Somehow, we’ve managed to make it to the end of 2022, so with that in mind, we’re celebrating some of the best games to have launched in the past 12 months. This time around, we’re talking about how Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising makes the case for a new breed of small-scale RPGs.
To be honest, it’s a bit weird to be celebrating Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising considering it’s the game I started playing around the same time I ended up finally catching COVID. Those first few hours felt like a haze with cutscenes interspersed by nauseating coughing fits, but somehow, I still came away from my time with Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising feeling positive. No, that wasn’t the tests.
2022 had its fill of RPGs, as between Elden Ring, Citizen Sleeper, both Pokémon titles, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Harvestella, among quite a few hours, the genre has been pretty crowded already. In situations like that, it can be harder for smaller, more niche titles like Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising to find a foothold, but somehow this game manages it by almost feeling like a micro-RPG instead of a grand 60 hour adventure.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising has all the trappings of a standard RPG, as you form a party, go out on quests, kill monsters and level up both your stats and equipment. However, Eiyuden operates a bit differently by confining the action to the events of a small town. You play as an adventurer drawn to a growing town in order to explore the ruins for treasure and personal riches, but along the way, you’re roped in to helping the town’s facilities grow.
While the majority of the game’s formula boils down to just fetch and kill quests, which can get a bit repetitive, the small scale of Eiyuden Chronicle’s world and the incredibly generous fast travel system means that you can generally complete any side quest pretty quickly, even if you have to grind a little for some of the items. What could have been a mind-numbingly boring series of quests turns into a lightning-fast series of quest clears and tonnes of experience. You better get used to hearing the level up jingle.
Truthfully, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising isn’t the most original game on the market. It’s a solid game, with decent combat mechanics, gorgeous graphics and charming characters. In any other year, it might have just slipped by as another decent RPG that ultimately gets lost in your backlog, but Eiyuden Chronicle’s smaller scale works to its advantage.
As we all get older, time becomes more precious and life finds a way of getting in the way, it becomes less and less possible to sink an ungodly amount of time into massive RPGs, which is why there’s incredible value in a game like Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising. I was able to 100% the entire game in under 20 hours while still enjoying the full RPG experience of becoming more powerful throughout the game. As much as there’s loads of fetch quests, it feels like there’s very little filler either.
While Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is never going to stand up in terms of quality with games like Elden Ring and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, both of which are quite well represented at award shows and GOTY lists, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising occupies its own place as a micro-RPG of sorts, and it’s a trend I wouldn’t mind seeing continue heading into 2023.
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