I just finished Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes and... it was not what I expected. First off, I've never played Suikoden. This is supposed to be a spiritual successor to the Suikoden series. I can't speak to how well the developers did at making a new Suikoden game; only to whether or not it's good as a game released in 2024. Sadly... it really isn't. Bad design choices plague this game from beginning to end. Beginning: They're using sprite/polygon mix. In the 2020s. You have this beautifully-constructed 3D world, but all the characters are 2D sprites. Now that was a great trick on the original PlayStation, when the hardware wasn't good enough to render human bodies well. (Compare the beautiful sprites of Breath of Fire 3 or Xenogears to the ugly, blocky mess they tried to pass off as people in Tomb Raider or Final Fantasy VII.) Today, though? It just feels badly out of place. There's a cutscene early on with Nowa and Seign sitting at a campfire. Beautifully-rendered PBR lighting and reflections on the slightly-shiny stone nearby... and two blocky guys made up of very noticeable pixels. These sprites also get lit, but for whatever reason the lighting just does not look right on them at all; any bright light source washes out the sprites badly. Then you start to notice the game mechanics, and how incredibly low-effort they feel, which is bizarre for how big and content-filled this game is. You have no control over your camera. (Except on the world maps, where you do. So the devs did implement this; they just decided to deny it to you for 90% of the game!) And there are plenty of places where you have to walk through areas that are obscured because of stupid camera angles. Likewise, you have no control over the pacing. There is no way to skip cutscenes, or long battle animations. (Disgaea had this figured out 20 years ago. Why can't this studio do it today?) You have no control over the plot. The entire thing is on very, very noticeable rails. Almost every single war battle and duel battle is a scripted cutscene trying and failing to pretend it's a game with actual stakes. And there are really no stakes throughout. If a town falls to the Empire, for example, you can still walk around freely in it and even if you talk to the guards, they don't realize you're their Public Enemy #1! You have no idea what's going on. After playing all the way through, I still have only the slightest idea what a rune lens is, and no clue what primal lenses are or why they're so important. And the entire plot revolves around them! The big gimmick that this game was sold on is right there in the name: a really big cast of characters. This features 120 recruitable heroes. And while I'm aware that there's only so much you can do with finite development resources, it's frustrating how shallow most of them are. Everyone has their little quirk... and that's about it for most of them. For example: There's a mage who's obsessed with being absolutely perfect. If she screws up and you notice, she will harangue you into denying what you saw and acknowledging that she is perfect. Why? No clue. There's an interesting backstory there... and we never get a word of it. There's a big, beefy guy you can recruit, whose voice actor plays him with a strong "Ahnold" accent, who believes he's a mage specializing in "muscle magic" when actually he just whacks people with his "magic staff" like a big club. Why? No clue. There's an interesting backstory there... and we never get a word of it. One of your characters' level-up lines is "Training is the friend who never betrays you." Why? No clue. There's an interesting backstory there... and we never get a word of it! You get the drift. There's so much lore implied in this game that you never actually get to see. And as things progress, it gradually becomes apparent that there's an agenda behind the story being told. There are these things called rune-lenses. Some people can use them to produce magic; most people can't. The Big Bad is doing research into the rune-lenses to try to figure out ways to use them to benefit all mankind. This is apparently a Bad Thing somehow. (Why? it's ever explained.) Yes, he's definitely a bad guy, committing atrocities and embarking upon wars of conquest so you know he's very definitely a bad guy. But when no one at all says "this thing you're trying to do is a good thing but you're going about it in an evil way," and meanwhile one of the most important "good guy" characters on your side flat-out says "the power of the rune-lenses was not meant to be shared with everyone," it kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth! This game had a lot of potential — that's why I backed it on Kickstarter — but sadly it fails hard at living up to that potential. I wouldn't recommend buying it.