Hyakusen no Jou ni Katawareshi Toki
Hyakusen no Jou ni Katawareshi Toki (from here on known as Hyakujou) is Eushully's latest game, based a generation or two before the events of Kamidori in the same region. It is technically a prequel, and the setting of Kamidori - the city of Yuidora - plays a pretty important - though not central - role in the story. For those who want to know what the 'canon' is, it is Route A of the Law Route. The game is designed to be significantly easier if you play the Chaos Route first, supposedly. However, I decided to focus on the 'true history' route for this review.
First of all, Hyakujou's storytelling is done in a semi-free scenario, where - similar to the SaGa Frontier and Romancing SaGa games, you pick your destination and progress the story based on where you go. In this case, though, the flaws of that approach are fairly apparent. To be blunt, you are given far too much freedom and too little direction. Since you can never tell whether an event is central to the plot or just a character-related event (technically they are differentiated, but several character events are required to progress the story for each city, so differentiating them is often meaningless). This is the second most painful part of the gameplay and the reason why I decided to give this game a low score, because it makes the story disjointed to a ridiculous degree.
I mentioned that there are painful parts of the gameplay... and I need to come out and say this: They seriously balanced this game horribly. First, this game absolutely requires an insane amount of grinding. Just staying at the same level as the enemies required me to spend over twenty hours just grinding for materials and levels. The enemies from the very beginning are on the higher end of the difficulty scale for Eushully games, which makes things even more annoying from the player's perspective. Sudden bumps in difficulty level are standard for the course, and I found myself cursing aloud at Eushully a lot of the time. It's not because of the difficulty that I was bothered, though. I was bothered by the fact that just gaining a few levels took hours of effort. To be blunt, this isn't an MMO. There is absolutely no need to make experience-gaining a painful process to this degree.
One thing you have to understand about the story is that the protagonist and his friends are fairly ignorant about events behind the scenes, and they only get involved with them fairly late in the story. This is another negative issue, because Mark and friends' goals are overly vague and result in a lot of disordered events, going from city and city only to experience the same issues (corrupt nobles, oppression, etc) with only a minority of events actually feeling linked to the story that supposedly began with the events of the prologue. The beginning and end of this game's story are very well-ordered, and the end run was really interesting. However, it came at the cost of me lacking a sense of investment in what was going on.
The actual writing/scenario team is identical to that of the last five Eushully games, which makes sense since only Fuukan no Grasesta amongst those came close to matching the better Eushully games. The artwork is typical Eushully, retaining the same nostalgic style. However, there are far fewer CGs in this game compared to previous games, and the entire story and game felt like they were working from a lower budget - though not a lot lower. Considering that I would be perfectly happy with them reusing the old IM battle system, it annoyed me that they felt the need to redesign things (wasting budget) in a way that doesn't really work (the formation and placement system is actually cruder than what was seen in much older Eushully games, making me wonder why they bothered making a new one).
Overall, this game is a representation of Eushully's gradual decay. While the concept was interesting, and the effort to engage the Kamidori fans with a prequel is worthy of praise, the poor gameplay decisions pretty much eliminate any benefits they might have gained by piggy-backing on a classic's glory. The decision to utilize a semi-free scenario storytelling system was a huge screwup, as it resulted in a disjointed story that felt like it only had an end and a beginning, without a clear line between. I also found the decision to put the H-scenes in a separate patch and only include them in the extras to be a bit silly, since Eushully fans want their ero, and Eushully without ero just feels weird.
Edited by Clephas
added pic
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