W.While the joyfully flexible role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3 dominated this year’s Bafta awards and won best game, there remains a strong nostalgic appetite for simpler, more traditional RPGs. Conceived by Yoshitaka Murayama, a screenwriter and director who made his name during the original PlayStation years, Eiyuden Chronicle raised £3.6 million on Kickstarter in 2020 to become the third most funded video game in the crowdfunding site’s history. It is a sequel to Murayama’s classic. Suikoden Series in all but name: a fast-paced adventure featuring a group of people, mostly young, entangled in the friction and chaos of two neighboring states at war.
As with Murayama’s work from the ’90s, it follows a familiar pattern as you guide your party from the settlement to the dungeon, your progress periodically interrupted by whimsical random battles through which your characters fight. They become more and more powerful. After a pedestrian prologue, the game unfolds delightfully. Your trick is your Pokemon-Meta-mission style: woo and recruit each of the approximately 100 titular heroes to your cause. They start as a small group, then become a squad, and finally become a makeshift army. Each warrior, healer, and support staff member has a name, a personality, and a bow. Recruits are located all over the world. Some sign up the moment they approach; others require cajoling. But the thrill of completing the collection enhances the game’s more conservative, old-fashioned appeal, as each of the recruits can be placed into your main six-person team and controlled directly in battle.
The dialogue is warm and chatty, and while the plot and voice acting have the unsophisticated quality of a Saturday morning cartoon, this only compounds its evocative PlayStation-era appeal. Murayama, who fell ill during the final stages of the game’s development, did not live to see its release and passed away in February of this year, at the age of 55. Eiyuden Chronicle It stands as a monument to its unique design sensibility and a testament to the power of a given community, both within the game’s fiction and by its very existence.
