Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes asks the important question, "What if you had an RPG with 120 party members", and answers that question to my knowledge the best that it could have given that challenging question. However, I still ask, was it worth it?

While the game boasts a large cast of mostly likeable characters where many of which end up serving a sizeable role in the story, most of these characters end up being one-dimensional save for a handful. As there is not enough time for them to change. Furthermore, most of these characters would have simply been put into NPC roles in a normal RPG if not for the fact that they now are NPCs... but also get to be in your party in a limited fashion. Still, it manages this fairly well in balancing them through having six main party slots, a support slot to allow non-combatant characters to join the party, as well as attendant slots if you don't want a plot relevant character to be in your primary party but still need to keep them around for the story. This all comes together giving a possible order of 10 party members which helps a lot in giving you space to experiment with them, and also to give them relevant party space compared to some other RPGs that attempted really large party sizes in that most of them were not able to give as much screen time and relevance as this game does even with significantly smaller casts. There are some creative ways to force the player to experiment and also to use more characters than a simple 6 from start to finish as well, which helps a lot in making you care about more than just your initial six. With so many to choose from, each player will settle into who they prefer.

The characters also come into the base building, which can be enjoyable apart from how constricting it actually is compared to how it originally appears, as all future upgrade materials are locked behind locations that you only get after completing specific chapters. Carefully keeping players "balanced" to be at about the same level for base building until they can advance the story in order to unlock more materials to expand.

This is where the major problems come in however. Pacing is all over the place, as key parts of an RPG are locked behind getting characters into your party and recruiting them to unlock things at your base of operation. Fast travel for one, is something locked at the 15 hour mark for when you unlock a character that gives you this ability, which means if you do a lot of side content before getting her, you'll be doing a ridiculous amount of backtracking, which the game points out in its story as a problem that you have to solve with this character. At which point... Why couldn't you have unlocked them much sooner? There are many aspects of the game that feel tedious and time-wasting in the same way, like the beigoma minigame that is a ripoff and worse version of Beyblade (There were WAY BETTER Beyblade games on the Gamecube and they didn't even bother to learn why those games were decent before implementing this half-assed minigame that is required to be completed for the true ending). Beigoma are rare items dropped by enemies that are required for the minigame, but you cannot collect them even from enemies that would normally drop them until you reach a certain chapter and can unlock the minigame with the two party members associated with it, meaning you have to then backtrack to get the beigomas you didn't originally get because it wasn't possible to get them. The very boring cooking minigame (That is required to do for the true ending), has long load-screens and is mostly RNG apart from selecting meals that are bland in order to appease the most characters, with a 15 minute timer you have to wait between matches before you can continue the sidequest. Star items, of which some are required to fully experience some minigames are items that randomly can spawn in shops and if played the way the game is meant to be played, are a random chance you check back on every 30 minutes (Unless you savescum which is clearly not intentional). Not to mention the atrocious load times on Switch and Playstation 4 which cause you to waste even more time as most stores require a long loading screen, most minigames require a long loading screen, fast traveling requires a long loading screen, etc. And so much more random things to get in the way of your progress and cause tedium and pointless timewasting.

Speaking of the minigames and all the sidecontent itself... It is pretty poor. The best of the games, the card game and the theater are completely optional, with the card game not even being required to be played any more than the tutorial match since unlocking the related character is done through collecting 120 cards, which is done through purchasing card packs. There is no traveling to fight card opponents, they are all your characters in the base in a drab and boring menu, and you can easily just buy as many card packs as you want to win against all of them for pitifully weak rewards that range from potions to the equivalent of phoenix downs. So there is absolutely zero incentive to play the minigame beyond it being the funner one of the lot. The theater is surprisingly dense, with a ridiculous amount of effort put into it with every character being voiced for every theater role in a goofy way that allows you to see their characters shine which makes it the most entertaining minigame in the post game... And for what? You have to earn the theater scripts by doing the tedious savescumming at shops, and you don't earn anything meaningful by doing all the plays with S-ranks. Then, that leaves the egg-racing which is one of the worst of the breeding racing minigames in RPGs I have seen, with a requirement for you to have every egg race 6 times in races that last for 2 minutes (With long load times before start and finish) to get the option to feed them, and only after they are done being fed from 6 races, can you breed them... With another egg that also did 6 races. With S-rank eggs basically being required to get the actually good items you can't just farm, that are still not that significantly good or worth it for hours of wasted time on an unfun uninteractive horse-racing minigame. What about beigoma? The game that is pointless to do early on because all your combatants will have rank 2 beigoma, which decimate your starting beigoma no matter what strategy you put into it since the game is mostly just about stats and type-match ups vs. any player input. Making it questionable why they even bother letting you do it without letting you farm beigoma ahead of time. Or how to advance the beigoma storyline you need to win matches against worthless jobbers in every city before the story beigoma characters will even give you a chance to stretch it out as much as possible (Which I remind you, is required for the true ending). What about the cooking minigame? Which is just you picking the same two safe meal options with one that you think your specific contestants will like (They probably won't even like it even if you pick something that tastes similar to their favorite foods), and then mashing the X or A button for a minute and... That's it. The main challenge comes from the RNG of which of your characters get chosen as judges. Do it 15 times while having 15 minute increments between each of them for more pointless time wasting (Which is required for the true ending). These things shouldn't have been mandatory, and more than that, more time and effort should have been put into all of them if they were going to make it into the game period. So much effort was put into the theater which I love, which could have just been put into the other minigames to make them better and more enjoyable instead of slogs.

Speaking of slogs, the gameplay: While I did enjoy the overall gameplay of the game, there was much to be left desired. Every character is viable, but certainly some will be a lot better than others, especially at different points of the game. Most characters are nearly identical apart from having maybe one unique skill on each character (If they're lucky), and none if they're unlucky. The most blessed ones have two or more unique skills, because SP is the name of the game up until the end game. Magic is nearly worthless until the end game with all magic doing pitiful damage and only being useful for healing. Until the end game where it becomes an unstoppable and overpowered force, meaning all your magic characters early on are weak, and endgame are your most busted. SP then is the game changer, where characters that have good SP skills are your champs, with the major thing to focus on being extremely powerful hero combos depending on team comp, and ignoring the ones that are useless since they do just about as much damage as a regular attack, same as early game magic. With so many characters and selecting their actions before each turn, there is some strategy and some fun ways to manipulate the system, but its still too slow. They did some smart techniques to make combat go faster, and it still isn't enough, as you'll want to be using the auto-battle through most of the game, which is not a good sign. Some of the boss fights are designed horrendously, with the worst ones at the start of the game, with one where the HP balancing felt off with one character having as much HP as mid game bosses in the second major boss fight, and the other having a complete RNG left or right choice that if you're unlucky means you have a very long drawn out fight. I really want to love the battle system, but it's poorly implemented even though it had good ideas for how to deal with having so many party members.

The game is also very buggy as of me writing. I had experienced over 20 crashes costing me progress, with 2 soft-locks on my PS4 version. With the auto-save being so slow with periods where it wouldn't autosave for 3 hours at a time, this was completely unacceptable.

Then... What's the point? I've been completely negative in this review until now, so why did I bother finishing this game? Well, primarily the presentation. The voice acting of every single character, the theater, the visuals, the animations (Albeit you can clearly see when they ran out of time with some cut scenes where the characters don't have running animations), and heart of this game kept me going. Its very pleasant to look at, to hear, and to experience in that way, and if not for that I would have stopped playing long ago. The duels while suffering the same problems as all the other minigames give cool one on one spectacle fights, same with the war scenarios which feel like you are leading armies even if it was rather slow and pretty thoughtless. As well, the story was alright.

The story is pretty generic, but with nice twists and turns, some nice political drama, and good character moments. I particularly enjoyed Perrielle through the story, and how each leader of the League of Nations were distinct in their failure against the fascistic Aldric who was a fun campy villain. My major complaint would just be the lack of commentary on some issues, while there is mention of racism against the animal folk of the game, its not really felt as much as it should be and could have been pushed more along with asking questions about the Alliance and Guardians instead of them being purely "good guys". Feels a bit too clean when we had drama of Seign overcoming his allegiances. As well... The end game feels a bit rushed, with a missing prince plotline that is mentioned but never elaborated on or seen beyond just being told it was done off screen. Similarly, at the start of the game when a villain has someone in their grasp they just let them go without question? You can feel where they ran out of time.

So, we return to that original question. "What if we had an RPG with 120 party members?" Well, the real answer is, we'd get an RPG where characters fight for screen time, at least half if not more will be required to dip out of the story and have no presence to avoid bloating, and we'll end up with a story where not very much of consequence can happen because that'd remove characters from that big 120 character selling point on the back of the box. I just don't think its worth it in the end, even if Eiyuden Chronicle did it in probably the best hypothetical way I could think of. This game isn't that bad, but the tedium and chore it is to play certainly drags it down a lot, especially with its technical problems. There is heart here, and I want to like it a lot more, but I can't bring myself to. I'm curious to see how the Suikoden series matches to this game, so I'll likely be looking at those games after playing this. All in all, a very low end 3/5.

Vanillaware must live on.

Unicorn Overlord is a complete game where one can feel the ambition at every turn. So much ambition in fact, that there are some aspects that needed to be cut as the game was well documented as going over budget like most Vanillaware games. While these parts are things that I wish I could have seen as I was quite gripped by this game, I also understand why they needed to be cut and the game is still worth its price tag either way.

While the story is not as complicated or in depth as 13 Sentinels, there is still a bare bones enough story to lead the characters from start to finish, the characters themselves being quite enjoyable and a few of the twists getting me. I would compare it to some Fire Emblem games, where it is mostly a story around conquering set from a sympathetic angle that just rarely brings up the consequences of war. Despite what some crazy people online will say, the localization was actually quite excellent as well.

The rapports in the game are what serve as ways to see character interaction, and after viewing all of them, I can say that while there are a fair amount of good ones that range from very funny, cute, to tragic with some great prose, some typos do come up in the script and they could be stronger. Part of this I find is particularly since the game can struggle to explore other relationships with characters beyond Alain. There are still a few good standouts such as Sharon and Ochlys and Aramis and Primm, it often feels like a lot of it is afraid to let characters get too close due to the Ring of the Maiden system.

As a part of this game, the player can marry another party member, and this is where I see a lot of the flaws with the character writing in the game. While you can marry anyone, all the male characters you can choose do not get treated in the same way as the intended women characters. And even amongst the women characters only a handful are taken very seriously which can be indicated by completing a character's rapport after Alain is already engaged with the ring and seeing if he says, "Twas but a dream, it didn't happen. I wouldn't think of cheating." or not. If he does, it shows the rapport was intended to be romantic, and if it doesn't, then it wasn't meant to be taken romantically. I found around ten women units where the line came up, but it never came up once for men which is a shame.

The game has a lot of variance however in that system though, along with others. There are many points where the player can challenge the final encounter early on, and similar to Chrono Trigger, if done at different times it will result in the ending sequence changing, but ultimately resulting in a bad ending due to the mechanics related to the ring of the maiden and ring of the unicorn as I mentioned before. Hence I do understand why they let you marry men despite not taking it seriously, because it is more of a gameplay mechanic than anything, since who you marry determines the ending sequence's final battle since the ring of the maiden and ring of the unicorn impart special skills when fully unlocked required to see the true good ending. They allow this since you have to use the two characters in the same unit, so this affords a player to pick someone for Alain purely for gameplay factors and having them be in the same unit as Alain which is understandable, but I wish they treated gay sexuality with more respect. Especially considering the implied sapphic characters in the game that are treated better.

Speaking of gameplay mechanics, I had found the option to spare or execute characters to feel contrived and meaningless. There is no risk of a character stabbing Alain in the back or being a mistake to spare, it ultimately just decides whether you get a unit or resources, and a unit will always be more valuable than resources. Even for characters you would think do not deserve to be spared, it is ultimately the right decision, which makes each of those decisions feeling hollow. For what it is worth though, the characters you do choose to spare do typically have pretty good rapports.

Which finally gets us into the heart of the gameplay, the battle system. Connecting to the rapport system, is the general battle system which is clearly where everything connects and becomes a beautiful interconnected web. Every character in the game has a set of unique skills based on their classes, which can be programmed with an in game decision tree to determine what a character does on their action. This works similarly to the Gambit system from FFXII, but in this case there are more limited options per character, but so many more different interactions to make it easy enough for a new player to make something passable, to a professional player properly taking advantage of this tree. Decisions are made using if statements which can be programmed with statements that are true or false and will only activate under certain conditions, such as only using a ranged attack if it is against a flying enemy, in which case if its not it will move to the next decision, to setting priorities like using magical attacks on armored units first. There is a large selection of conditions, and each move can receive two conditions each, making a rather large ability for a player to create specific AI for each of their units in the same way a programmer would. What makes this work beautifully and come together is how you can build units of up to 5 characters that battle an enemy set of 5 characters, with ten deployable armies you can control at once. This takes the strategy to a new level, and can be modified on the spot where you can see yourself the results of each change in AI, and see how it plays out in the gorgeous art style that had made Vanillaware famous. With well balanced weapons, shields and items with unique abilities to slowly upgrade your army and add complication to the strategies you employ, and improving rapport between your units so that they give each other better statistical upgrades, an overworld conquest system where you can get continuous rewards from stationing guards while having an expansive overworld to explore with side quests, it all comes together to make an addicting battle system for anyone interested in the SRPG genre.

As said, the art style is beautiful, and I lament on the team running out of budget, as once credits start to roll, you can see how many backgrounds that were never used in the story or rapports come up to show where each character has gone similar to other SRPGs. However, these backgrounds clearly were intended to be used with all the rapports which are unfortunately all on the overworld using the tiny sprites instead of the larger battle sprites. Which is a shame, and clearly a mark of the budget running out, as some of these backgrounds were nice, and it would have added a lot to many of these rapports if we could see the character models interacting instead of the overworld sprites.

The audio luckily did not suffer at all, with a number of beautiful tracks, great voice acting, and gripping sound effects that fit the game perfectly.

Ultimately there is so much good about this game that it has me longing for more, which is a shame since there are hints at what could have been if Vanillaware didn't run out of budget for this title. The lore entries in the journal make mention of things that barely come up in the final product and likely had to be cut, there are the rapports that could have taken place on the beautiful backdrops with all the unique character models they had, and more. Yet, what is here is undeniably a complete and wonderful SRPG. I only hope that Vanillaware is able to rightfully get rewarded for this, so their next project gets a larger budget.

There is a good monster collecting game in here somewhere, but its mired by the games excessive faults.

This game just feels cheap, of course its a spinoff series, of which the spinoff series was always originally on handhelds so of course it would not stand toe to toe with the mainline Dragon Quest games. However the transition to the Switch was faulty at best, and a complete floundering at worst. The Switch is a weak console, and this game was not prepared for it, with frequent crashes that interrupted gametime (Only saved slightly due to the frequent auto-saving), environments on some later worlds being very drab, and endlessly reused music from other Dragon Quest games instead of relying on new tracks. This game feels like a disappointment.

The story is a semi-retelling of DQIV through the perspective of Psaro, a fan favorite villain of the series and the central villain of DQIV. Though, the telling of the story leaves a lot to be desired. Psaro only having a voice when capturing monsters and not having a voice in the story strips the player of being able to get into his mind since he can't speak, and the game tries to present multiple points where you choose what Psaro says, but every choice is an illusion since Psaro is a pre-established character and you cannot alter his story by doing things he wouldn't do. This can be confusing at many points as you have to get into a silent protagonist's head to figure out what the game wants you to do, but he never tells you and so you will say yes to a dialogue option, only to have characters berate you because Psaro actually meant the other option. This impacts the whole story as they then need to have an abundance of flashbacks that do nothing for the player but stand in for Psaro's background, because he can't just talk about it since he's silent. Most of the worlds have alright little self contained stories, but each world is disconnected and you only get the pay off way later in the game, as a result, you do 6 introductions, 6 midway points, and then 6 separate conclusions to each world. Culminating in finally the ending of the main story that is admittedly not bad with some homages to the DQIV party. But the rest of the game can just feel like a checklist of things to do.

Taking us into the gameplay, where it feels like the monster collecting section of the game is off. While the start of the game functions fine, leveling your monsters, fusing them to get higher power talents and getting more talent points from fusing, and then using your new powerful higher ranked monsters to tear up the competition, the end game ends up being miserable despite this. This is due to the fact that every time you fuse your monsters, they are reset to level 1, which would work well, but they all gain experience at roughly the same rate, with small adjustment changes like you'd see from Pokemon. This proves to be a problem, since later on, it feels very tiresome to fuse your A rank, S rank, and X rank monsters for what amounts to very little actual power difference compared to your B rank monsters, especially when you have to re-level them all the way up after fusing, when leveling at that point will take a lot of grinding to get back up to the levels required of you by that stage of the game since ranks don't impact their experience gain. The main concession then is metal slime hunting, which is based on luck, or using a guide to hunt them down which is using outside information to limit your grind. Similarly, some of the fusions requirements for A rank, S rank and X rank are very obtuse and lead to frustration in even getting some of your A rank, S rank and X rank monsters, requiring a lot of fusing and grinding for the hopes of getting some monsters that barely out-perform B rank monsters, and will be weaker at level 40 than your level 70 B rank monsters at that point. The game is then more enjoyable with using the fan created guides and I'd recommend that, but it seems the game would rather you do something else... Giving into paying for the DLC that helps your grind. It feels like the game is trying to push you toward it, beause unlike SMT you cannot resummon previously created monsters, BUT you can buy the DLC that lets you refight monsters you already have in your compendium to recruit. How kind to put this behind a paywall along with the gold and EXP farming zones. Not predatory at all.

All of these combined factors soured this game on me a lot. While the core monster raising, the strategy that comes from late game fights, and the idea behind the characters(Even if not executed well) kept me playing to the end, the game has too many flaws to rate it higher. 2.5/5.