Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a 2024 JRPG from Rabbit & Bear Studios — the team behind Suikoden — and it carries forward one of that series' most underrated features: names that feel real. In a genre where characters are named Zephyranax the Undying or Kaelthas Sunstrider, Eiyuden Chronicle's protagonist is named Nowa. A Galdean Empire officer is named Seign Kesling. A mercenary you meet early is named Marisa. The naming is deliberate, restrained, and worth understanding before you create your own characters.
Two Worlds, Two Naming Registers
The conflict at the heart of Eiyuden Chronicle is political — the expansionist Galdean Empire pursuing rune-lens technology against a coalition of smaller nations forming the New Alliance. That divide runs straight through the naming conventions.
Alliance characters pull from a broadly Eastern-phonetic register, soft and short. Galdean characters carry European weight — compound surnames, given names with Latin or Germanic roots, the feeling of institutional naming. Seign Kesling sounds like someone who graduated from a military academy and expects you to know it. Nowa sounds like someone you'd trust to watch your back in a fight.
Short, warm, often Japanese-phonetic — accessible names for characters from a coalition of small nations
- Nowa
- Isha
- Lam
- Mio
- Yua
- Scarlett
European-formal — compound surnames, given names with heraldic or institutional weight
- Seign Kesling
- Aldric
- Mellore Eguile
- Perrielle
- Yuferius
- Ferenica
Mixed heritage or plain-functional — names worn smooth by travel or handed down in small communities
- Marisa
- Hogan
- Garr
- Leene
- Rugwed
- Kogen
Restraint Is the Whole Point
The most important thing to understand about Eiyuden Chronicle names is what they deliberately avoid. No apostrophes. No consonant clusters stacked for exotic effect. No names that require a pronunciation guide attached. The game has 120+ recruitable characters — if every name demanded decoding, the cast would be exhausting.
This is a conscious choice inherited from Suikoden. Short names stick. Nowa is two syllables. Isha is two syllables. Even the more elaborate Galdean names — Seign Kesling — parse cleanly on first contact. The naming philosophy says: the characters earn their impressiveness through what they do, not through how difficult their name is to say.
- Keep given names to 1-3 syllables — short names stick in a large cast
- Use compound surnames for Galdean or noble characters; skip them for Alliance heroes
- Mix Eastern and Western phonetics freely — the game's cast is genuinely multi-ethnic
- Let the name feel appropriate to the character's role, not just their faction
- Add apostrophes — Eiyuden Chronicle doesn't use them, and neither should original characters
- Stack consonants for an "exotic" feel — clean phonetics are the series' signature
- Give Alliance heroes Galdean-formal surnames — the contrast between registers is meaningful
- Make the name do all the work of establishing personality — that's the character's job
What Your Character's Role Says About Their Name
Role shapes naming as much as faction does. The protagonist register — Nowa, and by extension anyone in that Alliance hero slot — runs warm and phonetically clean. These are names for people who accumulate allies through competence and decency rather than family prestige.
Scholars and rune-lens researchers get slightly stranger names. They're the most cosmopolitan characters in the game, often with names that don't slot neatly into either Alliance or Galdean patterns. Francesca reads as Western but soft. Perrielle sounds almost invented, precise in a way that suggests someone who names things carefully. For support characters — blacksmiths, innkeepers, merchants who join the cause — the naming goes genuinely plain. Hogan. Momo. Rugwed. The ordinariness is right: these are the human scale in an epic story.
The Spectrum from Nowa to Yuferius
One useful mental model: place any name you're considering on a line between Nowa (pure Alliance — short, warm, phonetically clean) and Yuferius (pure Galdean — longer, European-rooted, carrying the weight of imperial authority). Most characters live somewhere between those poles.
A wandering mercenary should sit toward the Nowa end but feel slightly rougher — Bastian, Orva, Quinn. A mid-rank Galdean officer should sit toward the Yuferius end but without the full imperial elaboration — Aldric, Ferenica, Mellore. The spectrum is not a hard rule, but it prevents the common mistake of giving every character the same register regardless of where they come from.
Protagonist / Alliance hero register — Nowa, Isha, Lam
Wanderer / Scholar register — Marisa, Francesca, Bastian
Galdean officer / noble register — Seign Kesling, Mellore Eguile, Yuferius
Building for a Large Cast
Eiyuden Chronicle has over 120 recruitable characters. That number creates a specific naming challenge: differentiation at scale. With that many characters, names start to blur — every soft two-syllable name risks feeling interchangeable, every European compound sounds like a variant of the last.
The game solves this with phonetic variety within registers. Alliance names range from the consonant-closed Garr to the open-vowel Isha to the fricative Shixeen. Galdean names range from the blunt Aldric to the elaborate Mellore Eguile to the almost-invented Perrielle. If you're building a large group of characters, it's worth auditing: are three of your Alliance heroes phonetically identical? Does every Galdean character have a compound surname?
For fans of the original Suikoden series building characters for the same world, our Suikoden name generator covers the naming conventions of the predecessor series — useful context for understanding exactly what Eiyuden Chronicle is continuing and where it diverges.
Common Questions
Is Eiyuden Chronicle a direct sequel or continuation of Suikoden?
It's a spiritual successor, not a direct sequel. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes takes place in a different world (the Allraan continent) with no shared characters or continuity. The connection is the creative team — Yoshitaka Murayama and other Suikoden veterans — and the structural DNA: 100+ recruitable characters, an Empire vs. Alliance conflict, and the same restrained naming philosophy. Think of it the way Bloodborne relates to Dark Souls: different world, same spirit, made by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
Why do Galdean characters have surnames while many Alliance characters don't?
It's a world-building choice that mirrors real historical naming patterns. Compound surnames in medieval and early-modern Europe were often tied to noble families, military academies, or urban merchant classes — institutions that needed to track lineage. The Galdean Empire is a centralized, bureaucratic power where institutional identity matters. Alliance nations are more diverse and less formally organized. A wandering mercenary from a village doesn't need a family name that signals their genealogy. Seign Kesling absolutely does.
What's the best approach for naming a character with mixed Alliance and Galdean background?
Land closer to the Alliance register for the given name — softer phonetics, accessible — but add a compound surname in the Galdean style. The given name is what parents choose; the surname is often inherited or institutional. A character who grew up in a border region or with mixed heritage might have a short, warm Alliance-phonetic first name alongside a Galdean compound surname they acquired through military service or marriage. Seign Kesling himself is a useful model: the given name "Seign" is unusual without being inaccessible, while "Kesling" grounds it with compound Western structure.
How faithful should original characters be to the game's exact naming conventions?
Faithful to the philosophy, not the specific phonetics. The game's naming principle is restraint: short, clean, memorable, easy to say aloud. If you're writing fan fiction or creating characters for a tabletop campaign set in Allraan, the goal is a name that sounds like it could appear in the game's credits without standing out. That means avoiding fantasy naming clichés the series deliberately sidesteps — apostrophes, stacked consonants, names that require footnotes. A name that could belong to a character in Eiyuden Chronicle is a name that doesn't demand attention before the character has earned it.
