Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes (2024, PS4)

The algorithms of the internet probably knew how I felt about Suikoden I and II when it suggested a Kickstarter of its spiritual successor Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes for me back in 2020. I played the first Suikoden back in 2016, and Suikoden II not long after - really enjoying both of them, so when I saw that "the old team" was getting back together to create what essentially was another Suikoden, I was hype.

After having thrown my money at 505 Games I started to eagerly wait. And wait. I already covered this in another post - but it took 4 years for Suiko... I mean Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes (ECHH, yeah the name might not be the strongest point) to finally be released. Just to quote myself to save some breath;

"To their credit, the development team were very informative and transparent about the ups and downs of the developmental process. So much in fact that I stopped reading the steady flow of updates that came to my inbox not long after I had backed the project. I realized that the game would either be a thing or not be a thing (as is the way with Kickstarter) and basically stopped thinking about it for a year. And another year."

Long story short, the game arrived eventually and I (almost) immediately started to play it. Was it worth the wait?

Firstly, it is worth noting that if you wanted more Suikoden, ECHH delivers. The story themes, the gameplay elements, the character developments - they're all there and handled just as well in most cases as their inspirations. You can tell that a lot of the same people have handled the design and that the game comes from a source of genuine love for the material and the originals.

You play as Nowa, who goes out to vaguely seek fortune but quickly sees himself embroiled in something much larger. Before long you control whole armies against Dux Aldric who threatens to become the new dictator of the lands. The story is epic in its own way and just like Suikoden (1 & 2) always managed to stay on this side of far-out, unlike series like Final Fantasy (where I am often not entirely sure what is going on), the story in ECHH feels grounded and urgent. If you're worried that political intrigue will bore you (but how could it, have you not seen Game of Thrones?) don't be worried - the politics is just a backdrop for exploring all the characters that fill these games.

And while ECHH has some flaws (which I will get back to) I must say that the characters is where it absolutely excels. The thing that made Suikoden different from other JRPGs back in the day was the promise of being able to meet/collect over a 100 characters and build a home for them all. ECHH is no different. And you'd think that with a gallery of characters that large, most of them would feel underdeveloped, uninteresting or bland, but they don't. It's of course practically impossible in one playthrough to get to really know every single character, even if you don't run around and seek out all the optional ones, but ECHH manages. Every single character I came across made me want to know more about them, try them out in battle (when possible) and seemed like they had some thought behind them more than to fill a roster. 

The characters fill different roles in the games - a lot of them will be able to join your group as fighters. Some will help boost your characters with combat buffs or give you new features in different ways, like faster run speed, bigger bag space or fewer random encounters. Some will improve your castle that you get not very far into the game (by JRPG standards), with everything from theaters to hot springs to vendors. There is a mini game TCG, Beyblade (though called Beigoma in the game) and egg racing to mention a few. 

The game is shock full of content to explore when you don't feel like taking part of the politics of the main story for a while. The mini games are of varying quality and while I didn't get around to trying all of them, I enjoyed the ones I did (the card game in fact reminded me a little bit of the card game Shotten Totten 2). You can tell that a lot of these were probably after thoughts in the sense of stretch goals rather than content originally meant for the game, but I still found they added to the overall experience and to the atmosphere of the game.

While I had fun exploring the different characters and learning more about them, I found the world they live in lackluster and empty. It's varied enough with the standard desert, forest, mountain and ice areas. But both the cities and surrounding areas feel cramped and uninspired compared to the characters you play with. I tried to think of an RPG where I love the settings and remember them fondly years later, places like FFVII and FFIX. What is ECHH missing that these games have? I realize that it's a matter of details, nooks and crannies, little areas that you want to explore, the people you meet, objects that hint of lives being lived. In ECHH every house you enter looks the same as the next and you can't even go up to the second floor. People say and do nothing of interest and just feel like backdrop. I usually run around and explore everything in towns I enter, talking to everyone. I quickly lost interest in that in ECHH, only interested in finding the inn and the armory and moving on. There are some exceptions though, Castle Hirganthia towards the end is really cool and some cities hint of interesting concepts, like the Sand Shark people the Shi'arc (took me way too long to get that word pun too).

Doesn't this look like a place you want to live in?

But the world settings aren't really something I remember fondly, or at all, from the original Suikoden games either. There too the strength was in the story and the characters driving it forwards, so maybe it makes sense that that is where ECHH would put its focus as well. It definitely doesn't make ECHH (nor the Suikoden games) any less fun to play, but I still can't help wondering what if...

That being said, I loved the graphics and especially the character sprites. My kid couldn't stop commenting on how much it annoyed him that the player characters didn't have the same graphics as the surroundings, them being regular 3D, but this never bothered me. Would it have been even better with full sprite work or faux/modern style sprite work like in Octopath Traveler? I think so, but the design they chose to go with works too.

The combat in ECHH is something I never grew tired off. You've got six characters fighting simultaneously (though some characters count as two because of their size) on screen, their stats deciding things like combat order, crit chance, physical damage done and taken, magical damage done and taken and so on. Some times your choice of action changes your order of execution, and I found it confusing that I had to do the inputs based on party order rather than speed. This meant that whoever was first in your party was the one to receive action input first, even if they were the last character executing them. This never stopped being confusing to me, even though it probably is the most logical way of handling it.

Fortunately everything else about combat is fun and easy and doesn't outstay its welcome. It helps that there are literally scores of different characters with completely different fighting styles to explore, and even though they're not all equally strong and useful, they're all interesting. Add to this different "hero combos" in which certain combination of characters can unleash extra strong attacks together. Every character also have a varying set of runes that they can equip, which can give new skills, new magic or extra stats. There is even an "auto" feature in which you, sort of FFXII style can program your characters to fight according to certain parameters. While this works well, I enjoyed combat enough to always want to keep control over what was going on. And in case you're curious, my main party consisted of Nowa, Zabi, Gieran, Yusuke and Kogen. The final character was most often Seign for the Hero Combo, but I ended the game with Yuferius.

Add to this that all these different characters come with different voice actors and that you can choose freely between English or Japanese spoken dialogue (ok, some actors voice several characters, but the credit list is looong).

They even got Motoi Sakuraba himself to do the score. While I am not as huge a fan of Sakurabas' as some people, there is no denying he is a skilled composer and he does a good job here. The battle tunes, always a litmus test of good composing in my book, are doing a good job at getting you pumped while not getting annoying after the 100th time.

As mentioned ECHH is essentially a carbon copy of the original Suikoden, in all the good ways. But also in some of the bad ways. The loading screens (on the PS4) are so plentiful and long that I started doing exercises during them to offset some of my sitting and to feel like I was at least doing something useful rather than just waiting around. The inventory is also so confusing that it must be copied from the older games, though I don't remember it, because otherwise what the heck is this system doing in this game. Items stack in completely random numbers, meaning some will stack up to 2, some 3 some 5 and so on. It doesn't help that you start with an extremely underwhelming bag size and throughout the entire game I struggled to fit items that I came across, constantly having to decide which items to keep and which to throw. 

The duel system from the Suikoden series is also in ECHH, in which a certain character is pitted alone against an enemy. The fighting consists of trying to match the right type of attack based on the dialogue the characters are having, in a rock-paper-scissor way. Sounds cool on paper, doesn't work so well in reality. I don't recall it being a problem in the original games but it feels completely random and arbitrary in ECHH. I managed the first few I came across but towards the end I got sick of having to trial-and-error my way through them and just used a walkthrough for those fights specifically. Other than these situations, ECHH is not a particularly difficult game, and I only rarely struggled.

This next point wasn't a problem for me personally, but some times it was quite far between save opportunities. I clocked close to an hour at one point. If you're old-school this won't faze you, but it does mean that your playing sessions require a little bit of planning and timing.

While I feel like these are things you might want to know going in to the game, I really don't want anyone to avoid what is otherwise a great game over these flaws. 

So in conclusion, Eiyuden Chronicle is a game made with pure love for the genre and especially the inspirations Suikoden 1 and 2. While it has some flaws, everything else works so nicely that I fully enjoyed my 60 hours with it. The characters, the story, the gameplay - it made me just flow through the game and I never felt bored. And I feel like I haven't even mentioned half the stuff the game throws at you yet, there is simply so much to do. So when the credits rolled I knew I was really going to miss all the crazy creatures and people I had come across and I could finally conclude that yet, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes was worth my money and it was definitely worth the wait.

The Whispered World (2009)

There is a game genre I keep coming back to even though my success rate is abysmally low, and that is the point-and-click puzzle genre. The amount of PoC games I have legitimately cleared compared to the amount of games I have tried is a pretty sad read, but I just can't let it be. A good PoC adventure will stay with you for a long time and a good PoC adventure is one I am the most likely to want to replay. I've replayed Broken Sword and The Dig several times and I am currently replaying Secret of Monkey Island.

The Whispered World was released in 2009 by German company Daedalic who are now probably mostly (in)famous for their terrible Gollum game which was released last year (2023), which in fact was so poorly received Daedalic decided not to develop any games anymore and instead focus entirely on being publishers. Before that they made games like the Deponia series, which I've only tried for a bit, and The Pillars of the Earth, which I completed.

The Whispered World was one of the very first games Daedalic released and maybe it was a sign of what was to come. It seems like Daedalic was always stronger in ideas than they were in programming and realization of those ideas.

The game centers around the circus clown Sadwick. He tours the world with his brother and grandpa, and a larva named Spot which is also used as a tool for some puzzles in the game in a Deus Ex Machina way. True to his name, Sadwick is ironic and some times cynical about himself and the world around him and quite likable. The writing is decent, I especially enjoyed the fact that most combinations you end up clicking seemed to have its own unique line of dialogue attached to it, which is a nice change from the umpteen "I can't do that" you often get to hear in PoC games. I couldn't stand the voice acting however and it's a blessing that the option to turn it off existed. 

The game is almost exclusively controlled with the mouse, with which you move Sadwick around and make him interact with the world. This works fine and I don't particularly miss the old verb-boards where you had to guess your way through "pull", "push" and "pick up". Though I guess you could argue it added to the puzzle element. Either way, I always find that I am bad judge for the quality of puzzle designs, since even the simplest puzzles can stump me. In Whispered World there are certainly a few head scratchers that feel like the way to get there is to start combining a bit of everything. There is a point where you have to scare your brother, and to do that you have to build a scary figurine from odd things you've picked up. I doubt anyone would figure out exactly what pieces fit together, this is a matter of trying everything with everything. There is also a few points where you have to give the correct dialogue options to NPC's and I never could get the hints as to what was the right thing to say. 

The story of Whispered World starts with Sadwick having a bad dream. The animation is very of its time, I got instant flashbacks to homebrew flash animations that were floating around the internet around then. The world is going to end somehow, and Sadwick involuntarily ends up being both the only way to save it and the possible cause of it. It never bothered me that it doesn't make much sense, the world is a cozy fantasy world full of odd creatures and is fun to explore. Things are random, but they make sense within the setting of The Whispered World.

The game was good enough to keep me interested and when I was about to give up because I got stuck I enlisted my kids to help me out. It became something for us to try to solve together, and progress was a lot easier with three heads (albeit some young ones) at it than just my own. Too bad then about the programming.

It started already pretty early in the game, where something that was required to happen to progress just didn't. Fortunately a restart of the game solved it then, but about half way through it happened again. I needed a certain object (hay from a pile of hay) to continue the game, but trying to pick it up Sadwick just kept telling us he already had it. Googling around it seems that game breaking bugs were not uncommon in this game and after having tried for a while without success we decided to give up. Even though the game was ok, none of us were interested in replaying two hours to get to where we were, only to perhaps end up getting the same bug again.

If you're starved for some PoC gaming and haven't come across this one yet I would say it could be worth checking out. Unfortunately this game requires you to be careful for the wrong reasons so don't repeat our mistake and make sure to keep several save spots going.

BEANO the Board Game - Board Game Review

Have you heard of Dennis the Menace? No, not that Dennis. The other Dennis. Yeah, they're two, and if you're from the UK you most likely know what I am talking about. Through some freak coincidence, two Dennis the Menace were created and debuted on the same day back in 1951. You can't make that stuff up. They're also still both ongoing.

What else do they have in common you ask? Well, they're both about mischievous little boys (hence the name one would guess) with a pet dog. While US Dennis is well meaning but gets into trouble, the UK Dennis is definitely more of a cunning prankster. In fact, the UK Dennis has had to have a bit of a clean-up recently as he could have been considered something of a bully for most of his existence.

I had never heard of the UK Dennis before I met my SO from England, who introduced me to Dennis' magazine The Beano. The Beano sports a plethora of characters with similarly witty names and dubious personalities, like Minnie the Minx, Roger the Dodger, Bash Street Kids, Les Pretend and Ivy the Terrible. Some of the more cheeky characters have had to move over for kids with other skills, like Dangerous Dan, Ruby and Betty (with her Yeti), presumably because a magazine focused entirely on being naughty doesn't fly so well anymore.

As you can imagine The Beano characters are also available in various kinds of merchandise, of which my children already own most - thanks to an enthusiastic Beano-fan, their father. They have mugs, t-shirts, jumpers, bed sheets, back packs, lunch boxes and hats, to mention a few. Then we also have Beano themed "Who's There?", "Top Trumps" and "Clue" board games.

And we also own the board game I intend to talk a little about here, the BEANO Board Game, which is its own original idea giving the players the opportunity to try to be the one who does more pranks than the other players.

To do this the player needs to collect sets of two cards. One card represents the prank object, like a wiggly worm, a whoopee cushion or a stink bomb. The other card represents the idea of what kind of prank to do with the item, like throwing a water balloon at the Cinema or throwing a stink bomb at the Lighthouse. Once you have a set of cards (water balloon and Cinema) you need to get to the Cinema on the board to collect your point.

Sounds easy enough. Of course there are plenty of things that can go wrong along the way. Other players can "nab" your idea and certain areas on the board forces you to trade your prank items with each other. There is a lot of opportunity to ruin your co-players plans and you often have to act as quickly and as secretly as possible. Your ideas are open for anyone to see, but your prank items are hidden. Until you have to trade them off that is...

For better or worse, there is a good amount of luck required to be the winner in this game, since you both need to collect "the right" pranks and ideas, but also land on squares on the board that are beneficial to you. The tactical element lies in which path to take and which prank to try to achieve, since each roll with the die often gives you several different options. I think the board makes a decent job at trying to level out some of the luck - if you don't get the right cards, you might be able to steal them from other players instead. Rolling the die and ending up on a white square is probably the worst that can happen in this game, an entire round of not really achieving anything.

You can play the game two players, but I'd recommend being at least three. The more you are, the more happens each round, the less safe you feel and the more chaos will ensue. That is when this game is at its best. Be prepared to make some enemies because this game allows you to be very cruel. 

Overall  I think the game does a good job at being fun while also staying true to the BEANO soul - running around trying to do as many pranks as possible is entirely in the right vein of the BEANO comic. If you want something cerebral and deep, this is definitely not the game for you. But if you're a fan of the BEANO comic and want an evening of aggravating your co-players, you could definitely do worse.

Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) - Review

 Remember gaming magazines? Remember when gaming magazines came with floppies with game demo's? Even though I received countless over the years I only remember one - the demo for Wolfenstein 3D. Though it was a bit too stressful for my young self, my brother loved it. It only contained the first three levels, but I remember him playing them over and over and over, poring over each stage trying to find secrets, while I watched.

Then it was quiet on the Wolfenstein front for a while and I largely missed the games released before 2010. But then in 2014 Wolfenstein was suddenly back into my conscious with a bang - with the release of Wolfenstein: New Order, developed by Swedish company MachineGames and published by none other than Bethesda. This looked like a fresh and fun take of the by then long running game franchise, that also fit my matured taste, and I was very curious to try it. But back-logs being what they are, I didn't actually get around to it until ten years later (!), when I finally booted it up this year. Fortunately, the game turned out to be well worth keeping around...

You play as William "BJ" Blazkowicz who was first introduced in the series in Wolfenstein 3D - coincidentally, I had no idea what the main character was called all those years ago watching my brother play, but it was very fun to see that it was lore wise supposed to be the same. BJ hasn't changed much from Wolfenstein 3D and presents such a chiseled look as to almost look parodically non-human. 

In the New Order the Nazis win the war. Consequently the Nazis, always being the most grateful villain since they have zero redeeming qualities, take over the world and BJ needs to fix it by killing the new leader Wilhelm Strasse also known as Deathshead. Apparently there are some characters and story elements that carry over from the games that I missed, like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Deathshead being one of them. 

To do this you get equipped with a ton of weapons and kill a ton of nazis. The game straddles a very well balanced point between a "spray and pray"-game like Serious Sam and "Only kill what you must"-game like Dishonored. There are elements of trying to stay out of sight and getting the surprise attack, but never to the point where you actually ever feel sneaky. The game knows this and isn't designed with any HUD that shows you whether you are visible to enemies or not. You find out because you suddenly hear screaming and get shot at. This never becomes a problem, instead you lean in to it. Even though I might start out trying to stab people one by one in silence, it almost always ends up with me running like a crazy session of paintball and shooting anything that moves. No enemy feels like an ungrateful bullet sponge and all combat feels satisfying.

I played the game on normal difficulty and most of it was fairly easy. The game is very generous with health and ammo at almost all points. It's still not advisable to run into the center of the room and shoot wildly at whatever you see, that will get you killed, and especially if you haven't taken care of sentries first. Most stages take at least some planning and tactics, and utilizing a variety of your arsenal. I had to replay certain segments a few times because I got stuck in the open and was quickly gunned down.

You might see where I am going with this, so let's just say it - the game does pretty much everything right. 

All the weapons are fun and they all pack the right punch. Using different weapons in different ways allows you to unlock perks that improves BJ in different ways, like allowing him to reload faster or carry more ammo. This encourages you to play a bit outside your comfort zone and try all the different weapons in different ways.

The atmosphere is great, they even made re-recordings of famous songs as Nazi-versions, this is something you have to go check out on Youtube. The music playing in the background will get you pumped at the right times. There is definitely an extra level of atmosphere if you can read German like me, the game is littered with world building tidbits - a lot of them are translated into English but not all. The attention to detail is astonishing, there is even a playable remake of Wolfenstein 3D in a corner of the game!

But the most important thing that New Order gets right is how it constantly manages to keep things fresh. BJ will travel all over, with varied stages and challenges - you even go to the moon for part of the game (!). New weapons and upgrades get introduced at a perfect speed. There is never a moment to get bored, you'll always want to check what there is around the corner and how you can take on the next stage.

You'll meet a well written set of characters that help you forward. The jargon is rough and tough, just like everything else in this game. BJ gets to do an absurdly heavy load of work for the resistance, but then he seems to be basically immortal. The stages let you sneak one moment to get some head shots in, to swiftly let you don double shotguns to run around the corner and fill some dudes face with bouncy bullets. You'll drive a mini-sub and like mentioned jump around on the surface of the moon. I don't want to spoil too much in case you like me have saved this game in your catalogue for a rainy day, let me just say that the 13-14 hours the game will take you will not be wasted.

Rarely do I play a game and constantly smile over all the great gameplay and design choices that the developers have made. I can barely even nitpick but I am going to do my best. At one point in the game you discover some sort of super armor, it looks rad as all hell. Two of the NPCs get to use it, but BJ never does and I was a bit disappointed at that missed opportunity. Also I had trouble swapping to the right weapon in the heat of battle some times, and that got me killed more than once. I can't really complain at the controls though, on PC there is both the option to use mapped keys and scroll to swap weapons so the problem was most definitely on me.

The game got two prequels, Old Blood and New Colossus, that I am definitely looking forward to playing as well. If they're half as well made as this game I know I am in for a good time.

Weeeooo Weeeooo - Board Game Review

 Let's face it, a lot of board games for young children are quite boring. I think this is because some game creators think "simple" means "purely based on luck". But a good board game for young children, at least if you ask me, should still require some level of skill or tactical thinking, designed in a way that it fits the age group. Even better if the design is such that it fun for any age group. Is this even possible?

Let's take a closer look at the lovely and aptly named board game Weeeooo Weeeooo - they could've just gone with something boring like "Here comes the Fire Engine", but this shows the level of dedication - and see how it holds up to my adult eye.

Weeeooo Weeeooo is a board game in which you play as a fire fighter who gets called on missions. The goal is to complete as many missions as possible, but if you're not careful you get called to lunch and lose your points. Each round the player flips cards to see whether they are a point (mission) or a point reset (lunch break). To get the point the player also need to have brought the right tools - two out of three possible, since every mission requires a certain tool to be completed. If someone fails to complete mission/s, the point goes over to the next player in turn. So the game is essentially a risk vs reward assessment game and its great fun to see how differently young players can approach the game mechanics. Some go the safe route and only take a few points per turn, some (most) go all in and just hope for the best.

I find this fairly simple premise easy to grasp for any age group above the "put everything in your mouth"-age and this means that as an adult you don't have to go out your way to avoid being the supreme winner nor smiling through boredom. While the tools add another layer of activity to the game, they're basically just luck based. To pick a card or not pick a card, that is the only question and it's a pretty fun and interesting one, at least for the 10-15 minutes that the game lasts. I played this with my kids from the age of 2 with no problem, though at that age the components are still more fun to play with than to win with.

I forgot to tell you about the best part - the game includes a little fire fighter figure and best of all the game box itself turns into an actual fire engine with which you can drive around and complete/pick up missions.

This is probably difficult to get hold of now, so I'll make a general recommendation. Risk assessment gameplay is usually fun for most ages and something that can be designed to level out some of the differences in skill. It's a good style of game to bet on when trying out games for the youngest kids that actually require some thinking, maybe something to kindle an interest into heavier things to come.

Weeeooo Weeeooo is a fun and well designed game in this category, one that I feel goes that little extra distance and I whole heartedly recommend it.