Video Game / Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

Nowa and Seign

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is an JRPG, developed by Rabbit and Bear Studio and published by 505 Games. It was led by Yoshitaka Murayama, creator of Konami's Suikoden series, and has been cited as a Creator-Driven Successor, it was released for PC and consoles first, on April 23, 2024.

The story takes place on the continent of Allraan, where the League of Nations and the Galdean Empire are on the brink of war. A joint expedition between the two countries is set to ease tension. The League sends a party led by Nowa, a young soldier, while Seign, an officer, leads the Empire's delegation. They venture to some old, forgotten ruins, with the discovery set to change the continent forever.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a spin-off prequel of this game, set in the town of New Nevaeh and featuring CJ as the protagonist.

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Tropes:

• 20 Bear Asses: A good number of recruitable allies have this as a condition for joining you. Some have a valid reason, such as wanting to finish a job that's keeping them from joining, while others are just testing Nowa.
• All for Nothing: All of Dux Aldric's allies join him either because they think his is the winning side, that he's fighting for a just cause, or because they think siding with him will grant them a comfy future. It all comes crashing down during the battle at the Alliance's Castle, where many clever schemes see Aldric's mighty force completely dismantled, and his true nature as a traitor and warmonger exposed for all the world to see. To top it all off, he gets killed by the three main heroes in the final battle. What few of his followers are still alive will likely have to live with the fact that they were on the wrong side all along.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • In moments where you're required to bring along certain party members, if you don't want to actually use them you can put them in the "Attendant" slots where they'll still technically be in the party but won't take up space in your actual party slots.
  • Recruiting Carrie will help you a lot with getting around, to the point the game probably would be unplayable with all the backtracking.
  • Characters who are underleveled will level up extremely quickly and can catch up to the rest of the party within a few battles. Given that this was a standard feature of the game series that inspired it to avoid things like Late Character Syndrome from the high amount of characters, it comes as no surprise.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The reason Perielle speaks out against Dux during his acquisition of Norsfaria is because he had been withholding all information on the Primal Lens for months before this, the acquisition gave him a strategic position to launch an attack on the League of Nations, and she just hates his face.
• Ass Shove: Francesca threatens to break off a man's fingers and shove them "where the sun don't shine" when he harasses her.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Most Hero Combos which don't offer a special gimmick tend to do less damage than if the participating characters attacked normally. Even worse, if any participating character becomes unable to act the turn it's activated, the other participating characters lose their turn as well.
  • The Complete Heroes Combo, which requires your party to have all 6 characters from both Heroes and Rising, does significant damage but far less than if all 6 characters acted normally. The Combo gives the entire party an attack buff, but at that point in the game there are other ways to get party-wide buffs.
• Big Fancy Castle: Maybe the biggest one in videgames. The Castle have several levels and a city built around it that you can upgrade to glory.
• Boring, but Practical: The Friendship Combo with Nowa and Seign can be used every turn and does significant damage to all enemies (more than high-level spells which cost significant MP), making it very useful when handling random encounters when traversing dungeons.
• But Thou Must!: Only rarely do any of the speech choices a player is given have any effect on the flow of the plot.
• Carnivore Confusion: You have bird people eating chicken, steer people eating beef... and you even get a recipe for shark fin soup from a shark person.
• Chekhov's Gun: After Hurstwine is defeated and captured by Nowa and his party, the guard looking after him in his cell comments on his apparent love for salt with his meals. Hurstwine escapes near the end of the game by slowly rusting the bars of his cell over time, and though it isn't directly stated, he likely did this by using the excess salt from his meals as an accelerant.
• Chromatic Arrangement: Nowa (red), Seign (blue), and Marisa (green).
• City of Canals: Hishahn, the capital of Euchrisse, is built around bridges and canals, with the palace floating in a pool, and the locals are proud of it. It appears to be based on Chang'an in ancient China, which likewise had multiple canals.
• Classical Elements Ensemble: A few examples.
  • In the cooking battles, the Gastronomic Four of the Dark Dragon Syndicate are Terrance (Earth), Simmere (Water), Sears (Fire), and Waft (Wind).
  • In the beigoma sidequest, you face off against Crash's minions, the Spintinels: Thudd (Earth), Zeph (Wind), Flowe (Water), and Pyre (Fire). There is another one of his minions that you fight before any of them–Venom, whose element is Poison–but he's not one of the four Spintinels.
• Cooking Duel: Played completely straight with a very similar cooking game from Suikoden II.
• Combat Medic: Francesca and Falward.
• Combination Attack: Certain characters have a "Heroic Combo" when used together that can range from a fairly potent attack or a heal/buff that doesn't consume MP.
• Curbstomp Battle:
  • The first war battle in the game is like this. The stiff resistance from Grum's forces were to no avail as the gigantic main army from Galdea arrives after the first battle, taking the exhausted army by surprise who fall apart without a fight
  • This gets turned on it's head in the Battle for the Alliance HQ at the end, where the Alliance receives reinforcements from General Elektra as well as the Elves, but Aldric is met with betrayal from his allies in the form of Vorrdice (who forsakes his oath to Valmaurice) and Goldwyn (who was given a letter from the Crown Prince proving that Aldric assassinated the Emperor) on top of Marisa and Markus destroying his Revenant forces. To say that Aldric isn't happy is an understatement.
• Disc-One Nuke: There are certain characters that can be obtained early on that are shockingly strong for the early game.
  • Yusuke can be recruited right out of the bat by going to Xialuke Gate and has the ability to spend a turn to charge up his attack which can be stacked twice, resulting in him being an extremely powerful boss-killer who deal absurd damage with a kick.
  • Iugo will likely be among the first characters you can recruit since he's located in Eltisweiss and has no prerequisites. He has excellent physical stats and his strength will always be above-average at the very least.
• Doomed Hometown: Downplayed. Early on, Nowa's hometown is attacked and burned by Hurstwine on behalf of the Dux, but it's not completely destroyed and everyone made it out alive, so they rebuild quickly enough.
• Draconic Humanoid: The nation of Kenan consists of anthropomorphic "Dragonewts". They enjoy fighting.
• Dreadlock Warrior: Wayve, and sporting his dreads in the Killmonger style, to boot.
• Easy Level Trick: The easiest way to recruit Hogan, who requires you to earn 50,000 Baqua of profit solely by buying/selling items at the Trade Depot, is buying as much trading items as possible before talking to him to initiate his side quest. That way, players can just run towards the nearby trading post and sell everything that can be traded to easily get him.
• Escape Battle Technique: As in Suikoden: when your level is significantly higher than enemies' the "Run" command changes to an "Allow to Flee" command in which the enemies simply leave without a fight.
• Expy: Several.
  • Mellore is pretty much Sailor Moon in all but name, down to the hairstyle, weapon design, and speeches about love and justice.
  • Lian is a clear expy of Nanami from Suikoden II, from the hyper and somewhat-ditzy personality, the way she teases Nowa, and even her stats, fighting style, and design.
  • Nowa and Seign are clear expies of the Hero and Jowy from Suikoden II as well, even sharing the same color schemes (Nowa wears red and has dark hair, like the Hero; and Seign wears blue and has blond hair, like Jowy).
  • Marisa takes some cues from the Alma Kinan in Suikoden III, with a similar outfit (predominantly green color scheme), and a similar role (Guardian/protector of the forests and Runebarrows).
  • Dux looks like the twin to Emperor Barbarossa in Suikoden and dressed as Luca Blight from the sequel.
  • Lam is one twice over; Her power set is similar to Bob the Werewolf from Suikoden II while her overall design is remeniscent of Genki from YuYu Hakusho, who becomes younger the more of her power she unleashes.
  • Yume's character design and backstory of being adopted by a huge furry monster while out looking for her missing mom is lifted whole cloth from My Neighbor Totoro.
  • Maureus is essentially Rune Soldier Louie. He dresses like and calls himself a mage but statistically he has high Strength and -50 affinity for all Rune elements as well as being dumber than a box of hair. So instead he gets by on his copious brute strength, beating down his enemies with a solid steel wand which is topped by a crystal the size of a television. The series' character designer affectionately calls him the Meathead Wizard.
  • Despite being one of the nicest peole around, B'baba is an expy of two Studio Ghibili villains; Her name is a just one character shy of Yubaba, and her section of the castle is decked out similarly to the latter's office, while her character design is reminiscent of Madam Solomon.
  • General Goldwyn is obviously a counterpart for General Kiba, being an honorable sort who holds allegiance to the Emperor rather than the throne, and who defects when said Emperor is assassinated by the Big Bad of the story.
• Fantasy Conflict Counterpart: The story starts after the Galdean Empire is handed Norsfaria, a territory they demanded, in hopes of appeasing them, then using a series of border raids as a Pretext for War, while the other allied nations hesitate to join. In other words, exactly like World War II, with Norsfaria as Czechoslovakia and Grum as Poland.
• Fantastic Racism: It wouldn't be a JRPG without it. Hurstwine in particular is in no way subtle about his absolute loathing for any of the animal characters, referring to them as "tailed freaks," and their tails as "disgusting appendages."
• Forest Ranger: The Guardians, Marisa and Wayve in particular. Marisa's even decked out in green.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Before too long in the story, Nowa becomes a famous Rebel Leader with his name and face known to everyone in the region. People recognize him on the street. Yet you're freely able, and indeed required, to return to territory taken over by the Empire in order to complete sidequests and find companions, with the Imperial soldiers merely telling you to move along.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The giant Hermit Crab boss the heroes encounter in old Hishahn.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: After finishing the game, you can challenge Dux Aldric and other antagonistic characters to Glen's card game... somehow. Downplayed as it isn't actually acknowledged canonically in the dialogue anywhere and is clearly there just for fun.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: While there are a number of mild swear words used (like "damn" and "hell"), there also seem to be a number of efforts to work around harder swearing. One particular instance has a character using "motherforsaken" when it's clear that they meant to use "motherfucking." "Dastard" is used for "bastard", but the voice acting slips up sometimes.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Good luck finding and recruiting all 120 characters without one.
  • In order to obtain the good ending, you need to recruit all 120 characters by a certain point in the main story (before the battle with the Empire at Alliance HQ) that is not hinted in the game. Even worse, if you wait until the last moment to finish recruiting, one character cannot be recruited at that particular time (Aleior, who requires Marisa to recruit but she is not accessible) which will lock you out of it.
  • At no point is it stated that you need Carrie in your group to get through the ruins of old Hishahn. If you encounter the roadblock and go back to Melridge, a cutscene plays where the party calls him out...and the game still doesn't give any more hints unless the player opens up the map menu (X on Xbox controllers, Square on Playstation controllers) and switch to the story tab and even then, it's still very vague.
  • The Duels can be rather confusing since the audio cues for whether to attack or counter aren't always clear.
• Harder Than Hard: While there is a hard mode in the game, there are also modifiers that make the game even harder like "no baqua obtained from enemies", "no HP recovery item use in battle", "double MP and SP consumption'', "no escaping battles unless one uses skills", and "hyperinflation where prices in shops are outrageously expensive".
• Hollywood Tactics: Aldrich's strategy at Eltisweiss is to wait until his enemies destroy the first army group he sends, and only then appear with a large group of reinforcements. While he succeeds, it's wasteful.
• Home Base: You get this about four hours into the game, a gigantic base that you literally can get lost in.
• Hurricane of Puns: The rival chefs in the cook-offs do this particularly often.
• Jiggle Physics: Near the climax of the game, players get to fight the Dead Countess at Markus' old castle and because her model is 3D, her jiggle animations are more obvious than anything else in the game.
• Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear: When searching someone's home, you can find underwear belonging to... Lord Harlan, an older villainous man. It's described as "an unfortunate find".
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: Generally, you can tell which characters will be recruitable or otherwise important to the story because they're the ones with unique character models, often just standing around in towns. Even the ones who look less distinctive have a character portrait when spoken to before they become relevant.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: In a general sense, mages and magic are weak early on outside of the healing spells, as the damage they can do is minuscule compared to physical fighters. Later on (and once you gain access to the upgraded rune lenses), magic becomes substantially more useful, particularly as you acquire better mages like Isha who can really put them to good use. They still are hampered by having a limit due to Mana Points, but in raw damage, many spells can outdo physical attacks in the endgame. However, most of the mages have normal attacks that scale off of their Magic stat, allowing them to still do impressive damage.
• Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: There are quite a lot of animal-people in the game, both playable and non-playable. Of note are Garoo and Allaby (kangaroos), the Shi'arc people (sharks), Garr (a wolf, aka a Beastyn), Hogan (an alligator man, his race is not named), and Squash (a bird, whose people are called the Ornith). While not as playable characters, there are cougar-people walking around the home base as well.
• Magical Girl: Mellore, who literally refers to herself as such.
• Magikarp Power: A few characters fall into this realm, as they start weak and end up blossoming in the late game:
  • Mio is the textbook example on the physical side of things: she's got good dexterity (so her skills hit like a truck) and speed, but her regular physical attack is very weak and that's what she'll be relying on most of the time. When she gets to the late game, her physical attack absolutely skyrockets naturally and she becomes a Lightning Bruiser who can get the first turn off and do some wild damage.
  • Mellore, similarly, starts out as a mediocre mage who's quickly outclassed by a bunch of other characters in the magic department. In the late game, her magic stat explodes and she can become one of the best magical powerhouses in the whole roster.
• Magic Is Rare, Health Is Cheap: Healing and status recovery items are plentiful in dungeons and as item drops, but magic replenishing items are much harder to find and usually you'll need to rest at an inn to recover full MP. While MP replenishing items are more readily available later on and can be bought, they still don't replenish nearly enough for them to be a reliable resource.
• Mood Whiplash: During the cook-off battle questline. On two occasions, the cook-offs literally end in murder in the restaurant/inn, in front of everyone there, with Trey murdering Sears after his loss, and Kurtz murdering Trey in revenge for his wife and teacher's deaths after beating Trey in the cook-off. Both times, Kurtz is angry and devastated. Right after each incident, you get a new recipe, the scene returns to the inn bustling with activity as usual, and Kurtz has snapped back to his typically pleasant, cheerful self.
• New Game Plus: After finishing the game, players are able to play the game again from the start with all characters that were recruited the first time to no longer needing to be re-recruited again (like Seign and Hildi who shouldn't join the party after the Time Skip). Players can also optionally carry levels, equipment, and runes equipped or can restart the game at level one and crank up the difficulty to hard mode with all of the modifiers turned on for a harder challenge without having to deal with the annoying side quests.
• Obfuscated Interface: The interface when you upgrade your castle can be difficult to navigate as you expand your options, many times you will use some times to scroll trough the menu to find what you have missed.
• Old Save Bonus: Having a save file from Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising will grant that game's town clock tower and a Rune of Wind Enchantment, and player-customized names (for the main characters' weapons and the town delicacy) will also carry over.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Nowa and Shixeen, upon her first appearance in the shopping plaza at your headquarters. Shixeen, speaking in Ambiguous Syntax, challenges Nowa on-sight, aggressively declaring that she's heard of him, and how he's ruthless and decimates all of his foes–men, women, and even children, and now she wants to take him on in a duel. After furiously denying Shixeen's claims, Nowa nonetheless accepts the challenge, asking her where she wants to fight, and finds himself confused when she says right there in the store is fine. After drawing his weapons and declaring that he won't hold back, Shixeen gets confused and asks him where his deck is–she was challenging him to a game of cards, and that she "literally could not have been more clear."
• Peninsula of Power Leveling:
  • Bounty Hill and the Dappled Forest are cut into three segments, with the second and third ones blocked off by soldiers until reaching a point in the plot. However, by moving just past the blocking soldiers, a player can trigger the second/third segment monster blocks, and thus encounter much higher level enemies with similarly high experience gains.
  • Later on, building the Mysterious Room unlocks the Heroes Trials, which are a series of battles that end in an upgraded version of a previously-fought boss that can level characters up to insane levels as well as earn some high-end Runes and accessories.
    • The Mysterious Room can be built at about level 45, but a curious player completing the first encounter will rocket the party levels up to 60, unintentionally making the rest of the main story trivial.
• Plant Person: The treefolk, led by the Dendriarch.
• Powerup Food: Recruiting Kurtz the chef and giving him recipes lets you get dishes with combat bonuses from his restaurant.
• Precursors: Whatever civilization built the Runebarrows had advanced technology based on rune lenses but is now forgotten. It's suggested that some of the Runebarrows contain the puzzles they do likely as a way of ensuring that only a sufficiently advanced civilization rediscovers the lenses.
• Promoted to Playable: Mellore and Iugo were originally NPCs in Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, but they're full-fledged party members in Hundred Heroes.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: A number of examples, with such a large cast.
  • Hyperactive, energetic Lian is the Red to Nowa's Blue.
  • Francesca is both to herself. She'll either be sweet, polite, and soft-spoken, or a violent, trash-talking thug. There's really no in-between with her.
  • Calm rational Seign is the Blue to Valentin's flirty passionate Red.
  • CJ, Garoo, and Isha make their own little trio here. CJ is the Red to both Garoo's relative Blue, and Isha's full Blue. Garoo is the Blue to CJ's Red, but the Red to Isha's Blue. And Isha is the Blue to both Garoo and CJ's Red.
• Relationship Values: There are hidden ones for every recruitable character toward Nowa, and they are used in only one particular scene near the end of the game to determine who he shares a moment with before the final war battle and dungeon. The system itself is very rudimentary, as it's based on who the player has spoken with at Headquarters the most, regardless of the occasion. As such, it's quite easy for players to unintentionally have this scene with a character Nowa has little-to-no interaction within the main story, simply because its necessary to interact with them for essential functions within HQ. Thankfully, that also means one can also work the system in their favor by saving before the scene in question and spam-talking to the character they want for a few minutes to ensure that they meet them.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Pooby, Marisa's furry little animal companion who sits on her shoulder.
• Sequel Hook: Narungarde manage to escape and promise to be back for the rune-lenses and the Guardians.
• Shout-Out: To various franchises, as well as the Suikoden series in general.
  • Mellore as a character is one big shout-out to Sailor Moon and the Magical Girl genre in general.
  • The Scarlet Moon Empire from Suikoden gets a shoutout in the form of the Scarlet Moon Syndicate mentioned by an NPC in Arenside, as well as the Scarlet Moon Department Store.
  • One of the recipes you can obtain over the course of the game? Nanami Ice Cream.
  • Hogan's recruitment method is the same as Gordon from Suikoden II, right down to the exact amount needed.
  • One of the bosses is a Giant Enemy Crab. What's the gimmick? You guessed it, you can flip it over and Attack Its Weak Point for massive damage.
  • The beigoma minigame is based on the traditional Japanese tops of the same name that eventually inspired the creation of Beyblade. Its associated sidequest's storyline pays homage to its contemporary successor by presenting itself much like its anime series would — an over-the-top shonen anime with characters bearing exaggerated, colorful Shonen Hair that are wildly out of place with the rest of the game, while spouting off corny, Hot-Blooded lines that feel right at home with actual shows within the demographic.
  • When you confront the bandits at the end of the Abandoned Mine, they ask you who you are. You're given three options for Nowa to choose from (including Ymir's constant, sarcastic "O Great Captain of the Watch"). One of those options is "Albert Munchausen III," a shout-out to a Running Gag from the Suikoden series in which you get asked to pick a fake name in several games, with one of the options typically being "Schtolteheim Reinbach III/IV."
  • One of the names you can pick for your castle is Mount Liang, the home base of the protagonists of the Water Margin, the Chinese novel which the entire Suikoden franchise is based on.
  • Ivy fights with oversized Magitek arms suspiciously similar to Vi, and that's not even accounting for the Sdrawkcab Name.
• Spirited Competitor: The entire steeryn race is portrayed as this, stating that they are almost all avid competitors who love games of chance. According to some of the books, travelers to steeryn cities are encouraged to teach new games to the populace.
• The Empire: Played straight with the Galdean Empire, who serve as the main villains of the story.
• The Generalissimo: Dux Aldric becomes this for the Galdean Empire after the Emperor is killed off offscreen some hours into the game.
• Time Skip: Six months pass after the events of the prologue. Another one occurs late into the game when the Alliance wins against Dux Aldric and his army after defending the castle and a month happens afterwards where the various nations that were conquered by the empire are liberated.
• Warp Whistle:
  • Partway through the game you'll recruit Carrie, a mage who can teleport you to any location you've visited, meaning you no longer have to trek your way across the map.
  • Upgrading the castle to Level 2 activates warp points that let you teleport to different locations across your fort.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The ending quickly goes through all the recruited characters' fates after the events of the game.
• Wise Tree: The Dendriarch, basically the elder/sage figure of the Treefolk.

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