What Is Eiyuden Chronicle, Suikoden's Spiritual Successor?

The successor Suikoden's creator built himself, finished by his friends.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes (2024) is a role-playing game by Rabbit & Bear Studios, founded by Suikoden's creator Yoshitaka Murayama with the artists and composers of the original games. It is not a sequel and uses none of Konami's world. It is, deliberately and openly, Suikoden's design rebuilt by its own makers: a young officer, a rising empire, a castle town, and more than a hundred heroes to gather.

THE REUNION

Rabbit & Bear Studios, 2020

Murayama founded Rabbit & Bear in 2020 with the people who had made Suikoden beside him: Junko Kawano, the original game's chief designer and artist; Osamu Komuta, director of Suikoden Tactics; Junichi Murakami, art director of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow; and composers Motoi Sakuraba and Michiko Naruke. Publisher 505 Games backed the project, and a companion action game, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, arrived first in 2022.

THE KICKSTARTER

July 2020

The goal

Set at roughly $500,000 (yen 53.8 million). It was met within hours of the campaign's launch on July 24, 2020.

The total

yen 481,621,841, reported at the time as more than $4.5 million: at that date, one of the most-funded video games in Kickstarter's history.

What it proved

Twenty-one years after Suikoden II, with no marketing machine behind it, the audience for this kind of game was still there, and willing to pay for it in advance.

THE GAME

Hundred Heroes, April 23, 2024

Hundred Heroes carries the structure openly: over a hundred recruitable heroes, a headquarters town that grows as they arrive, turn-based parties of six, war battles, duels, and Kawano's character art in Murayama's storytelling frame. It was released worldwide on April 23, 2024 for PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.

MURAYAMA'S DEATH

February 6, 2024

On February 14, 2024, Rabbit & Bear announced that Murayama had died on February 6, "due to complications with an ongoing illness," eleven weeks before the release of the game he had spent four years making. He was 55. The studio's statement recorded the fact his colleagues most wanted known: his work on the game, as scenario writer, was finished. "It saddens us to know that he won't get to see the reactions from his fans," they wrote, and continued: "we need to accept the reality that he is no longer with us and continue to push his dream forward by releasing Eiyuden Chronicle to the world. We want to maintain his legacy and vision with this game." His family thanked supporters and asked for privacy, and that no flowers or offerings be sent.

THE CONTINUATION

The studio carries on

Rabbit & Bear reorganized under its remaining leadership, Kawano, Murakami, and Komuta signing the announcement, and released the game as planned. Support and downloadable content followed, and the studio has continued to speak of Eiyuden as a world it intends to keep building in, in the terms its statement set: maintaining his legacy and vision. The Library's own judgment is simpler. Suikoden ended in 2006 with its questions open. Its maker got to finish one more, and the people who loved the first games are the reason it exists.