When it comes to the Eiyuden Chronicle Hundred Heroes update for July it’s a bit more celebratory. This shorter update marks the 2-year Kickstarter anniversary for Eiyuden Chronicle. In this update, you are going to see a few words of celebration from the team. We also get a Murayama monthly update like always and some insight from Murakami with a flash of his daily life happenings.
2 Year Kickstarter Celebration
It’s been pretty much 2 years since the Eiyuden Chronicle Kickstarter and boy was it successful. During the Kickstarter, they smashed all the goals they set. The site crashed multiple times in the first half hour or so. They had around 2.3 million raised within the first 8 or so hours. So to celebrate the success that has been Eiyuden Chronicle so far the team had a few words to say.
Murayama said this:
It’s already been two years since the madness of the Kickstarter campaign. We’re still moving forward now, thanks to the power and courage that everyone’s support gives us.
We heard this from Kawano:
We’re in our second summer of this project now thanks to everyone. We just released Eiyuden Chronicle Rising, so I tried drawing the characters of Rising this time around.
Then Komuda chimed in with this:
Over these two years, we’ve been using your support as our fuel as we work together and move full steam ahead. I hope we’ll be able to show you what we’re working on little by little as time goes on.
Lastly, Murakami had this to say:
We’re in our second summer of working on Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, but it’s still at the front of our minds and we’re working hard to deliver a game that everyone will love.
In addition to these short statements, they also said that they might be able to show some of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes soon! Everyone’s excitement is boiling over in the Eiyuden community.
Murayama Monthly Update
In his monthly update for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Murayama talked about games and said this:
This season, every new day in Japan is a hot one, but we’re still working and managing all the twists and turns that come our way. One of my hobbies is playing board games. More so games that use wooden pieces and paper boards, versus the ones you can play on a computer. My personal favorite game is Carcassonne, a game where you build towns and roads. My policy toward game systems is that they should be as simple as possible while also allowing for as many variables as possible. This may be due to the experiences I’ve had playing board games.
When you add complicated elements and systems to computer games, the computer can easily do the calculations and operations needed to support them. With board games, however, humans are the ones who need to do the calculations and manage the rules. So the more complicated the calculations needed to prep a strategy, the greater the stress it puts on the players. Therefore, board games require the creator to cut away needless elements and refine the system as much as possible.
Murayama further went on to say:
In the end, you’re left with an extremely refined board game with what I would call a beautiful game system. This is very obvious in the games designed by Alex Randolph, a very famous board game designer, which include games such as Ghosts!, DOMEMO, and especially Venice Connection. I wanted to make sure the mini-games in Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes inherit that flavor, so I’ve been discussing this sort of thing with the team daily. As we continue talking to each other and doing trial and error with various things, the final version of Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is slowly coming together. We can’t show you all of it just yet, but we’ll be sure to show you what we can first as thanks for all your support.
Then Murayama gave us this short in-game video. Even though it isn’t much, it is just enough to get fans going crazy. People were going crazy just over the fact we get our old Suikoden-style minimap! Which I am also a fan of by the way.
Some Words From Murakami
We get a lot here from Murakami about what he’s doing outside the Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes and some about the game too. Murakami had this to say:
Unrelated to anything, but recently I finished watching Season 4 of Stranger Things on Netflix. Hi, I’m Murakami J. It’s been a while. That scene with Eddie was so crazy, I’ve been listening to Metallica every day as I work. Sorry for starting off with a very niche topic. Has anyone else watched that show? It’s a story about kids that takes place in a rural American town and was very appealing to me as someone who loves Goonies and Stand By Me. It’s also set in the 80s, which was perfect for me, so it pulls at my heartstrings every time I watch it. The level of detail they put into the fashion, music, and culture from the time period is really amazing.
Recently, a lot of monumental works across various genres of the 80s have been getting revivals, such as the movies Top Gun: Maverick and Ghostbusters, the Cobra Kai TV, etc. Work has been so busy that there’s a lot I haven’t been able to see yet. But it’s really fun to watch these things, as you can tell that the creators have a deep passion for the works that influenced them. And love creates new masterpieces. I believe that masterpieces can be enjoyed forever. We learn from them and yearn to revive the happy parts of our memories in fun new forms.
Murakami Went On
Murakami elaborated further:
It’s been a while since I reported on what’s going on in the studio, so here goes. Currently, we’ve reached the peak of our mass graphic production phase, so every day we’re super busy and always wishing we had more people on our team. The field is almost completely full of areas. We aren’t reusing a lot of assets for Eiyuden Chronicle, so every time we finish creating something, we find ourselves with yet another challenge to overcome. As for the pixel art, our main members just keep getting older and older. (LOL) It was really hard for us to find people who were young, good at drawing pixel art, and who actually WANTED to draw pixel art, so this is just what we ended up with when we searched for the best of the best.
Veterans are truly reliable, though. We just need to make sure our pixel art staffers take proper care of their health. (LOL) As of now, people who can draw pixel art are valuable treasures of the game industry. Let’s take good care of them!! Thanks to all their passion, the game is slowly coming together. I think we’ll be able to show you some progress or an event scene or two in a little bit, so I hope you’re excited.
More Words From Murakami
Lastly, Murakami finished with this:
Oh, there’s one thing I wanted to mention. We’ve also reached the point where we need to start working on the in-game backer assets for those backers who helped us achieve victory in our Kickstarter campaign. We deeply value all the support you gave us, so we’re going to work hard on this. Soon, we’ll need to get some info from you all in order to start working on this (we’re preparing for it now), so please help us out when the time arrives. That’s it, really.
As usual, I have a ton of things to do, and I’m just trying my best to scratch them off one as one while putting up with the heat. That reminds me, It seems like this year’s summer is going to be filled with extreme heat and irregular temperatures all around the world. (And we still have covid to worry about, but I’m more worried about that for the time being.) Please make sure to stay safe and healthy, everyone! Sorry, the message isn’t longer this time around, but I’ve got a lot of work to get back to. See you next time!
Wrap-Up
Now we didn’t get a character reveal like normal, but I think it’s good to celebrate the team. Rabbit & Bear Studios has been hard at work making all these Eiyuden Chronicle things possible. Even though they had another studio make Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising they still oversaw what was going on there to a degree. They also provided the lore and characters that were put into that game. Even during the pandemic, they were hard at work on Eiyuden Chronicle. The team even provided a short funny video to help us pass the time.
With the overwhelming success of their Kickstarter campaign, we can see the fans really are excited. The spiritual successor to Suikoden seems like it’s right on track to release next year in 2023 as advertised. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes will be released on all platforms and will be in Xbox Game Pass on day one!
