kickstarter

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

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It’s hard to confine everything I felt as I played Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes to a single post. Or even to the written word. A mixture of relief, frustration, sadness, and joy in different measures and different times will have to do. It took me months to gather my thoughts enough to write about it and months more to refine it and each time I have revised I’ve felt a little different.

Here’s a little bit of history, since this is the backdrop for my experience with the Kickstarter. You may know the original writer behind Suikoden (Yoshitaka Murayama) left the video game industry for years. I heard he specifically wanted to limit his time at Konami and it was an amicable split. Two more Suikoden games and three more spinoffs were made afterward, and they were still pretty decent games. I’ve long been a fan of the series – their eastern flavor, their heartfelt moments, their fun and varied cast of characters and attention to both large and small scale are a breath of fresh air in a genre that mostly sticks to smaller groups, bigger stakes, and plot twists with maximal shock value. →  [post launches in virtual reality],[put on your VR headset now],[left click on your mouse to open the remainder of this post in your web browser on your digital computing device]

“Revived” Franchises and Kickstarters

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It’s no secret that I like Suikoden a lot.  Even the bad ones.  The series’ spiritual successor the Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes got yet another trailer recently.  The creators are mostly saying the right things, indicating they’re focusing on things that Suikoden did differently from most games – having a large cast, involving that cast in the story (appropriately), and a relatively realistic and political scenario.

I’m a little worried, though, because past crowdfunded games that focused too much on recapturing an existing series’ magic lost sight of being their own thing, and end up being known as inferior copies.  Mighty No. 9 is probably the most notorious, but it’s definitely not alone in this.  Been there, got the t-shirt, still wear it ironically (probably), but honestly haven’t played the game.  Or Shenmue 3.  Or Pathologic 2.  But I spent money on them.  That’s on me, not necessarily on the developers of those games – and I’ve learned my lesson from those experiences.  →  We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we play.

The Future of Games I Care About: A Brief Overview of Crowdfunding

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Currently playing: Shadowrun: Dragonfall

In early 2012, Double Fine launched a Kickstarter campaign for a then unnamed point and click adventure game meant to be reminiscent of studio founder Tim Schafer’s work on LucasArts classics Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango.  Kickstarter had been used to fund video game projects before the Double Fine Adventure campaign, but they were mostly smaller projects offered by developers with less of a reputation.  

In the intervening decade the template of high profile Kickstarter campaigns from well known developers has become familiar to onlookers.  Often a team or individual who built a reputation making games in a specific genre that has trouble getting funded by publishers in the current market (point and click adventure, shmup, isometric RPG) revisits that genre by turning to Kickstarter for initial funding and potentially to prove to deeper pocketed publishers that there is sufficient enthusiasm among fans to make the concept viable.  The trappings of these campaigns have also become familiar to those of us who participate: stretch goals for exceeding the initial funding target that could include additional characters or areas, hiring a well-known composer for the soundtrack, or additional game modes; the temptation of physical copies, art books, soundtracks, in-person meetings or even dinners with the developers, and other perqs for higher tier pledges; and updates that arrive frequently throughout the campaign to stoke enthusiasm and inevitably slow down as the game enters the long period of development.   →  This post are sick.

Review – Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising

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Currently playing: Tyranny

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a “companion game” to the core game Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, which is still in development. Hundred Heroes is a Kickstarter headlined by Yoshitaka Murayama (story) and Junko Kawano (art), veterans of the original Suikoden. The Kickstarter is clearly designed to invoke the feel of the Suikoden series. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising serves as a kind of teaser for the game world as well as a standalone, relatively casual, action RPG. As a teaser for a future game, it works reasonably well. Isolated from that context, I’m not sure it’s a great action RPG, although I did enjoy it.

As Jay observed in a comment on a prior post, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is similar to Ys III (not just because many of the environments line up – that’s just a happy coincidence). It’s a simple action RPG focused around exploration and resource collection. Although you get a few extra character mechanics over time, and you unlock additional party members, the pace and structure of the game incentivize you to play as main character CJ much of the time. →  Ridge Reader V