Genre: Action platformer
Developer: Natsume Atari
Publisher: 505 Games

Need to outsource a game? Whoyagunnacall... NAT-SU-ME! Known for creating spin-off and licensed games such as "The Jetsons" on the Famicom, here they took on the Kickstarter stretch goal for the "Suikoden" spiritual reboot, "Hundred Heroes". Implemented in Unity, the "2.5D" polygonal backgrounds have decent geometry counts and texture resolution, to go along with some volumetric lighting-- the lush forest, fire cave, and snowy backdrops appear pleasant at times, coarse at others. The character sprites are richly detailed, but the Flash-style "keyframe"-based animations look cheap.

Composer Hiroyuki Iwatsuki apparently took leave of all sense of music theory when composing this obnoxious soundtrack: right from the corny, "howdy-doody" title screen chord progression to the "referee's whistle" sample in one of the town tunes, to the "honky tonk" Barrows theme, it's one ear-bleeding song after another. Thankfully for the upcoming main course, "Hundred Heroes", the developers hired one of Japan's big guns, Motoi Sakuraba. This title's sound effects are minimal, but loosely do the trick.

Sort of like the famous "Dragon's Trap", this title is a 2D action platformer with a hub town, featuring branching paths leading off into various enemy-occupied areas. The game gradually unlocks access to these places as the story progresses. The title automaps "Symphony of the Night"-style, but the areas are not complex enough for this release to be called a "Metroidvania", per se. The attacks for the three characters are mapped to a trio of face buttons, and these attacks can be strung together into combos. The flow of the game involves accepting fetch quests from the town's people, to upgrade the various buildings.

On paper this game superficially sounds sort of like "ActRaiser"-- but the player has no control over the development of the town, and in fact other than swapping out static meshes for the buildings, there is no real sense of progression in this aspect of the game. The characters do level up, have a full slate of RPG-esque stats, and their weapons and armor can be upgraded at the various town shops. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is thoroughly mediocre-- but as a low budget "companion" title for the soon-to-be-had actual game, "Hundred Heroes", it is a reasonable way to get familiarized with some of the world's characters and lore.