So it took awhile but I beat a game called Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. Now I know it’s a spiritual successor to the Suikoden series but that was a franchise I never had a chance to get my hands on so this wound up being my first experience with anything like this.

The story primarily revolves around a boy named Nowa who’s from a small town that happened to join a local watch. The watch goes on a joint expedition with members of the Imperials, officers of Galdea. During this expedition Nowa forms a friendly bond with one of the imperials Seign. It is there they discover a primal lens an item of incredible power which is taken by the leaders of the Galdean Empire and uses as a means to start a war forcing Nowa and Seign to fight each other on opposite sides. Now the story also features a third main character Marisa who shows up a good bit later in the story. Marisa is a member of a third party group known as the Guardians, protectors of the forest who ultimately joins the fight against Galdea but does her own thing for a majority of the game before joining Nowa’s forces. In the meantime Nowa travels the world seeking members of his rebel alliance while also dealing with the rift between him and Seign.

The story as a whole is really good but doesn’t do anything particularly new. It’s your standard story where an empire starts a war with the world forcing you to recruit people worldwide to stop them. Even though this is a story played out among a wide variety of games it’s still told very well here. The leader of Galdea is seen as a very incredible threat throughout the entire game so when the odds seem impossible you as the player really do feel the tension the characters feel.

With that in mind the story isn’t really the driving force behind the game but rather the over 100 characters you recruit along the way. Yeah when the game said 100 heroes that was no exaggeration as you have to recruit about 120 unique and fully voiced characters into your party. Many of them automatically join as you progress the story but a majority of the characters you come across are scattered at very random points of the world and many appear after certain segments of the story have been completed. So as the player it’s your job to carefully search every place and go back to these places after every major story moment to make sure you’ve found everyone. Now that can seem daunting but the game has unique solutions to help with that as some characters unlock special perks like fast travel, or the ability to know where to look for characters you haven’t met yet.

Most of these characters are able to join your party as you navigate the world and each one has unique stat growths and builds while you also have the ability to customize them with armor and runes, items that give specific abilities or buffs to your unit. There’s so many characters that you can spend hours tweaking and experimenting to find the right ones for your playstyle. The characters themselves are also so much fun to meet and you’ll be hard pressed to go through the game and not have a party full of characters you absolutely love. I remember early on in the game you’re introduced to a healer Francesca who is a very helpful addition to your party but as a character is entertaining with her random bouts of aggressive banter literally yelling at enemies to “stay the hell down.” So I recommend being prepared for well developed and fun characters.

However, not all of them are there for combat as there are many that serve additional roles. For example some units can join your party as a support unit and provide there own unique skill. Some allow you to change your party at save point, others boost the experience gained in battle and so much more. Then you have others that serve a function in your base of operation that you get later in the game. Many are shopkeepers using their own trade to help your party while others provide services like collecting supplies used to upgrade the facilities at the base. Every character can be made to play an important role in your gaming experience and they are all unique with big personalities making it fun to explore the world to find and recruit them.

As for the gameplay it’s a turn based combat where you have a party of up to six characters fighting the enemy which is triggered by random encounters similar to what you see in early Pokemon games. For the most part the gameplay here is what you would expect from turn based combat as you give each unit there own individual command and you exchange in back and forth attacks until someone wins. Though boss fights include gimmicks that you can exploit to either protect your party, do extra damage or sometimes both. For example in one of the boss fights you can take an attack action to trigger a trap so that it hurts the boss rather than your own party. If your party is composed of the right characters you may also get an option to do combo attacks, which look amazing but honestly from my experience don’t really do enough damage to be all that useful in battle but are a lot of fun to watch.

As for exploration you have a beautiful overworld with plenty of cities to explore and dungeons to navigate through. Each dungeon has it’s own mechanics and puzzles that you have to solve in order to progress to the end and I found these puzzles interesting as each dungeon was unique and the puzzles were a lot of fun to solve without the dungeons being overly long it was a nice balance of taking time needed to solve the dungeon without the experience being so long that it gets old.

The game also features a variety of mini games most of which are a lot of fun. You have a top battle game that kind of made me think of the anime Beyblade, a theater where you can cast any of the 100 heroes in a role of your choosing and watch them act it out and so many more. Most of the games were a lot of fun sadly I did find the cooking one tedious as it’s somewhat luck based as you make dishes to please a panel of judges and hope they like it over your opponents to win the most points. I’m not a fan of luck based games so this one wasn’t one I particularly enjoyed and there’s a character locked behind doing this a lot so it wound up being one of the last characters I recruited. So while the cooking game wasn’t one I enjoyed the mini games as a whole added an incredible side adventure that was a lot of fun.

Now with that being said the game does have a couple of negatives. One of the problems I had was how the objects in the background were a bit blurry. It rarely affected the game but there was one dungeon where you could really benefit from seeing stuff in the distance to see how you were progressing with the puzzle and I often had to walk back and forth to check because I just couldn’t see trigging random encounters along the way. A minor but noticeable problem, but the big one is the performance on the Switch. My game crashed a fair number of times often forcing me to replay a few minutes of gameplay to various boss fights. It was a very frustrating experience and it happened enough times that if the game wasn’t as much fun as it was I probably would have given into the frustration and just stopped playing. Thankfully I loved the game enough to keep going to see the end.

So overall I am enamored by how much I loved the individual characters in this game. You have these incredibly memorable personalities and I spent so much time adding various characters to my party to try them out to find my perfect combo. While the story isn’t particularly unique it’s told very well and makes great use of the characters in the story as they are the highlight of your adventure. Traveling to meet and recruit them until there’s nobody left to find is an addicting experience that takes up the majority of your time playing this game and it’s time very well spent. The Switch version does have it’s performance issues that would probably be a game breaking experience if the game wasn’t so much fun. Honestly if it wasn’t for those issues I’d probably be planning a second playthrough right this moment so I hope an update happens to fix that because I’m excited to do this adventure again.