While the joyously flexible role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3 dominated this year’s Bafta game awards, winning the award for best game, there remains a strong nostalgic appetite for plainer, more traditional RPGs. Conceived by Yoshitaka Murayama, a writer-director who made his name during the original PlayStation years, Eiyuden Chronicle raised £3.6m on Kickstarter in 2020 to become the third highest-funded video game ever on the crowdfunding site. It’s a sequel to Murayama’s classic Suikoden series in all but name: a rip-roaring adventure featuring a group of mostly young people tangled in the friction and chaos of two warring neighbouring states.
As with Murayama’s work from the 90s, follows a familiar pattern as you guide your party from settlement to dungeon, your progress regularly interrupted by capricious random battles through which your characters become incrementally more powerful. After a pedestrian prologue, the game unfurls deliciously. Its gimmick is its Pokémon-esque meta-quest: to woo and recruit each of the 100 or so titular heroes to your cause. They begin as a tiny party, then develop into a squadron, to finally become a makeshift army. Every warrior, healer and member of support staff has a name, a personality and an arc. Recruits are encountered across the world. Some enrol the moment you approach; others require cajoling. But the thrill of completing the collection turbo-charges the game’s more conservative, dated appeal, as the recruits can each be slotted into your main six-person team, and directly controlled in battle.
