Credits rolled on 12/27/2024 at 3am

Total playtime: ~103 hours

Played on Steam Deck, primarily docked, but occasionally handheld.

I want to start this off by saying that I really did enjoy my time with this game, but there are a LOT of QOL issues that drag it down. These are things that are completely unacceptable in a game that came out in 2024. I expect tedium and frustrating systems in older games. I know this is supposed to be a spiritual successor to Suikoden (none of which I’ve played), but you can—and this might be a scary concept—just…NOT include garbage systems in new games.

This doesn't affect my rating of the game, but I was also contending with a controller issue any time I was playing with my Steam Deck docked, which was probably 75% of the playtime. There’s a known drift issue for this game, and I never found a fix. Your controlled character will just run to the right more often than not, when you’re not actively touching the left stick. This also means that you open the menu and it’ll sporadically just start scrolling like crazy. I don’t know how I didn’t go crazy with 103 hours of this.

Things that I enjoyed:

The variety of characters – First of all, the main character is named Nowa and my boyfriend is Noah, so he got some immediate points for that. There are 120 characters to recruit, with about 70 being battle-capable. The scope of design was really satisfying. I used Yusuke for a large chunk of the game before eventually replacing him, but it was difficult to drop my sweet pink coat-wearing delinquent. My end-game party was Nowa, Leene, Momo, Mellore, Isha, and Milana. Prior to finally getting Leene, I used CJ a good bit. Before Isha and Milana, I had Lam and Yusuke. Mellore was a staple from the very beginning. I ended up with 4 mages in my party for a huge portion of the game despite it really wanting to punish you for using them early on. (Early magic uses a TON of MP, like 40MP for a basic healing spell when your mage has a total of like 60MP. You also can’t buy MP recovery items anywhere in the game until much later with your Castle HQ general shop, after a few upgrades. This is already ridiculous, but you also only ever get access to the weakest MP recovery item. Anything else, you just find throughout the game.) I honestly never even tried out the vast majority of characters. I was always just trying to get shit done and never took the time, though I wanted to. Lastly, Momo is god-tier.

The music -- Some tracks had that distinct Tales sound because of Sakuraba, but not all of them. I can’t really think of a track that I didn’t enjoy.

The art -- The landscapes, backdrops, town design, etc. are fantastic. Really solid blend of 2D and 3D here, as well, which I can be pretty picky about. I’m not a big fan of pixel art, but this is a beautiful example of it.

The camera angles in battle – BRO. The way that camera would just glide beautifully to follow attacks. Glorious.

Battles in general -- I thought they were a lot of fun. I did auto-battle occasionally when enemies were a lot weaker, but because I never bothered to set up character actions for auto-battle, they'd use up rare recovery items and spam high-cost spells. The animations are insaaanely smooth and the spells look phenomenal. Some boss fights have gimmicks, and while I'm glad those weren't super common, they were mostly fun.

Eggfoot races – Required only in that you recruit a character in order to open the stadium, but otherwise an optional mini-game, and the only one I genuinely enjoyed. There are some kind of dumb aspects to it, in the sense that each eggfoot can only be fed so many times, can only race so many times, and disappears after breeding. But I still found it fun. I just wish you could skip viewing the races, since you don’t actually do anything but sit there and watch them play out. I spent like six hours doing these while watching a show when I first unlocked it, and then with the next Castle upgrade, I saw that there were better feed and egg options. So it’s not really worth putting any time into this until you’ve maxed the upgrades.

Upgrading the Castle HQ -- I just really love shit like this. It's super satisfying to unlock new shops and amenities, and to see the town grow.

Things that were just kind of mid:

The story -- Disappointing, as the bones were there. The villain is a generic bad guy. The game is overall one about politics and war, but you actually learn very little about the world and its history. The Runebarrows play less of a role in this game than in the prequel, Rising, and you learn absolutely nothing about the ancient civilization that developed them. You learn basically nothing about the rune lenses, Primal lenses, etc. The good guys have clear motivations, but the villain’s are bland and uninspired. There are still some good story beats, but nothing here was especially impressive.

Hero combos -- These weren’t bad enough to be listed with the cons below, but they’re also mostly useless. I only used them a few times because I rarely had a party of characters who made the combos, and any that I did try were honestly trash compared to basic attacks. Disappointing more than anything. They LOOK great, though.

Duels -- Okay, so, the animations here look great. There are only a handful of these in the game, and it's all just picking attack or counter until you can select break, which moves the duel into the next "stage." The fights that are animated between these stages are really goddamn cool. The duels themselves, not so much.

Legion battles -- I wouldn't have played this game if this was the whole combat system. It's just not my thing. However, considering the themes of war and rebellion throughout the game, the legion battles certainly have a place within it. They were pretty simple, not very difficult, and spaced out enough to highlight major plot points that I didn't mind them.

Despite the positives, I have some major complaints about various systems/mini-games in Hundred Heroes. Here we go:

Inventory -- The first third-ish of the game is a massive chore, if only because of the lack of fast travel and an exceptionally stupid bag/storage system. Your bag—before later upgrades—has 30 slots. The way that items take up these slots, though, is where it gets absolutely asinine. You have 12 healing herbs? Cool, that’s two of your slots—six herbs in each. Oh, you found some magic drops? Two per slot. You picked up 5 of this exact same type of Rune in a dungeon? Sick, that’s FIVE SEPARATE SLOTS. I was in an early dungeon (mines) for about two hours, and had to keep wasting herbs on characters who were barely missing HP, or just tossing shit that I didn’t really want to toss. There was no fast travel yet and I was so far into this place before I pondered using the escape runeshard thing that I couldn't be bothered to use that and travel aaaalll the way back to where I was within the dungeon.

You unlock your Castle HQ relatively early, but you are responsible for upgrading it with items that you slowly get access to as areas open up, and all of the shops/facilities require specific recruited heroes. You unlock fast travel around the same time as you find the character who can open up a bag shop in your Castle HQ. So, basically, you can now carry more, but a huge aspect of that problem—having to backtrack a million miles just to store items—is essentially already negated. This point of the game is even more frustrating because, between your HQ and the next town, there’s a dungeon that you have to go back through constantly, as there is no way to access storage in the town. Between THIS town and the next, where you finally get fast travel and the bag character, is a large chunk of plot, the biggest and most tedious dungeon of the entire game, and multiple side quest requirements to get said fast travel. (Again, this is like a third of the way into the game.)

You also can't change your party or equip runes anywhere but your base/an inn or the rune shop, unless you use your support slot for a character who can grant you access to those things. I don't care if Suikoden had similar mechanics, or if that's a typical thing in games with so many party member options; it's a horrendous decision, ESPECIALLY since simply being able to throw whatever runes on my party would mean freeing up that precious inventory space while in a long dungeon. These early-game runes are just like, "add 5% strength" or whatever, too. It's not like they're SUPER DUPER SPECIAL GAME-BREAKING pieces of equipment that require a bit more effort to equip or something. Just let me throw them on my characters so I have some more bag space, fuck.

There is no defending a system where I’m unable to just change my party whenever I want without going back to town/HQ. There’s no excuse. I hated that aspect of Octopath Traveler and I hated it even more here because the other systems punish you enough already.

These are my major complaints, but there are a few other things that I made statuses about because they killed my momentum with the game:

You get a relatively late quest to learn how to play beigoma (spinning tops) and then challenge a number of skilled opponents before taking on this one jerk who’s bullying everyone and stealing their tops. Your starting beigoma are garbage. Basically any rando in town who plays will destroy you. Like, there are no beginners. You also get the majority of the beigoma in the game as monster drops, but this is not retroactive, so you have to backtrack to a million different locations to get them. This is honestly a waste of time because the only ones that are going to win a match are from a few higher level areas that I thankfully already had access to. I would not have bothered with this, except TWO recruitable characters are locked behind this quest. You get one early on, but you have to defeat the aforementioned stronger opponents, as well as a set number of randos in between each of them, and finish the majority of the questline for the second character. I had like one small bit of plot before the point of no return for recruiting characters when I was doing this quest, so I basically HAD to do all of this stupid shit, as well as the cooking battles for another character, before I could move on.

The cooking battles themselves are a fun concept. I didn’t mind actually doing them, for the most part. Most of the recipes are found by talking to townsfolk in their homes. A good chunk of them show up as chests in random battles. Like the beigoma, this is not retroactive. Thankfully, though, you unlock the cooking battles pretty early so there’s not as much backtracking to early towns/areas in this case. Where it gets stupid, though, is when you realize that just about every general shop in the game also has a recipe available. They just have an incredibly low chance of showing up, and once you’ve checked a shop, there’s some invisible timer of 30 minutes before the chance is “reset.” You can save at an inn and just reload over and over if you want, but I refused to do so out of spite. You don’t HAVE to collect all of the recipes in order to finish the 15th battle and subsequently recruit a character, but by the 12th battle, I was struggling to score high enough to win. The other problem is that every recruited character has a favorite food. When the battle starts, the randomly-selected judges are introduced. Sometimes their favorite food is mentioned, but more often, it isn’t. Even with a favorite food guide pulled up, it’s nonsensical. One character’s favorite food is rolled omelet. I didn’t have that recipe, but I did have omelet. She gave it a 0 (scale is 0-5). Another character is introduced as loving vegetables. What’s his actual favorite food? BLUEBERRY PIE. Yet another likes kiwis. So I make mixed fruit one of the courses, because none of the actual recipe blurbs mention kiwis, but the picture for mixed fruit has them. She hated it, of course. Chocolate cake as the favorite food? Gives the dark chocolate cake a 2. Okay.

There is one final character who you cannot recruit unless you have everyone else, and I was sure as shit not going to miss that over these dumb minigames, so I put in the effort.

I had planned to finish the Castle HQ upgrades before tackling the endgame, but the last two things I needed to complete were upgrades to the playhouse. The two plays that I was missing? Just like the secret shop recipes--low chance, random offerings at specific shops. I said fuck it and finished the game without getting them.

So, the complaints definitely claim the most text here, but as I said, I did honestly enjoy my time with this game. I liked a lot of the characters, even though I felt like none of the main ones really got a satisfying wrap up to their individual arcs. I had a good time with the combat and found a lot of the enemies interesting. Hundred Heroes unfortunately falls into the "average" category as a whole, but it's probably going to stick with me for a while.

(I always forget things when I'm writing up reviews, so I might think of some other things to add later. I tried to make notes.)

I was gonna gave this game 10/10 star by nostalgic alone. Huge suikoden JRPG fans, loss counts how many times i replay back then when i had no walkthrough. But i a grown ass man now, cant spent time like last time.

I have 100% completion within 40 hours (more or less) and.... i drop star to 6.5/10 So, as usual im just gonna list the Pros and Cons from my experiences.

PROS:

• Beautiful scenario and surrounding ( Mix of 3D and 2D aesthetics )
• Awesome animations (particularly the duel part ! damn straight anime moments )
• Voice acting damn good. Everyone has their own slang somemore. ( had trouble understand Larla lol )

CONS:

• Bugged on release ( yeah actually had to hold playing for them to sort the bugs coz it impact the playthrough severely. no kidding )
• Everything so damnn SLOWWW ( movement speed , battle, cooking etc everything so slow actually had me use cheat engine to speed it up !! i had to speed it up x3 ! what worse they way to speed the movement is lock behind a character and the item only available at last dungeon what the hell man )
• Random encounters oh my. How fun when u try to solve puzzles and get thrwon into battle every 5 steps ! random encounters so old alreadyy.... if u want to do, at least gave us some items like in tales series. the equipment is such a waste to use.
• Hero combos damn useless like really ( normal attck do more damge than 3 hero combo, u guys didnt check the formula and calculations is it? ) i end up never rely on it . 1 good combo only which is falward and fran. Thats all. the rest, pfft. and the combo is just their animations stacked on each other mostly. boringgggg
• Inventory damn annoying ! theres a limit and its 30??? wtf 30 and u have 120 heroes ! and to make matter worse u cant stack items ! oh u need 30 healing herbs? yeah thats gonna cost you like 10 spaces . u got inventory within inventory man . this is shit. i hate it so much..... U need to put support to increase the capacity and upgrade facilites, but still u only got like 60 max. 60 yeah no kidding. so fun to come and go to store items
• Lack of variety of unique skills and runes. yeah u have 120 heroes? forget it. u prob stick to close 10-12 ish coz the rest just different in face and stats. rest got shit runes slot. Not even a true rune or something .... blergh u end up spamming same things
• Villain.... His is such a soy boy, uninteresting, his script like he has a toddler mentality. holyshit. he got nothing on Luca Blight !! he more like a clown TBH
• Beyblade... Who the f****** hell thought its a good idea to lock 2 recruitable characters behind this shit ??? its not fun and very tedious. u have no way to trace who play the game or no any indication whatsoever... even worse u need to find gold baybalde to even completed it and the only way to get a drop from enemy... why the hell enemies has beyblade??? what they to with it huh huh where it put it? in their pockets is it??
• Cooking. 16 contest. are u real. why not 5? its same shit . u just put omelete, steak and cococnut water and will win. why need 16? its not even rng. just freaking tedious. come on. What worse all this tedious character to recruit not even worth the effort.

I think i rant too much, but u can see why it drop from 10 -> 6.5 . I still got a lot i want to rant but i just want to move on. I dont think i will ever replay the game.

I heard they planned for sequel already. Please improve. Do not stuck JRPG of the old days... we moving forward and we need modern JRPG that actually fun to play.. like octopath traveler.... Many of us grown already, and we enjoyed it differently compared to back then . IMO only, no need to argue if u feel the need.

but oh well, thank you for the nostalgia Yoshitaka Muramaya ! and all the massive backers !!