Eiyuden Chronicle Hundred Heroes Review

Greetings Friends, I originally played Eiyuden around release, I believe I tried the Switch Version, the Steam Version, and the Game Pass Version; mostly played the Game Pass one for about 10 hours. I love Suikoden in general and want more Suikoden of course but the game was just dull for those first 10 hours. Not to worry the game does get better like 20-30 hours in and is ONLY 95 hours long if you do everything. So I was aware of this more or less and just didn't play it because its 40 hours too long a la Rebirth, in the case of Rebirth it was very profitable to cover on youtube so that negated the shittiness of the length (same thing for Revelations I'm sure) but more and more of the comments on the Rebirth videos are like "fuck this game its way too long." Now in a general sense very few people care about Suikoden at this point and games like Kessen 3 and Valkyrie Profile 2 are much better than any Suikoden game and those franchises are both super dead so accepting the fate of franchises that peaked in PS2 era and died is sort of an inevitability of a traditional JRPG fan. How many active people would you say even know that the character Arshtat (a fantastic character and character design) even exists? Probably like 2000 tops; there is a lot more Arshtat on gelbooru than Eiyuden though so that's something. They are actually making a new Suikoden shockingly enough and it is a gacha which most people would say is a negative BUT based on Eiyuden not doing well and not reviewing more than mediocre people wouldn't play a traditional Suikoden but a few superfan whales might fund the gacha enough to deceive Konami into making a mainline Suikoden afterward; so gacha is probably the correct angle for reviving the franchise and also for more Jeane artwork.....................................................................................................................................................................................................So your question is probably what got me to play it at long last, firstly I got a Steam Machine which meant I could play steam games on my couch with the Steam Controller with ease and also motivated me to try out some more games that I was mildly interested in. Secondly the illustrious SRD posted a 100% speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T_mBIq0FjM a few months ago which is an ultra complicated route that I had no interest in making myself but if you wait long enough and outsource all things are possible. So as a result Eiyuden "only" took me like 45 hours to beat while doing all the minigames (~25 hours was watching very tedious dialogue), so I got the full experience and had level 99 characters 5 hours in etc.........................................................................................................................................................................................................So What's the verdict and why you ask. Well it is about an 8/10 or so, the first 10-20 hours is basically dogshit with a few high points like Mellore, then the castle metagame is quite good and fairly engaging particularly if you have an efficient route for gathering the resources. The main protagonist level characters all suck except Marisa. Nowa is better than a silent protagonist but not that much better; he's mostly good in comedic situations where he breaks the fourth wall about helping people for no reason. The villains are okay, Luca Blight but more evil I guess; the strategist is very good compared to most Suikodens but also kind of a minor character, Perielle is a very good character but arbitrarily dies if you don't recruit 120 stars you don't have any input on this beyond 100%ing the game; its totally fine if the main love interest dies because of a decision you made in the game like Vandal Hearts 2 but it randomly happening is generally terrible without spectacular writing and as you may have guessed the writing in this game is mediocre and inconsistent with the exception of the Cooking Minigame which actually has a good story. To reiterate the Cooking characters have better plot development than the main cast; also the cooking minigame takes 10-15 hours to complete essentially..............................................................................................................................................................................................So I really like Suikoden V but in my decrepit old age of still less than 40 I've had to reconsider it being 60-65 hours long and some of it being fairly tedious to interact with; that doesn't mean I'll pick Suikoden 2 over it but Suikoden 2 is much more appealing to replay because it doesn't take fucking forever to beat. Enter Eiyuden which is longer than both combined and way worse at most things, especially fundamental baseline things like character design and basic plot construction. So its clearly not in the upper echelon of Suikodens; is it better than 1, 3, 4, and Tactics; of course its better than Tactics, tactics fucking sucks (except for Jeane of course); I don't think its better than 4 or 3 and 1 is like 1/10th the length and thus far more digestible so it is basically the worst Suikoden, albeit every Suikoden is between 7.5 and 9 give or take and this is just another 8 or slightly less than 8.