Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review – IGN

Hundred Heroes also has a strategy RPG portion that appears after the central war in its story begins, mostly when facing enemy generals, where you control armies of soldiers on a grid-like map and command them to attack enemy legions. Major characters act as commanders with impactful special abilities like lowering enemy defenses or HP to secure an advantage before an invasion. My go-to strategy was ganging up on enemies to quickly lower their HP, forcing them to retreat, and then reallocating my armies somewhere else afterward. Events can even pop up during these battles, like enemy generals joining the fray or split second betrayals, which add spice to the mix but often make your tactical decisions more straightforward. While intimidating, I never had an issue operating on the fly.

You will also participate in “duels” during major plot points, usually with one main character facing a rival or antagonist. In these duels, you can choose to either attack to deal damage and raise a Tension gauge a little, or counter to take less damage from an attack and build a larger amount of Tension. The idea is to whittle down the enemy’s health enough to reach the Break marker on their HP bar, which lets you use a stronger Break attack to finish them off. Alternatively, maxing out the Tension gauge enables you to deal a similarly devastating blow.

However, whether the enemy attacks or counters is entirely up to chance, which can feel unfairly random. I’ve only won half of these duels as a result, and the others found ways to excuse my loss as part of the plot. By the end, I leaned toward constantly attacking to get a head start in damage, but even that is a simplistic strategy. Thankfully, it’s not a huge deal that these are left up to chance because there aren’t significant losses that would force you to restart a duel, but it’s still frustrating to lose based on a bad guess. That makes duels seem more like a story tool rather than an actual challenge.

Gimmicks can appear in the regular turn-based boss fights, too. Most of them worked as obstacles that I needed to plan around during battle, like setting aside one character to flip a switch for a secret weapon between turns. However, gimmicks based on random chance could increase a battle’s difficulty without adding any interesting strategy. One early fight encouraged me to pick between two hammers that could potentially deal three times the damage of one of my units to the boss. The boss popped up on either the left or right side, and only the hammer closest to it would be able to hit it. If you picked the wrong hammer, then you would waste one character’s turn and have to survive the fight for a longer amount of time. But similar to the duels, there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell which one is the right pick, which leaves the difficulty up to chance rather than any particular strategy.

Hundred Heroes’ campaign takes somewhere around 40-60 hours to complete, depending on how much time you spend recruiting characters, upgrading your castle, and playing minigames – including a top-spinning one called Beigoma that’s very reminiscent of Beyblades. Some of the side quests are easy to complete, like defeating specific enemies for drops that potential allies request before joining your party. Others feel like a never-ending mystery, like my quest to find a lucky fish for my fisherman friend. That said, the campaign doesn’t force you to complete any specific side quest – though it might encourage you to recruit a certain number of allies before advancing to the next chapter.

Despite eventually enjoying it, Hundred Heroes suffers from a slow start that initially holds it back. At the beginning, I was unimpressed with the amount of backtracking it took to get between destinations, especially with the random encounters that interrupted my journey. Hundred Heroes doesn’t clearly spell out the solution to every puzzle, either, so you sometimes need to pace through cities over and over before stumbling upon a solution. It took me 15 hours just to unlock fast travel, which I only found by chance while wandering the streets of one major city. At that point, things really started to open up, letting me satisfyingly teleport between towns to recruit new allies, but that amount of time is a lot to get through before a payout.