Early Hours: Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a companion game to an upcoming JRPG, both of which stem from a successful Kickstarter. The main game, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes will be developed by former developers who worked on the Suikoden franchise. Rising is a side game meant to make the wait for Hundred Heroes feel less daunting, but ultimately feels more akin to an appetizer rather than a full meal.
National Treasure
The adventure begins with CJ, a young girl on a quest to find treasure to partake in a family ritual. Upon arriving in town to begin her adventure, what she discovers is a community in shambles. Buildings are broken down to rubble, and the acting mayor is doing their best to drive visitors into town to help improve the economy. It's from here CJ sets out to help the village rebuild through various tasks, all the while setting out to find glorious riches in the treasure-filled subterranean ruin located near town, the Barrows.
MapQuest
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising features lovely landscapes reminiscent of Octopath Traveller. Lush foreground with a heavy field of view blurring in the far off distance is home to hand drawn characters and lovingly crafted buildings. While the character art is fine on its own, the same cannot be said about character and enemy animation. Models seem to have a ¾'s view skeleton placed inside a 2D drawing. The result is stilted movement with only a little extra flair in the details. Think Dragon's Crown with less detailed drawings. Despite the off-putting animation work, the game is pleasing to the eye nonetheless.
The UI is your run-of-the-mill RPG UI, but there’s one glaring element that’s quite distracting. Smack dab in the top-middle is a stamp card, a slate of (at first) 30 slots for red square stamps to be placed and filled. The inclusion of the stamp card front and center as opposed to, let’s say, a mini map is an interesting choice. Pausing to see the map rather than it being implemented with the UI itself feels like a miss that interrupts moment-to-moment gameplay.
Rinse & Repeat
The grand adventure to find treasure is quite cookie-cutter; accept a quest, cutscene, travel, dodge and attack, turn in the quest, cutscene. Unfortunately that is the entire gameplay loop of Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, featuring 80+ fetch quests and 20+/- main quests that amount to foraging further into the dungeons. The sheer amount of fetch quests, backtracking constantly between zones, fighting the same enemies, and platforming the same areas make for a repetitive experience.
Combat for the first hour to 90-minute mark is especially grueling as you only have a two-hit combo attack, or a single hit in midair. It doesn't feel fast or frenetic, and is instead quite slow paced. After hitting the aforementioned mark, a second party member is unlocked. The additional party member not only opens up the availability of upgrading equipment, but Link Attack abilities as well. In lamest terms, Link Abilities serve as combos. The Link Abilities do open up combat a bit more, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is still repetitive nonetheless.
The lack of variation in gameplay hurts it considerably. With the battle mechanics specifically, they're far too barebones for the fights to be anything close to exciting. In the quests department, you're only ever doing fetch quests. It's as though someone took the gameplay from Final Fantasy XIV, removed any dungeons or trials, and made a game out of it.
Talk to someone, go somewhere to talk to someone else or farm mobs for mats, and return to the person who sent you on the quest, rinse, repeat. This wouldn't be bad or blatantly noticeable if there were quests other than these, but this makes up the entirety of the game's many side quests and 20+ Main Quests. If there was a captivating story being told other than on a quest for big loot and finding a missing father, this would be ancillary. But the story does nothing to add to the gameplay.
While I may sound a bit more on the negative side, the game does scratch the itch of an easy collectathon. It thrives on its pick up and play nature, serving as a nice starting ground for new players of the genres. The game's environmental visuals are beautiful, even if the characters and their animations are simple. For hardcore players, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising may be a miss. But as a gateway for new players and the more casual scene, I think it does well enough to open the door.
Written by Matthew Wright