You've probably had the experience of watching a movie and realizing half-way through that you've already seen that movie and just completely forgot about it. Have you ever had the opposite though? Where you are certain you've already played a game and realize you definitely haven't, half-way through? No? Just me then I guess.
The original The Secret of Monkey Island was released all the way back in 1990, and while I am old now I was too young then to play it at launch. No matter, I definitely got around to playing it at some point while growing up. I remember the bar with all the pirates, the word-fencing, the annoying boat salesman. Yeah I pretty much remember finishing The Secret of Monkey Island.
So when I decided to introduce my kids (6 and 11 yo) to this little gem I thought I basically knew most of the puzzles and we would breeze through. I felt like I remembered all of the game even though many years had passed since I last properly played it, though my memory of the actual ending was a bit hazy. True enough, we got through all the way to Stan without much trouble - sneaking through the forest, getting shot through a cannon and feeding rabid poodles rancid meat (don't worry, they're not dead, just sleeping).
The game puts you in the shoes of Guybrush Threepwood, an up-and-coming wannabe pirate. As he goes around trying to prove to the real pirates that he has what is needed to be one of them, the bad guy LeChuck (the meanest pirate and also a ghost) kidnaps Threepwood's newfound love Governor Marley. The story might be whacky (in all the good ways!), but the gameplay is straightforward. While this wasn't the first game to use Lucasarts famous SCUMM system (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) it works great here. Maybe some young-uns don't like the idea of having to choose a verb with an item to solve puzzles (which was a novelty then, before this you had to type the verb yourself which was a guesswork in and of itself), I personally quite enjoy this system. Newer P&C games will automatically choose the right verb, but that is making things a bit too easy I find.
You can't beat the original. Can you?
Ok, it's probably more of a time consuming gimmick nowadays, but I like it, ok? Unfortunately the version we were playing was the Special Edition, which means they added voice acting and completely revamped graphics. Unfortunately because, old trout that I am, I also definitely prefer the original graphics. My kids did not however, and two against one the revamped graphics won out.
They're ok and in some parts, in all honesty, they make it easier to make out which things you can interact with. But they're just... ugly... compared to the lovely pixels of the original. The Special Edition also provides background music, which was quite nice, I must admit. While the voice acting was perfectly serviceable, a character like Stan works best as a silent antagonist if you ask me. He really grates after 10 seconds. The Special Edition also keeps the verbs, but hides them and your inventory behind buttons ("I" for things in your inventory and "Ctrl" for using verbs), clearing out your screen. I actually found this less user-friendly, but maybe that is just me.
The revamped graphics adds quite a touch.
After we had dealt with Stan and Guybrush leaves the island with his ragtag team I slowly start to realize something. As he sets foot on the beach of Monkey Island it hits home. I don't recognize any of this! I am having a proper Berenstain Moment as we start to make our way through the jungle and make friends with Bob and the Cannibals.
I knew that the game takes place on Mêlée Island and never thought to question why the game was called Monkey Island. But half the game actually takes place on Monkey Island, a half that I don't have any memory of playing. The memory I have of playing and finishing the game, is actually of me playing the first half over and over. I never actually made it to Monkey Island as a kid!
So while the first half of the game went swimmingly and I still knew most of the puzzles, I had no clue what to do once we got to Monkey Island. Me and the kids managed to figure out quite a lot of the puzzles on our own, otherwise we resorted to a walkthrough for some of the trickier ones (both the boat sections for example).
Actually getting to Monkey Island felt... wrong. It felt out of place. It felt like it was tacked on and didn't fit the atmosphere of the rest of the game. While Mêlée Island is dusky, moody and piratey, Monkey Island is its polar opposite with sunny beaches and literal monkeys running around eating bananas. I always loved the perpetual night time of Mêlée Island and didn't feel comfortable running around getting a sun tan on Monkey Island. Most importantly, it didn't fit the internal feeling I had of the game. An image I now have had to severely revise.
This doesn't mean I think The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a bad game. I still think it is one of the best P&C experiences I've had and probably one of the best P&C games there is. The writing is just superb, Lucasarts at its height of funny and whacky. There are many memorably characters, scenes and puzzles in this game and I thoroughly recommend it.
But the Secret of Monkey Island from my childhood memory is gone. And that stings a bit.
Are "weird games " a genre? Maybe they should be. It's hardly a new phenomenon, just look at that fish person game for the Dreamcast. I think games just allow themselves better for exploring some really odd ideas, for me the interactivity of the game medium seems to mean I have a lot more patience with the shenanigans of other people's minds. I am the complete opposite with literature and film, where I find whacky or seemingly arbitrary story beats tiresome. But there is something about being part of the crazy, not just observing it, that makes it a lot more interesting to me. Suddenly I am ok with whacky and seemingly arbitrary.
You'll see a lot of corn, and a lot of gags.
Coincidentally (?) I've ended up playing two fairly weird games simultaneously, Saint's Row IV and Maize. But where Saint's Row IV is shock full of crazy things to do, Maize is a much more straightforward and simple game, I'd even like to call it a walking simulator in how scaled-down it is in its gameplay elements. In that way it has been interesting to play these two games side by side, since they've chosen to approach the idea of whimsical from opposite ends of the gaming spectrum, and both have succeeded with that goal in their own ways.
In Maize you wake up in a corn field and make your way around. You initially find and explore areas like a farm house, a silo and a barn. The atmosphere is suitably creepy, you have no idea where you are, who you are or why you're doing what you're doing. In the initial part, before you find your choleric side-kick, you feel like it could go either way and just as well be the setup for another Resident Evil game.
But it doesn't take long before you realize that the theme of the game seems to be "stupid", you will hear and read a lot about it. Almost everyone you encounter, either directly or indirectly, are referred to as stupid or idiotic at several points in the game and none more than yourself.
You'll end up picking up the oddest things, like a cut-off hand, a chair or a water cooler, some times just to collect them or put on your head, some times to put them in places and/or combining them with things to advance the story. The game blocks your path when needed in not very subtle ways (perfectly fitting with the theme though) so you won't spend much time running the wrong ways and it is by no means a difficult game.
You rarely pick up things that make sense.
It's probably easy to think it's barely worth your time - the puzzles are rarely more difficult than finding an item and putting it in the right place, and the right item and right place are always very clearly marked. There is no danger at any point, nor risk to fail. There are almost no mini games that require timing or anything that requires much of any thinking - maybe this is also intentional to fit the theme of the game.
So what's left is the writing - the story and the characters. And it's a story so charmingly odd it keeps you curious and smiling the entire time. Or not. I feel this game could probably go either or with most people. Either you go along for the ride, or you find the humour neither funny nor interesting. I guess it was my kind of chuckles however, and definitely that of my kids (6 and 11 yo) who ended up loving this game.
The game seems to be set in the 80's.
The character roster is small, you won't come across many... things... to talk to. But your side-kick Vladdy makes up for that, a smart choice to not make the game feel too lonely and silent as you mostly run through areas that seem to have been abandoned not too long ago. Figuring out what has happened and what was going on in these abandoned rooms and corridors is part of the mystery, and it will keep you interested throughout the roughly 4-5 hours the game takes to play. The less said the better, this is one of those games where you want to go in knowing as little as possible for the best experience.
I just got to respect a game where the creators had an idea and decided to run with it even though it probably made little sense on paper. It's one of those "you get it once you see it" kind of things. The end result is entertaining enough, and worth your time if you want something unexpected that might give you a chuckle.
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.
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