Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

There’s a particular kind of video game project that carries more weight than its budget should allow. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is one of them. It began in 2020 as a crowdfunded project pitched by Rabbit & Bear Studios — a studio founded specifically around Yoshitaka Murayama, the writer and director of the original Suikoden, joined by Suikoden character designer Junko Kawano. The pitch was unusually honest for crowdfunding: we are going to make the thing Konami stopped making. Not a reinvention. A continuation.

That premise is also the problem the game has to solve. Nostalgia-funded revivals tend to arrive as museum pieces — reverent, inert, and mostly interesting to people who already own the original soundtrack on import CD. Published by 505 Games and released April 23, 2024 on PC and Switch, Hundred Heroes mostly escapes that trap, and it does so by being enormous rather than merely faithful. There is no mobile version, officially or otherwise, which matters: this is a game designed around long sessions and a home screen, not a commute.

Murayama died in February 2024, months before release. The game shipped with his name on it and without his hand available for the post-launch work, and the absence shows in the parts that needed one more editorial pass — the localization, the pacing of the middle act, the question of which of the hundred-odd subsystems actually deserved to exist.

The reception reflects the split. Metacritic puts it at 79, and the spread between praise for the design and criticism of the execution — particularly on Nintendo hardware — is not a mystery. The design is loved. The execution is what drags it down, and that split is why this lands as a mixed recommendation rather than an easy one.

• Over 120 recruitable characters: Nearly all of them fight. The ones that don’t run your shops, farm, forge, theatre and fishing hole. Recruitment is the progression system — not a collectible sidebar bolted onto one.
• Classic six-character turn-based combat: Front and back rows, character-pair combo attacks tied to specific relationships, and rune-lens magic slotted into equipment. Party-building, not ability-rotation.
• Castle-to-town reconstruction: A ruined fortress becomes your headquarters and gradually a functioning city. Each recruit unlocks something concrete — a vendor, a crafting tier, a minigame, a story scene.
• Grid-based war battles: Periodic large-scale tactical engagements where your recruits become units on a hex-like field. Narratively load-bearing, mechanically the game’s shakiest pillar.
• Hand-drawn pixel sprites over 3D environments: Scored by Motoi Sakuraba and Michiko Naruke — two composers with distinct, aggressive melodic instincts.

The Recruitment Loop Is the Real Game

Most RPGs give you a party and a reason to care about it. Hundred Heroes gives you a census and makes caring a mechanical choice. There’s a cook who wants rare ingredients, a mercenary who wants to be beaten in a fight, a merchant who needs an escort through a specific pass. Each one is a small, self-contained transaction, and each one pays out twice: once as a new face in your roster, once as a new capability in your town.

This is the loop, and it’s excellent. The strength of it — inherited directly from Suikoden, refined here — is that recruitment compounds. Signing a blacksmith upgrades your weapons, which makes the next dungeon viable, which surfaces the next three recruits, who unlock the farm that feeds the cook whose buff-food makes the war battle survivable. Nothing is a dead end. Deep into the campaign, a detour to grab one NPC can cascade into four unrelated systems coming online, and the structure is built to reward walking back to your castle just to see what changed. Few modern RPGs earn that kind of voluntary return trip.

The story it’s wrapped around is the friendship between Nowa, a frontier-village kid with more decency than sense, and Seign Kesling, a talented young officer of the Galdean Empire. They meet as allies, and the empire’s hunt for rune-lenses across the continent of Allraan turns them into opposites. It’s a solid structural spine, and the best sequences are the ones where Seign has to keep choosing the institution over the person. The weakness is everything between those beats: the localization lands somewhere between serviceable and flat, tonal shifts arrive without transition, and a cast this large means most members get a single memorable line and then dissolve into the crowd. That’s arguably the honest cost of the premise. It’s still a cost.

Combat: Great Bones, Terrible Clock

The battle system is good design. Six active characters across two rows, with back-row placement changing what weapons reach and what magic is worth casting. Pair combos reward building teams around who actually knows whom, which quietly pushes players into the game’s relationship web instead of just stacking the six highest-damage units. Rune-lenses give a flexible, equipment-based magic system that can be rebuilt cheaply as encounters change. Party composition is a real lever here, not a formality.

And then the animations play. Slowly. Unskippable. In a normal encounter with six party members, the gap between “chosen” and “turn over” is built long enough to invite distraction, and a very long RPG that trains its players to look away from the screen has lost an argument with itself. Auto-battle blunts the tedium without fixing it. The friction isn’t in the decisions, it’s in the waiting — a design choice, and a bad one. A skip button — the kind that shipped standard in JRPGs a decade earlier — would have moved this game up a full point.

The war battles are the other soft spot. Conceptually they’re the payoff for recruiting an army: a hundred heroes finally appearing as units on a map. As built, they’re tactically shallow compared to the dungeon combat, they resolve more by unit matchup than by maneuver, and they arrive on the story’s schedule rather than the player’s. They work as spectacle. As strategy games, they’re thin.

Interface and Onboarding

The menus are dense in the old way — lots of nested submenus, lots of inventory management, limited tooltips explaining how rune-lens slots interact with equipment tiers. Veterans will read this as texture. Newcomers will spend their first stretch unsure which of the twelve things the game has handed them actually matters. There’s no meaningful difficulty-curve handholding and no guided path through the town systems; the game’s answer to onboarding friction is “go talk to people.” That’s charming and it’s also a deliberate filter.

The art direction is the least compromised thing here. Hand-drawn sprites moving through fully 3D environments is a difficult trick — it usually produces a flat foreground glued onto an over-detailed backdrop — and Hundred Heroes nails it. Sprite work is expressive at small scale, environments have real depth and lighting, and the camera knows when to pull back and let a vista do the talking. It looks like a high-budget 16-bit game rather than a modern game cosplaying as one. That’s a meaningful distinction.

The Sakuraba and Naruke score is loud, melodic and unembarrassed about it — big brass, driving percussion, themes that resolve. It is not ambient background music, and that’s the point.

Performance is where the game’s reputation was made and damaged. The design itself is load-heavy: long transitions between town and dungeon, long transitions into battle, and — worst — long waits on the screens a player visits most. That’s a structural problem in a game whose core loop is return to your castle and check on things, and it lands hardest wherever the hardware can’t absorb it. A 2D-sprite game of this scope is light on hardware in principle; the way it’s built here is not.

Steam (PC): The version to buy, and not by a small margin. The dense menus are simply better with a mouse — though a controller is the more natural fit for combat — and PC is the platform best positioned to absorb the game’s load-heavy structure. If there’s a choice, this is the choice.

Nintendo Switch: The hard conversation. The Switch build is the version where the game’s structural weaknesses — long loads, slow battle animations, war battles that tax the hardware — compound into something punishing, and it has drawn the harshest assessment of any version. A 100-hour-scale recruitment-and-town-building RPG with pixel art is a perfect handheld game in theory. In practice, the Switch version asks players to accept a measurably worse experience for portability, and that trade is difficult to recommend.

Hundred Heroes succeeds at the thing that’s hardest to fake and stumbles on the things that are easiest to fix. The design — the recruitment web, the compounding town, the row-and-combo combat — is the work of people who understood exactly why the originals mattered and had the discipline to rebuild that rather than modernize it into mush.

But a very long RPG is a negotiation with the player’s time, and this one keeps taking more than it needs. Every unskippable flourish, every loading screen between your castle and the world, is a small tax levied on the exact behavior the game wants to encourage — and the tax is heavy enough that we can’t recommend it to most players without serious caveats. The design deserves better than the clock it runs on.

Murayama didn’t live to see it released. What shipped is an imperfect, overstuffed, deeply sincere game that does the one thing a spiritual successor must do: it makes the original’s absence feel less permanent. For Suikoden devotees with patience and a PC, that’s worth $14.99. For everyone else, wait.