At first glance, this game looked like something I would really enjoy: A semi-linear story with simplistic game-mechanics combined with and art style that reminds me of the SNES or Genesis days only with less pixels. Since I was in my gaming "prime" during that age I occassionally like to go back and revisit it and so far I am "kind of" enjoying this one because the combat is pretty easy and fun and the three bosses I have faced have been challenging but not something you have to focus a great deal on in order to win. Let's just say I don't see myself looking to YouTube videos for tips on how to defeat any of the bosses in this one the way that you would probably need in a far more complicated side-scrolling game like Hollow Knight, Blasphemous or Bloodstained. Of course those are all metroidvanias but in a way Eiyuden Chronicle kind of is as well.
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one look at that graphic and you can probably tell that this game is going to be very similar to a lot of other Japan-inspired games and you would be correct about that. They focus on teenage heroes and heroines, the story is cutesy with a bunch of emojis built into the conversation, and while I am fine with all of that, one thing I am not fine with is the exceptionally high amount of useless dialogue that takes place basically all the damn time.
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This dialogue happens around every corner and most of the missions that you are sent on are more like fetch-quests than they are advancing any sort of story. In fact, in the 1.5 hours that I have been playing this game I can't really even tell you what the story is other than the fact that the main character CJ is trying to make her fortune in treasure-hunting and in order to be able to do so she is forced to clear out some nearby dungeons that she has to go in and out of multiple times in order to retrieve more and more items for the townspeople who keep giving her quests with odd requests like needing a bucket of paint that just happens to be in a chest after the 2nd boss that you face.
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Speaking of the bosses, this is one of the game's strong points in my mind. They are inventive in that some of them take up the entire screen and use environmental effects and others are running around the screen in a way that you must dodge a bit before you can get some damage in on them. None of the ones I have faced so far have been particularly difficult and it was only through me forgetting what the buttons were in one frantic mad-button-mashing moment that plagues me frequently in gaming, that I managed to die. Unfortunately this was one of the boss fights where I trusted the auto-save a bit too much and it sent me quite a ways back to the last time that I had manually saved, which was a while ago.
Keep this in mind if you play this game: When you encounter a signpost in the middle of a dungeon... use it to save. These are normally placed just before you are going to face the area's boss and it was only because at that point I had encountered very little that I would consider a death threat that I didn't use it during this particular encounter. yeah, it's annoying to have to manually save but they put those points where they do for a reason, right?
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The 2nd time I faced this boss I was already very familiar with the mistakes I had made in the first encounter and cleaned its clock without taking a single hit. I will presume the bosses get more complicated and difficult as you move onward but up to now they have been quite easy and honestly, this is the way I think it should be. You can keep your "souls-like" difficulty level bosses. I'm a filthy casual after all.
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I think the only real problem I have with this game so far is the fact that, much like a lot of Japanese RPG's, there is SO MUCH DIALOGUE and thankfully all that I have encountered thus far is written and not in a cutscene that has to be loaded over and over again, but you your only choice is to endure it, or skip it entirely. Let's just say that I did so much skipping of dialogue that I had to enter the menu on a number of occasions just to figure out where I was meant to be going next.
I will never understand who this excessive dialogue is for, but there must be an audience for it or they wouldn't do it. If this wasn't skippable, which it is, I would have walked away from this game after 20 minutes. It becomes evident very early on that this is more like a book than it is a game but if you skip all of that, the action is simplistic and fun.
I will continue to play this game, probably to the conclusion. I can tell already that this is designed to have a great deal of collectables that are time-consuming to farm for, but I am not the kind of person that is going to do that.
If you like something simple to play as a "side game" than I think you could do worse than Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising. It's pretty fun and if you have a PS-Plus membership anyway, it is included as part of that for free.