Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a great city management game, but as an action RPG it lacks fluency, more efficient systems, and difficulty. The story is good and leaves a good edge for the next title, but at the same time it feels a bit rushed.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a good 2.5D action game with good graphics but very basic mechanics. Still, it's entertaining and prepares us for what's to come next year. We already want to try the next game in the series.

The action adventure game Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising manages to carve out its own identity while serving as an introduction to the lore of the forthcoming Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes JRPG. Basic combat, tedious fetch-quests and linear town-building may put off those seeking a solid challenge, but the game’s sprightly action, jovial spirit, and spunky characters will carry casual platformer fans through its relatively short play time.

Unusually enough, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a prequel of a game that hasn't been released yet but it will appeal to fans of the Suikoden series and JRPGs in general. While the game takes a while until it truly takes off and its more in-depth characteristics become more prominent, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising features a gorgeous art style, a surprising plot, charismatic characters and a very welcome city-building mechanic.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is an action RPG that, despite its simplicity, is enjoyable thanks to its interesting gameplay and beautiful art design. A good way to look forward to Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is short, clocking in at about 15 hours for 100% completion--though it probably could have cut a few hours of side-questing out and still wound up being a fine little adventure. Despite enduring a fair bit of filler, I don't regret the time I spent playing the game, and am interested to see how the characters and setting play into the bigger Eiyuden Chronicle world being created. It might be flawed, but Rising accomplishes what it sets out to do: whetting players' appetites for a grand adventure down the line.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is an appetizer prepared for fans of Murayama's work who can't quench their appetite while waiting for Hundred Heroes. With obvious limitations and problems that are not always easily digestible, Rising is a work recommended mostly to all those who do not want to miss a single piece of the universe of Eiuyuden Chronicle. If played with the right awareness of its reduced ambitions (also thanks to a budget price of 15 euros), it can still turn out to be a pleasant interlude in an action-RPG sauce: simple, long-lived enough and with a good artistic direction.

Pretty visuals can only get you far, however, and Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising doesn’t offer enough entertaining or unique content to keep it from being anything more than a passable RPG. At the very least, it introduces the Eiyuden world and some characters involved in Hundred Heroes, but that’s very little incentive for putting up with tedious gameplay and boilerplate characters.

While Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a decent introduction to the world of Eiyuden Chronicle, it fails to use its full potential. More complex combat and varied side quests would have made it a much better experience.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a companion game and it feels very much like one. It’s a very average game overall, with the strongest point being its presentation and the weakest being how much of a grind it becomes. It’s hard to recommend to anyone who isn’t deeply interested in Eiyuden Chronicle, and even then something tells me this isn’t going to be a critical piece of lore for the main game. It’s adequate, and given how many excellent games we have on the Switch of a similar style, I’m not sure that’s enough.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a gorgeous title with some charming elements, but the action isn’t sharp enough to be memorable, and the town building elements only serve to hamper the other sides of the gameplay. A lovely game is buried in here somewhere, but instead, too many unsuccessful elements drag down the greater experience.

I get the feeling that unless someone is extremely invested in Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, they won’t get anything out of Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising. The background it offers for characters like CJ, Garoo, and Isha and the series’ world is great! It’s pretty valuable, in terms of lore and establishing a mood. But the actual experience is average and takes a while to get interesting. It never really hooked me. Rather, it made me want to go back to other games that did it better.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a charming if tedious RPG that probably shouldn't have been an RPG.

It feels more like a long lost SNES game than a modern action role-player but that’s clearly the point in this charming, if insubstantial, prelude to Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes.

As someone who enjoys town-building mechanics in RPGs, like those of Ys VIII, Xenoblade Chronicles, or Dragon Quest Builders, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising relies too heavily on them, at the cost of telling an engaging story or offering compelling action gameplay. The too-frequent backtracking, mind-numbing side quests, and overall lack of variety make for an experience that is tough to recommend. An unlockable hard mode, 50 in-game achievements, and the promise that Rising saved data will yield bonuses in Hundred Heroes are feathers in its cap, but Rising on its own is just too much of a slog. Here’s hoping that Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes lives up to the success of being the number one video game Kickstarter of 2020 because its prequel certainly does not.

Rising takes players to averagetown, population snoozefest and it doesn’t ever get exciting, even after its twenty-hour completion time. While it offers players a beautiful presentation and some ear candy tunes, these elements cannot help elevate Rising as being any more than a fetch-quest-heavy experience with little to no payoff. If I wanted to play Chores: The RPG, I’d just clean my house, because doing that offers considerably more tangible benefits than playing this game to completion did.