[Rant] Eiyuden Chronicle is a mess of game design.

Sorry guys and gals for bringing this kind of negativity to the board, but I just needed to vent to a group that might commiserate.

The preamble to this is that I was very excited for the title - I thought it looked gorgeous (***huge*** fan of the HD-2D style) and loved the setting, and character designs. It was admittedly mostly a visual interest in the game since I have somehow missed all the Suikodens in my gaming journey so far. I'll correct that this year for sure.

Playing through the opening hours of this game, I unfortunately found it to be a tangled mess of very poor game design. There’re the arguable things like only being able to save at save-points… I’ll die on the hill that this is poor game design and will fight all of you pro-savepointers to the death, but I’ll just move on from this since it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

There’re also huge issues with combat. The balancing is poor – generic battles barely put up a fight, and there’s no interesting decisions to be made. Generic mobs all basically just deal damage (and roughly the same amount) so there’s little actual choice to be made in targeting or defensive actions, relegating it to auto-battle fodder. On hard, I fought maybe a handful of battles in my time playing, not counting boss fights (which were markedly better). Having recently played FF1 pixel remaster, I can honestly say I had more player agency in that game’s random battles than in this one. At least, for one, I could actually cast spells…

In Eiyuden, however, the spells in the game are so bad that I actually think they might be malfunctioning. They deal paltry damage and have such a huge resource cost that they can be cast once, maybe twice per character. MP restoratives are so rare as to be non-existent. Compared to the relatively free and very powerful skills, and how powerful standard attacks are, I had little to no reason to cast a spell and definitely not outside of a boss battle. This relegates ‘mage’ characters to the trash bin early, and though my googling tells me that in the very end portions of the game (lv50+) this changes… its not a good situation. I’m not talking magic being just ‘suboptimal’ but quite literally useless.

There is also a strange overreliance on RNG elements that serve to frustrate far more than anything else. Gimmicks in fights can be rng (like the early mole boss for example), and the duels feel completely out of your control in a really frustrating way.

This leads into the character stats and rune system of the game. Characters stat growths are fixed and sometimes make no sense, rune slots are not standard so some have more than others, and some have powerful built in skills and combos but some don’t. What this means is some characters are just objectively terrible. With as many recruitable characters as they have I didn’t need or expect ‘good’ balance, but this is so lopsided that when I see characters I want to use but have glaringly awful stats it feels bad to use them. Really kneecaps the ‘many recruitable characters’ bit that game hinges on. On top of that most of the runes in the game are the worst kind of RPG stats - +5% ‘power’, +20% blind resist, etc. Complete snoozefest, devs need to stop developing character progression systems that reward players with stuff like that. It’s the RPG equivalent of a saltine cracker.

And to look at all those stats, you are interfacing with a REALLY bad UI. The UI is slow, cumbersome, and loaded with information obscuring elements. I put a shield on a character, their stats don’t increase but they gain a shield icon near their health bar. Why? What does it do? No one knows. What do the stats actually do? Hidden. What are the character affinities? Hidden. What are the enemies affinities? Hidden. Abilities will say things like “Raises power slightly” or some equivalent wording, but what does that MEAN? What spells do you actually get when you equip a spell rune? You cannot make informed choices with this stuff. They actually lock a lot of this information and a lot of QOL behind the fort-building subsystem which is simply a mistake. It feels like they carved out functionality to give reward systems to their other gameplay elements and it feels horrible.

All of this means the combat is a congealed mess of wishy-washy stats that kind of don’t matter anyways because you’re auto-attacking with everyone in the party anyhow, with a party constructed of the most broken characters you can find instead of ones you might want just because of the disparity in power. Plus navigating the slow nested menus to get everyone equipped and unequipped is a massive pain as well.

To top it off, there are a slew of technical issues with the game. There are too many loading screens and they take longer than they should, even on PC. There are a lot of interiors and other things that are wholesale copied between locations that make them feel very samey. There is no quest log or anything of the sort and you can end up getting a lot of really piddly side quests for recruitment that makes putting the game down for a length of time a total PITA to remember everything, a guide almost feels required because of this. The DOF effect is amateurishly heavy-handed and is best just turned off completely, which is only an option on the PC version for some reason. The shadows render in a weird bubble around your character and causes distracting shadow pop-in.

PHEW. OK rant over. I wanted to like this game so badly, but this stuff just kept mounting and mounting until I had to put it down for good. Of the three kickstarted JRPGs to come out recently, Chained Echoes/Sea of Stars/Eiyuden I’d put this at the bottom rung by a wide margin. Quite a shame.