It takes a long time before Rising really lets you off the leash to explore the Barrows at your leisure, and when the main story does finally kick in, any last remaining shreds of good will have already been crushed to dust by its overwhelming tedium. There's no denying Rising's handsome presentation, but the amount of back-tracking you have to do will make you sick to the back teeth of it. On it goes with all manner of artificial obstacles thrown in your path to prevent you from exploring anywhere you're not meant to go just yet, and the constant back and forth between the town, forest and mine gets tiresome very quickly. Eventually you're allowed to fight a boss (a tree, for yet more wood), but it's quickly back to collecting stones, mining some ore, and gathering mushrooms and such like. Then it's fetching a girl's dad from the next street over, then chopping some wood in the forest. I kid you not, the first 'main' quest of this game is to find someone's cat. In other words, the stamp card is a glorified sidequest counter, and if the 30 blank spots on your initial 'silver' card don't strike fear in your heart, wait until you're presented with the 50 checkmarks that accompany your respective gold and platinum cards.
And to collect said stamps, CJ must perform all manner of busy work given to her by the local townsfolk. Heroine CJ is one such scavenger hoping to make it big in New Nevaeh, but before the town's weirdly tax-obsessed (and probably secret Tory) acting mayor Isha will grant her entry to them, she must prove her worth by collecting stamps. In-game, this serves as your ticket into the mysterious nearby Barrows, a labyrinth of underground tunnels and treasure troves that adventurers flock to from all around the world in order to make their fortunes. I'd maybe feel more generous toward Rising if it weren't for its blasted stamp card. Namely, it resurrects what should have been left dead and buried, and adds nothing of its own to keep things interesting, making it feel more like a relic of a bygone era than warm, fuzzy nostalgia play.
I'd even go as far as saying Rising is more sidequest than main quest all things considered, especially in its early hours, and the end result is a game that falls into exactly the same pitfalls that I Am Setsuna and so many other 'modern classic' JRPGs have done before it.
#EIYUDEN CHRONICLE RISING VS HUNDRED HEROES SERIES#
It also doesn't have anything in common with the JRPG series that Eiyuden Chronicle proper is meant to be doffing its cap to, swapping Suikoden's turn-based battles for real-time monster biffing, 2D dungeon crawling and a heavy emphasis on building up your hub town by completing ream upon ream of sidequests. It's Natsume Atari who have lead billing here, with Murayama operating in a supervisory role while development on Hundred Heroes continues. Only this isn't being made by Murayama and the rest of his former Suikoden crew at Rabbit & Bear. Focusing on the back stories of just a handful of the titular hundred you'll be meeting in Rabbit & Bear Studios' spiritual successor to Suikoden (the first of which memorably had a whopping 108 recruitable party members), Rising has the air of almost required reading for players eager to return to the lavish, retro worlds Murayama built his name on. Originally conceived as a Kickstarter stretch goal for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, the next JRPG from Suikoden creator Yoshitaka Murayama, this smaller, more action-focused RPG has become both an official prequel to Hundred Heroes and a kind of intermediate stop-gap designed to tide players over until the main event next year.
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