Issue #326: Yoshitaka Murayama is the Martin Scorsese of Gaming
I saw The Roundup: Punishment (2024) this weekend in what I assume is the largest and most luxurious theater where it will play in the United States. It was my first visit to the new AMC next to TD Garden. They took over a closed Arclight, leaving all of the theater’s insides intact. That means really nice chairs. Great seats to watch a front runner for best action movie of the year. If you haven’t seen Don Lee’s tremendous performance in The Roundup series, I recommend you start. The first film, differently named from its sequels in the U.S., is The Outlaws from 2017. Lee slaps, slams, and boxes his way through all kinds of special operations mercenaries and depraved criminals.
If Punishment is showing in your area, catch it before it disappears. Even if you haven’t seen the other ones, you won’t be missing much.
Shirts, hats, and zines still available on the webstore. Don’t forget.
https://paradoxnewsletter.bigcartel.com/
Why Is Eiyuden Chronicle So Good?
Last week, I wrote an entire section about Eiyuden Chronicle (2024), a new game from the late Yoshitaka Murayama. It was a pretty straightforward overview of the game, the development history, and its mechanics. I decided to hold it back. In the subsequent weeks, I saw an endless deluge of similar reviews and discussions about the game. As it turns out, it has been very polarizing. Most of the reviews I’ve read are middling or negative. As you’ll go on to read, I disagree. I think the game is great. But it is worth considering why the game has inspired so much discussion.
It all starts with a Kickstarter and a man: Yoshitaka Murayama. He passed away in February, before the release of Eiyuden. Before this game, he was best known for the Suikoden series. He directed Suikoden (1995), Suikoden II (1998), and Suikoden III (2002). Despite being a producer, writer, and director for Suikoden III, he is uncredited anywhere in the game because of his departure from Konami — the game development company behind Suikoden and, crucially, the owner of the intellectual property. There were two numbered Suikoden games after Murayama’s tenure, with Suikoden V (2006) being extremely well reviewed. Reviews don’t always correlate with sales, though, and Suikoden V would go down as a financial disappointment that would end the series.
The Suikoden franchise hasn’t been touched by Konami since, not unusual for a developer that seemingly exited the console gaming space in 2015 before pledging to continue developing console games in 2021. Though Konami has announced a remake of Suikoden I and II, it missed its 2023 release window with no updates on the game since August 29th of 2023.
By contrast, Murayama has been quite busy. He founded Rabbit and Bear Studios along with Junko Kawano and other members of the original Suikoden team, launching a Kickstarter to fund the development of spiritual successor, Eiyuden Chronicle, in July 2020. I was the 495th backer of the project, out of 46,307. I believe I was among those who got in before the game hit its funding goal — about three hours after the project went live.
I love Suikoden and Suikoden II is my favorite game of all time. Now, the legacy of Suikoden continues with the release of Eiyuden Chronicle last week. Considering this game’s pedigree, the Suikoden franchise’s long hibernation, and the Kickstarter, it’s no surprise people are having a strong reaction to the game. People have been waiting. So what did we get?
The game has been an emotional rollercoaster, but it got its hooks in. Now I’m almost done with it. And I would put it above every game I’ve played this year. Yes, I like Eiyuden Chronicle more than Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (2024) and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (2024). The obvious differentiating factors of the games aside, it has something intangible those other two games don’t.
The game is dutifully loyal to the blueprint of Suikoden I and II, for better or for worse. The main combat system includes only minor deviations from the earlier games. It would be fair to call Eiyuden’s combat simplistic. But a wide range of characters means a wide range of ways to approach combat. There are also some odd choices when it comes to balance. Enemies hit hard but also take a lot of damage. Healing items are plentiful, but single target healing spells only recover a fixed amount of HP. Because the spells don’t scale, those you have access to in the early game become worthless very quickly. Because of this, you end up spending a lot of time in the menu healing your team with 4-6 uses of the same spell. This design doesn’t feel as intentional as other aspects of the game.
Speaking of intention, just about every quality of life component you would expect from a modern JRPG is absent in Eiyuden. At first, I found this a little annoying, but, unlike the issues with combat balancing, these omissions feel intentional. They contribute to the retro feeling of the game, restricting the gameplay experience to something straight out of the 90s. There are no sidequest markers or tracking, no global speed ups (like the turbo system in the Kiseki games), slow overworld movement that can only be sped up at the expense of your party’s support slot, and minimal tutorials. For some of the game’s more esoteric systems, there are no tutorials at all.
But it just feels right. It is, after all, the same as Suikoden I & II. And when I say Eiyuden brings everything from those games, I mean everything. If you are up for another list, there’s turn-based tactical army combat, one-on-one cinematic duels, cooking battles, fishing, 120 (fully voiced!) characters to recruit, books to collect, and a castle to build. There are some new additions, too, that feel so perfect. The trading card mini-game, ever a JRPG trademark, is actually fun in Eiyuden. There’s also a Beyblade mini-game with a lengthy quest line (that ultimately overstays its welcome by a lot), a theater for staging some amusing interactions among the cast, and an endless dungeon for grinding and testing team comps. The endless dungeon is especially great in Eiyuden. Each floor requires you to swap out one party member for another from a small randomly selected group. This ensures you play with characters you might not have otherwise. And it’s scored. There’s a lot of replayability there.
The theater attraction is just absurdly detailed. It has a range of plays with several different roles that you watch unfold after making your casting selection. Each of every 120 characters can play every role in every play. Their lines are all fully voiced, as is nearly every bit of dialogue in the game, and fairly different among characters in the same role. There is very little in-game incentive to explore this part of the game, but it is fun enough to put your favorite characters in these plays to see how they tackle the material. There is no voice acting in Suikoden I or II, so the sheer amount of recorded dialogue is incredibly impressive. It adds to the sense of life Eiyuden has. Every part of the game feels alive.
Highlighting individual performances, Brent Mukai is unbelievable as strategic advisor Melridge. I mistook him at first for John Burgmeier, the voice actor for Shigure Sohma in Fruits Basket (2001) and Kurama in Yu Yu Hakusho (1992). Burgmeier is one of the greatest English language voice actors of all time, so this is a high compliment to Mukai.
Eiyuden is clearly the work of an auteur, with the modern omissions feeling as pointed as what’s included. That also extends to the art, which is gorgeous. Character portraits run the gamut of style and quality, but it’s the gorgeous pixel sprites that are truly impressive. The sprites don’t have mouths, which is a little weird. But otherwise, I have no complaints. They are expressive and each have different mannerisms. I never thought I would play a game that felt like early Suikoden, but that’s exactly what Eiyuden delivers. This is the equivalent of gamer democore1.
One of the questions people have posited about the sum total of Eiyuden is whether or not it is a well designed game. I think the question of whether or not it is well designed is less interesting than if the design makes sense. From my perspective, it does. The unapologetically old school dimension of the game is the result of careful choices by Murayama and the team. There’s no question that some of the missing modern conveniences in Eiyuden make the game less pleasant than it might otherwise be. Some of the main offenders — like unskippable dialogue and animations when upgrading a weapon — I can’t remember being issues in the early Suikoden games. But other decisions, like requiring the use of save points, are evocative. I even remember very vividly what Suikoden II save points look like, I became so well acquainted with them.
I will go to the mat for a game with vision that bucks conventional game design wisdom. I will gladly play a game that is clunkier or makes me jump through hoops to do something simple if those elements make me feel something. Eiyuden is a complete success in that regard.
Another area where Eiyuden has sustained criticism is the story. It is true, most of the story beats are taken from either Suikoden I or II. And the plot feels less nuanced, the stakes a little lower. Murayama, up until now, has been intent on putting the screws to his audience. He forces weak characters into your party and then kills them off to make you feel guilty, kills off beloved supporting cast member, and forces you to fight characters you could previously play as. Eiyuden doesn’t subject its audience to these trials. In it, characters are more likely to escape danger and show up in the eleventh hour.
Though Murayama clearly didn’t flinch when it came to his vision for gameplay, story seems to have taken a back seat to achieving the perfect mixture of systems. Eiyuden falls a bit short of its predecessors, but I don’t think a better game than Suikoden II will ever be made. Despite Murayama’s death, I hope the team at Rabbit and Bear will have the opportunity to carry on his development philosophy and turn Eiyuden into a series.
Weekly Reading List
When I consider
’s years of podcasting excellence, in all manner of conditions and under all manner of constraints, I wonder if he’s ever given any thought to changing his name to “PJ GOAT”? In the most recent Search Engine, he tackles the contentious topic of trigger warnings, exploring both their history and psychological impact.Though you should certainly listen to the episode, many of the scientific studies Vogt glosses by way of Dr. Victoria Bridgland suggest that trigger warnings do not serve their stated purpose. They neither diminish the unpleasant feelings that come from engaging with macabre or disturbing images and ideas nor discourage those vulnerable to being “triggered” — in the view of conventional wisdom — from engaging with such material. Findings like these make me wonder about how the “in this house, we believe science is real” crowd would react.
That utterance, “science is real,” is a very wide-ranging endorsement of the ideology of science in response to two narrow, but important, issues: climate denial and the anti-vaccination movement. “Science is real” as an assertion doesn’t seem like a proportional or targeted reaction to either problem. Science needs to be questioned, with 20th century continental philosophers (and psychoanalysts) being my favorite thinkers to do so. Lacan writes in “A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology” (1950):
[T]he human sciences, because they form themselves through the very behaviours that constitute their object, cannot evade the question of their meaning or pretend that the answer doesn’t impose itself in terms of truth.
In other words, the way science circulates in modern culture is at the level of truth. “Science is real.” But science, ostensibly, makes no such claim to the unassailability of the knowledge it produces, though scientists in the United States seem content to embrace their authority as truth tellers.
My point isn’t to call into question any of the findings discussed in the podcast episode. Quite the opposite, in fact. It seems to me that the “science is real” yard sign owners might dispute the authority of Bridgland’s findings, if I had to guess. Their questioning of science, however, would be in service of a political goal. Science’s claim to truth may be weaker than ever, insofar as many dispute some of the least controversial of its findings (climate change and vaccinations) and others extol its status as “reality” only as an instrument to perpetuate a worldview. In the discourse of the yard sign, “science is real” only because science happens to endorse what the liberal voting population believes to be real. They are correct in this case, but they are not actually deferring to science’s expertise. Instead, they appropriate its authority.
Vogt’s contextualizing of Bridgland’s research, however, avoids the myriad partisan traps. He examines the limit of the laboratory setting to produce certain kinds of findings and focuses with precision on what exactly one might conclude based on a study’s results. A study is only as good as its interpretation, after all. What scientific research suggests about trigger warnings may be a little uncomfortable, considering how pervasive they have become in contemporary discourse. But, what can I say? Science is real.
Until next time.
“Democore,” in this usage, is a small movement within the hardcore punk scene made up of bands playing in a very similar style to minor 1980s NYHC bands with minimal musical output. “Democore” can also refer to the 1980s NYHC bands themselves — and their excellent demos.