Retro Gamer Boy

Fresh off my success at beating the Pixel Remaster of Final Fantasy 1, I found myself wanting to indulge in another RPG. I started a new game on Fire Emblem on my Switch, but it was tough on my neck to keep looking down at it, so I decided to pick a game I could play on my main gaming laptop. This entailed finding something on the Xbox Game Pass. After recently finishing “Fight, Magic, Items,” I recalled two games that I had heard about, Legend of Mana and Eiyuden Chronicle. For anyone who is not sure, Legend of Mana was a follow-up to the Secret of Mana series that I absolutely loved on my SNES, and Eiyuden Chronicles is the spiritual successor to the Suikoden games I played on my PlayStation 1.

Legend of Mana was… different. Not anything as I expected. The opening was basically an anime song (though it sounded like Korean) with lots of detailed anime sprites popping up, doing things on-screen, and showing the destruction of the land and the Mana Tree. However, once that was all completed and I actually started the game, I was very confused. You start the game on a blank world map, and your mailbox becomes an artifact that turns into a house. From there, you have these things called Sproutlings that say wonderful things like, “Did you know that everything is an illusion?” or “Sproutlings have no soul, do you have a soul?” You then collect artifacts such as colored blocks, a wheel, and other items used to create the world in which the game takes place. The gameplay map itself appears to be a 3D texture overlaid on a 2D space (the same way the original FF7 worked), and the backdrops are watercolor and beautiful. Then… there are the actual objects you interact with… they still look like 16 Bit sprites as does your character. I cannot explain it, but there is something very unsettling and distracting about having these blocky, 16-bit characters running around on this beautiful backdrop that could easily fit into many modern games. Not to mention, any object you interact with, any treasure chest you open, etc., is in this weird pixelated format. After completing the first two major quests, I decided to switch to the second game.

Ah, Eiyuden Chronicle! Why oh why did I not choose you first? I was a huge fan of the first two Suikoden games (though I kind of lost track of the series after that) and loved how you could collect these “Stars of Destiny.” My friends and I liked this so much that we used a similar structure to describe the different members of our friend group, all of whom are captured in D&D-style character sheets. At any rate, it is my understanding that Suikoden 4 was a black sheep in the series, and although Suikoden 5 was better, the studio did not really recover from the reputation lost with 4. After many years, its creator worked with a few talented developers to bring Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes to life. The game is beautifully made and harkens back to the old joy of JRPGs on SNES and early PlayStation, but the artwork is crisp, the environments are fully 3D, and of course, the music! Now, I am on a quest to collect 100 heroes, and I am very happy with my decision.

See you all soon!