Eiyuden Chronicle Rising

A prequel of sorts to the long-awaited spiritual successor to Suikoden, Rising is a pretty forgettable experience overall.  Its visual style is a nice blend of 3D environments and drawn 2D sprites, though the overall presentation is marred by the cheap "broken joint" style of animation reminiscent of an early 2000s Flash cartoon.  Gameplay-wise it's pretty basic, just being a simple sidescrolling platformer hack-and-slash with a leveling system added, and a few combos you can perform in tandem with well-timed button presses after you recruit more characters to your team serve as the only means to spice it up.  Quests are pretty mundane item-hunting chores with the odd boss fight thrown in, and while rebuilding a town bit by bit, gradually unlocking more services to enhance your adventure is a pretty great concept that's been done successfully in many other games, it's not particularly fun here owing to how flat the gameplay is.  Even the plot feels pretty superfluous, mostly just serving to set up a few characters and maybe a plot point or two they could just as easily exposit in a throwaway line in the full game.  So, a pretty bland gameplay experience that just highlights a few cool character designs and doesn't really have much of an impactful story to tell.  Even if you're someone who's excited for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes' launch in 2023, you're probably not going to miss anything of consequence by skipping this one.

Developer: Natsume Atari
Publisher: 505 Games
Released: 2022
Platform: PC, Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, XBox One, XBox Series