While the joyfully flexible roleplay Baldur's Gate 3 dominated this year's Bafta Game Awards, winning the Best Game award, there remains a strong nostalgic appetite for simpler, more traditional RPGs. Conceived by Yoshitaka Murayama, a writer-director who made his name during the early PlayStation years, Chronicle of Eiyuden raised £3.6 million on Kickstarter in 2020 to become the third most funded video game ever on the crowdfunding site. It's a sequel to Murayama's classic Suikoden series in everything but name: a harrowing adventure featuring a group of mostly young people entangled in the friction and chaos of two neighboring states at war.
As with Murayama's '90s work, the game follows a familiar pattern as you guide your party from the colony to the dungeon, with your progress regularly interrupted by wayward random battles in which your characters become progressively more powerful. After a pedestrian prologue, the game unfolds delightfully. His gadget is his Pokémon-meta-quest: to woo and recruit each of the 100 or so titular heroes to your cause. They start as a small group, then grow into a squadron, eventually becoming a makeshift army. Each warrior, healer, and support staff member has a name, personality, and arc. Recruits are found all over the world. Some register as soon as you arrive; others need coaxing. But the thrill of completing the collection reinforces the game's more conservative, dated appeal, as recruits can each be integrated into your main team of six and directly controlled in combat.
The dialogue is warm and chatty, and while the script and voice acting have the straightforward quality of a Saturday morning cartoon, this only compounds its evocative PlayStation-era appeal. Murayama, who fell ill during the final stages of the game's development, did not live to see its release and died in February this year, aged 55. Chronicle of Eiyuden stands as a monument to its singular design sensibility and a testament to the power of a purposeful community, both in the game's fiction and through its very existence.
