc and it was a lot of fun and that's not even mentioning more specific things like the hot ones. individual springs or dungeons showing what they did with some of the 3D puzzle environments here, as each area usually has some sort of mechanics that you'll have to work with when you move through it, for example this Mechanical Tower has gear and plant puzzles you have. destroy to advance, but then there are slightly more interesting things like shops and trading, for example, there's this huge trading mechanic that the game has where each city has a trading shop, so to speak, that sells a variety of trading goods to different prices you can use. this to exchange these things and make profit from them if you sell them in the right place.

This is helped later in the game once you gain access to a specific hero that allows you to instantly teleport to places called Carrie and so you can facilitate this trade very easily and it is a good way to earn a lot of money, but another interesting thing about shops in particular is that many of the shops in various cities have what the game calls rare items that can appear only in your inventory. rarely, which I think has some kind of timer, but I don't know exactly how long, so there are some dynamic elements in the world that can be fun to play with last but not least for this section though then we have the save. system Just wanted to point this out, like many older jrpgs this game mainly allows you to save set points in the world or when you rest and you can usually save there too, the game will auto save too but you can't just freely save when you're on The open world can be a bit annoying at times.

I didn't find it too painful, but it's definitely a slightly older way of dealing with things that ultimately leads us into combat. system Now, as you would expect, this is a turn-based system that uses a turn order that involves things like damage type armor systems, unique battle tricks, items, hero combos, and some other unique things like duels , and we will also talk about war battles, although I do want to. To start this particular section with what I didn't like about combat and that is the fact that at the beginning of each round you have to choose what your characters are going to do on their turn, this effectively means that each of them In this round you have You have to anticipate what the enemy is going to do, which means that if you want a healer to heal, that can be a little tricky, because whether or not you get that heal before someone dies or your particular healer gets attacked, it's really It's just guesswork and while you can get used to it and there are specific mechanics you can use to make this a little less noticeable, it's now a bit annoying on its own.

I don't think it's that bad until I realized that your enemies are not forced to this, which means that for their single target abilities they choose that target when they go to attack, not before and I know this because if you have a character that dies, resurrect him, they may be the target of a single target attack again from the enemy in that same round, which means they are not playing by the same rules as your characters, which means your inability to react facing things in the moment can be a source of quite a bit of frustration, especially early in the game when I don't have many options to deal with these things as I talked about in the difficulty section and I think that's a shame because combat does a lot of things that I really like them, like some of the more granular details of how combat plays out.

The setup looks at who is in which row, where they attack, and what aspect their abilities are viewed from. What runes do you have equipped to give them different abilities? Do you use one of his defensive maneuvers to mitigate incoming damage? Do you use the particular battle trick to take advantage of attacking a boss in some way, but unfortunately just having to deal with not being able to react to those things in the moment makes it seem a little less impactful overall and that sometimes you're just rolling the dice whether something actually works or not, which has the side effect of making youfeel like you don't really have control of what's happening in particular, although a few different things to keep in mind is that there are a lot of different types of damage that your usual thing is to refill your Elemental stuff, but also different types of simple melee damage, so if you're using any range that normally appears as thrown, some Heroes actually use grab which, along with magic, prevents armor, many melee abilities, like slashing, for example.

It will actually be mitigated by armor and depending on your character's equipment or the enemies, they will have a small shield next to their name that represents how much armor they have and you will deal reduced damage to that enemy with certain damage types up to break, then there are hero combos based on the relationships between your individual heroes, you can use some of your resources to perform some combo using all of those characters, which can be a bit of fun and generally you have points of skill and magic points to use many of them. This means that your skill points regenerate since your character only performs regular attacks, but your magic points are simply what you have until you restore them with items or rest, which means that using a lot of magic has its disadvantages because there is a limit on the amount that you can do and that's all well and good, but unfortunately it's cut short by some late-game elements in particular.

You can find some single-use magic items at the end of the game. One of those items in particular is a level five Earth Shard rune, I believe it has the ability to make your entire party immune to enemy attacks for about three turns, which even against late game bosses is like a "I win" button and these regularly drop from enemies in the name, which I thought was a bit strange, although the last note on the normal combat system is that one of the things you can build in your own city is a kind of endless Boss Rush and that's important because, although the story will probably take you to level 60, in the mid-50s, the Boss Rush area is where you can advance until level 99 and there is even an endless mode, so that if you enjoy combat for what it is, you can do it. engage in a lot of it there, which is where you'll do it after the main story ends because otherwise nothing after that point will really give you much experience, but now we have the duels at certain climactic moments in the story.

The game doesn't actually use a traditional battle system, it uses its dual system. This system is usually a 1V system where your options are to attack, counter, or break. The goal in duels is to get to where you can break. This involves generating tension in the orange. bar below your character, this is best done by simply spamming the counter button until it goes up, but once the tension bar is full to a certain point you can use the break ability which then progresses. The Duel I thought this was probably okay for certain moments in the narrative, but I don't think it added much to the game gameplay-wise and then here, because I didn't really know where else to put it, it's the War battle mechanics that you see, since in many cases we are dealing with a full-blown war.

Some of that doesn't really translate into a small battle with six party members, which is why we have the war screen. Many of these are also dictated by various moments in the story because the commanders you have for individual units are set based on where you are in the story. For example, a character could lead a certain leader legion and therefore be able to issue very specific commands available to that character to your legion. It's also important to mention that the heroes you'll recruit in the world make up the individual squads of your legions. here that you can then swap before the battle starts, meaning that the heroes you've recruited have a very substantial impact on the actual battles here, otherwise it basically depends on which units attack who and from what angle, there are legion skills that will allow you to increase your attack, lower enemy defenses, just damage them directly or just position yourself a little better for the most part.

I wasn't very impressed with these war battles, most of them are story related which means they aren't very difficult to win, but I think they do pretty well for what they are supposed to be and they go up quite a bit. You can also build something in your city that allows you to do a few different battle drills of this type if you say you want more but while moving. straight to the Steam Deck section of the video, now the Steam Deck for a particular game is largely a decent experience, you can turn it on to get a decent frame rate and the game is very playable that way, but there are a few things different to take into account in particular.

The game so far runs at about 40 FPS generally on that system, which is important because of the encounter bug I mentioned. I don't know if that will be fixed in the future but for now it is what it is, it also has your usual stuff like cloud save controller support etc which makes it pretty easy to play as the Most games in this genre are generally an important thing to note, although the game seems to save whatever your graphical settings were if you were on a PC and then switch to the Steam Deck, so if you move back and forth a lot back this might be a consideration for you as you'll have to change the graphical settings a lot and it's probably worth mentioning that there are certain screens in this game that just have a lot of very small text where you see a lot of different numbers to many of your different characters, which can be difficult to read on that particular screen, discounting those things;

However, I would say that the Steam Deck is a very accessible way to play this title and something you could definitely build on from there, although let's talk about the positives, negatives and then ramp this up now. The positive side of things I have to say, although I didn't talk about it too much in the combat section, is that I really liked the trick system, certain bosses have little tricks or things that you can attack that are not the boss and that They then have various effects on the battlefield, and while it's not a revolutionary idea, I had fun playing with them in the battles they came up in.

I also really enjoyed the visuals of this game, well it seems a bit strange at first, the mix of sprite based characters along with 3D environments really landed on me. I thought it looked really cool and reminded me of a lot of those older jrpgs I used. Playing it myself and despite its issues I enjoyed the amount of combat you could customize down to the characters you were using, the equipment they had and the abilities they may or may not have, and while I think the rune system just could be more impactful. I think if you really want to be very granular in how you approach setting up your combat set, you can do that and the game provides an outlet for that, even up to level 99 via Boss Rush in your main city now in the On the downside I think the fact that you can't react in combat but enemies apparently can, or at least pick random people when their turn comes, is frustrating.

I would have preferred to see them just let you take your turns while they spawn instead of choosing everything at the start of the round. I also think that while the story was decent, it's a little hard to care about a lot of these characters because they have very little screen time or impact on screen. story, especially when you're managing dozens of them and party management is also something that's really hard to defend because you're just trying to manage the team and similar things for so many characters because even if you're not using them all realistically, you'll have You have to keep about 20 of them wherever you want if you don't want to have any issues with the story here and there and that's a lot to juggle and it gets pretty tedious pretty quickly, it's not.

Impossible either way and the game has some mechanics aimed at solving exactly that problem, it's still a problem, although all of that brings me to my conclusion in many ways. Auden Chronicle, here is a very fun jrpg that reminded me a lot of my initial one. I play through a lot of old Final Fantasy games or other jrpgs, but I will say that despite trying to modernize the genre and take it forward, I don't think it really manages to do that, if anything, I'd say this game is very similar. Basically all the other recent jrpgs I've seen that have tried to do this are more like old games than anything else, but despite that, it's still a very fun jrpg with a lot of different things to do, a great great story to tell and Aside from a few different minor issues, I largely think that this particular game manages to justify its price, which happens to be $50 US dollars and of course whatever is regional for people and for that price , I think you're getting more than your money's worth if this is the type of game you already enjoy playing, although I think it's also available on Game Pass, which means, of course, that I buy this game and that's enough for this particular video.

I certainly hope you enjoyed it. Let me know below how you feel about this particular title, which of course means liking, commenting, subscribing to all the YouTube jazz, but regardless of all that, really thank you very much for watching. I really appreciate it. May you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day.