Eiyuden Chronicle, spiritual successor to Suikoden, raises over $4.5 million on Kickstarter
It's a JRPG with everything.
Given that Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes raised $1.5 million the very first day it was on Kickstarter, triple its humble $500,000 goal, we knew it was going to finish with an impressive total. It certainly has, completing its crowdfunding campaign with $4.571 million. That puts it just behind Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, which raised $4.7 million on Fig.
Eiyuden Chronicle reunites Yoshitaka Murayama, the creator of the Suikoden series and writer of the first two games, with character designer, writer, and producer Junko Kawano, who worked on the first and fourth Suikoden. Like its inspiration it promises to be a kitchen-sink JRPG with turn-based combat, over 100 characters to recruit, and a fortress town to rebuild complete with its own guild system, farm, cafeteria to staff and then franchise, and a theatre where recruits will perform plays based on scripts you've collected.
It's a lot, but that's what happens when you hit every single stretch goal in a crowdfunding campaign. The final goal, set at $4.5 million, was a separate companion game to be made by a different studio but with overlapping characters and shared assets.
If you want to know why fans are so eager to throw money at this spiritual successor, here's our feature on why the Suikoden series is such a big deal.
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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.