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.
