Everybody, everywhere, knows the value of chores. They always need to get done, and they often feel never-ending. This is why Natsume-Atari’s Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is such a conflicting game. While it’s advertised as being an action RPG, the majority of the game is all about fulfilling all the chores that its world’s people have little to no interest in doing. While the game is adequate in nearly everything it does, Rising feels much more like a chore simulator and ultimately is just as engaging as doing them in real life.

Only this isn't being made by Murayama and the rest of his former Suikoden crew at Rabbit & Bear. It's Natsume Atari who have lead billing here, with Murayama operating in a supervisory role while development on Hundred Heroes continues. It also doesn't have anything in common with the JRPG series that Eiyuden Chronicle proper is meant to be doffing its cap to, swapping Suikoden's turn-based battles for real-time monster biffing, 2D dungeon crawling and a heavy emphasis on building up your hub town by completing ream upon ream of sidequests. I'd even go as far as saying Rising is more sidequest than main quest all things considered, especially in its early hours, and the end result is a game that falls into exactly the same pitfalls that I Am Setsuna and so many other 'modern classic' JRPGs have done before it. Namely, it resurrects what should have been left dead and buried, and adds nothing of its own to keep things interesting, making it feel more like a relic of a bygone era than warm, fuzzy nostalgia play.

The opening hour of the game had me a little worried – CJ is a fun and upbeat character, but her chipper protagonist energy doesn’t do much when she’s bouncing off of generic townsfolk and the rare named NPC. Gameplay, too, suffers from her solo-act – her default attack combo is rigid, enemies are basic, and I found myself falling asleep as I backtracked between the town plaza and fetch quest forest.

Rebuilding the village of New Nevaeh is a core gameplay component in Rising, and while it’s serviceable, it’s not interesting. CJ is given tasks by specific shop owners for key items to improve their shops. With each store upgrade, CJ and her party can enhance their gear to new ranks. While players will get a delightful animation for completing a building upgrade, this element still feels quite shallow, as though it’s missing something to make it stand out compared to other titles that offer town-building.

I don’t think that ‘fetch quest’ is necessarily a dirty phrase, but the experience of Rising really is tarnished by a chronic over-reliance on them as a quest construction, especially in conjunction with backtracking. There’s just a critical lack of ways to interact with the world and its (fun) characters that don’t involve backtracking through a dungeon you’ve already seen to pick stuff up. Even the main plot isn’t free of this – on several occasions you’ll be in the middle of following an important-sounding thread, only to be diverted onto a semi-irrelevant secondary objective by incidental dialogue from one of the cast. It’s disappointing, as even the MMO genre has a bit more variety than this nowadays. However, I could cope with it, at least over the game’s 15-hour runtime.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising has a slow and snore-worthy opening hour, but hiding behind that repetitive introduction is an incredible blend of high-octane 2.5D combat and rewarding resource gathering gameplay. The icing on the cake, though, is the Marvel Cinematic Universe-worthy parade of character cameos and appearances that promise some of the many faces you'll be battling alongside (or maybe even against) once Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes comes out.

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