Eiyuden Chronicles Kickstarter

The interview with Murayama in the Kickstarter updates was pretty cool. I think that's the first time I've ever actually seen him being interviewed, though. His passion for linking story with gameplay kind of reminds me of Suzuki with Shenmue. Also the combat system sounds like it could be really great. It seems like they're actually trying to iterate on the combat in Suikoden III. (y)


Tbh, I'm still wondering why Capcom abandoned the phenomenal sprite works and great systems(especially coming off of BOFIV) for what we got in BOFV. I almost came close to quitting a few times from the fustrations.
:LOL:
For me everything about Dragon Quarter is absolutely perfect. The blending of survival mechanics with strategy RPG systems is one of the most magnificent combos I've ever seen in video games. I love the story, and ties to the scenery. The nonlinear story elements give a very unique presentation of the story, that probably wouldn't be possible in any other medium. It does everything it can to try to crush the player's hopes and dreams (fitting for the story). All tied together with one of the greatest soundtracks in all of video games. I can't say enough good things about the game. It's one of my all-time favorites.

I don't really like any of the other BoFs, though. I really didn't like IV, especially, but I haven't played it since 2002 or so. Excluding Dragon Quarter, the original BoF is probably my favorite.
 
We need more PS1 style JRPG's. Outside of Final Fantasy and Persona I don't really play any anymore.

This game look's very cool though and I'll keep an eye on it.
 
I just noticed that Perielle and Hildi are actually in the character collage background of the cover artwork, which suggests to me that they already had sort of an expectation that they were going to break $2.2 million for this kickstarter. I'm really curious where this campaign is going to settle, though. I don't think it's going to make it to $4 million, and I hope that's not a problem for the project. They keep mentioning potential publishing partners, plural, though. So hopefully those negotiations are going well.

I also really need to remember to add a digital copy to my pledge, now that the option has been given.

This game look's very cool though and I'll keep an eye on it.
So far, this seems like it could be almost everything I would have hoped for in a sequel to Suikoden III, outside of a lack of story continuity. The stretch goals continue to make it more and more a sequel in all but name. I just hope it makes it to unlocking the 108th character. Only three more left, and it's pretty close to the stretch goal for #106.
 
Oh, god. What are they doing! They're putting, like, Pesmerga/Yuber (Neclord?) into a 109th character slot! I don't know how to feel about this.

There's also so many features being added, it's kind of hard to keep up. Fairly big features, too, like party conversations, bath houses, voiced cutscenes, and pet raising/breading/racing. I sure hope they're going to be getting a whole bag of money from a publisher--.
 
It's finished and they've reached all the stretch goals. Well they have one last goal where they are planning to make a "town building rpg" together with Natsume but that is going to be a separate title it seems and will cost backers an extra 7 bucks.

I'm fine without that. Time to lay back and look forward to Eiyuden Chronicles. 1
 
46,305 backers and over $4.5m raised. Very impressive! I just added another 700 yen for the extra game - and it was already funded.

Congratulations to the team; i'm really looking forward to playing this in a couple of years time :)
 
I somehow feel a little bad about it, but I actually backed this project at a tad higher than I did for Shenmue III. I was initially just going with the Archivist Knight tier, but a week or so ago I was just browsing through the KS page, and noticed that a slot for the original Monument tier opened up. I think it was probably someone who saw the 3D printed prototypes of the figures in that one video in the updates, and assumed that was how the backer versions would be made (despite the descriptions actually saying they'll be polystone resin). I'm definitely going with Marisa, even though her prototype model didn't really look as good as the one for Nowa.

Anyway, I jumped on that with a new KS account, since I was already considering adding on a digital copy of the game to my original pledge. I ended up adding on the steelbook case, cloth map, collectible cards, backer hero, and companion game to my Archivist Knight pledge. If they're using Fangamer for physical backer rewards--I don't think they mentioned anywhere who their partner(s) would be for this--then I'll expect to see basically none of the physical rewards outside of the sigil buttons, probably. Honestly, I do hope they have a really good distributor in mind, because it feels like they went heavier on physical rewards than any other video game campaign.

With all the stretch goals met, it does feel like the plan is for pretty much a true sequel to Suikoden III, from a purely gameplay perspective (plus two extra SoDs). Very happy about that, as well as the novel "DLC." Now for the waiting game.
 
Oh wow, they manage to dethrone and took third place plus fufill all stretch goals. Congratz, and I hope the game launches with all it's ambitions intact. Tho I didn't back, I'll def buy a copy if it lives up to it's hype/expectations. Fingers cross Konami sees and tries again to do something with the Suikoden IP.
 
I've been playing the backer beta now for 7 HOURS (!!!!), and it still seems to be sending me to another mission, so at this point I'm thinking I'm just going to stop and wait for the full release. The beta is on Steam, and I'm getting my playing copy for GOG, but it's not really clear to me whether the beta save would even carry over to a Steam version of the full game. I don't really want to replay ~10 hours of the opening of the game, if the beta is going to go on for that long. Only problem is I'm not sure if I can stand to not keep playing what's available in the beta.

This game might be friggin' massive, is basically what I'm saying. For a rough description of the events I've been through so far (basically spoiler free): The game open's in a small town where you prep to go out on a joint mission that establishes some of the main characters, and some circumstances around the relationship between 'the empire' and 'the federation.' It's a fairly large, mutli-part dungeon mission. After that it's a little like the mercenary outfit section of Suikoden II, but you have a bit more freedom. Actually kind of forces you to go out and recruit some people that takes you to another smaller dungeon a few times. Then there's another mission to help out some of the locals, with a pretty massive mines dungeon (actually kind of reminded me a little bit of Palborough Mines in Final Fantasy XI). I stopped just after that, and getting ready to be briefed on another mission.

Graphically, it's not my favorite idea--having 3D environments and 2D character sprites--but in practice it does look pretty nice. The sprite work is great, and the art style is quite good, I feel. The main thing that bothers me is the mipmapping is not very good, and causes some unpleasant transitional texture glitches in a number of background elements. It's also pretty easy to see the mipmap transition depths as discreet lines on more foreground elements, basically like a lot of (particularly Sonic Team) Dreamcast games. It's not something I generally find horribly offensive, but it just feels like something that shouldn't possibly be happening in this day and age. It's also a pretty small issue. The only other technical thing I've noticed is that shadows aren't great, and in Japanese, Nowa's voice recordings get really muffled in a number of lines sort of in the middle of my play time. Also, there have been a couple instances of the voice lines not matching the Japanese text lines, which is kind of weird. (No idea about any of the English audio/text.)

Generally, though, things appear pretty polished. It feels like they had way more money for this game than they could have ever needed. There are a lot of seemingly good systems around the combat, but I'm a little concerned about some of the balancing. I set the difficulty to Hard, and while it starts out a little challenging, After gaining a few levels, and tweaking equipment a bit, it seems easier than the first Suikoden to me. The main thing that bothers me is I absolutely adore Yume (a character you can recruit early), but keeping her in a party is basically a massive handicap. She's a two character slot member, but instead of the tradition of having these types of characters take up on front row and one back row slot, she takes up two slots of the same row! To add insult to injury, she's also an S-type character, so she has to be in the front row to do almost anything, not to mention S-types are always the most numerous character types. On top of all that, her stats are no better than the main character's, so she's not even doing damage to make up for having 5 party members instead of six. It's so upsetting--. I still kept her in the party full time, though.

One other thing that concerns me a little bit from a balance perspective is the rune system. Characters seem to have a range of different slots from 3 up to maybe 8, that get unlocked and different character level thresholds. Seems like certain slots are reserved for different types of runes though (ie. slots for elemental runes, slots for special attack runes, slots for stat boosting runes, etc). Anyone familiar with Suikoden meta knows that if you have a multi-attacking party member who can equip Double-Beat, Killer and Fury runes, the game gets broken wide open as they slaughter everything. With the disparity in rune slots being like this in Eiyuden, I don't see how a character with only 3 or 4 slots is going to be able to keep up in any way with characters who have 7 or 8 slots. It probably doesn't matter a whole lot. I doubt many people care about these things as much as I do, and there are a lot of interesting things about the combat, otherwise.

The character interactions are pretty great, and I was actually forced into a fit of laughter when this game's version of Schtolteheim Reinbach III comes into play. Looking forward to actual release day.
 
Back
Top