[internisus]

If you want to, I mean. I've been borderline interested in the series for a long time, but no one has ever given me a clear reason for why it is distinctive. I want to want it. Evangelize me.

[Churippu]

I am posting a review.

[Churippu]

Actually my review might make you not want to play the games at all.

The games are really good a fun! I swear.

If you have to play any one Suikoden game though, go with Suikoden 2. Best story line, best characters, best overall gameplay.

[Zebadayus]

NOOOOOOOOOO CHURIPUUUUUUUUUUUUU!

That's my job!

You're... reviewing the first one or what?

I'm going to do sort of a sweeping review of the whole series, probably.


Internisus, just wait until Chu and I are finished, 'kay?

[Ebrey]

The original game was well liked for several reasons:

1) It was released before FF 7, when your only other RPG options were Wild Arms and Vandal Hearts, both of which are competent but unoriginal.
2) The music is fantastic.
3) Recruiting 108 characters was fun, although in the original most of them are combat characters who are useless. How do you use 70 combat characters in a 15 hour game? In later games more of the characters would open up minigames rather than fighting.
4) The battles were nice and fast. There were also wars and duels which were simple but fun.

The story wasn't that great, and was poorly translated, but it's a short game, so why not play it?

The second game builds on the first, but it's 50 hours long and has a fantastic storyline (terribly translated). It has one of the best horribly evil villains AND one of the best sympathetic villains in RPG history, and they complement each other brilliantly. The second also features one of the most robust castles in the series, where you can play minigames and learn characters' backstories by investigatin them.

The third has another great story, helped by a better translation and the fact that you play it from multiple perspectives. It falls apart a little in the end, when the series creator quit because they wouldn't let him do another POV from Bishop Sasarai of Harmonia (Harmonia is the powerful empire in the background of many of the games... like Lodis in the Ogre Battle Saga). However the graphics are incredibly jerky due to a terrible graphics engine, and the gameplay is repetitive. Instead of dungeons, the game's length is padded out by making you move across the same field areas over and over again. The castle in this game doesn't change as much visually as II's did when you recruit more characters, but getting the theater is awesome. It lets you select characters to reenact famous scenes, and they do them in their own unique style.

Four is apparently awful due to a bad story and a high sea encounter rate. I haven't played it.

Five is supposed to be good.

[gooktime]

The first one is very, very charming and can be finished with all of the characters recruited in about 20 hours. While some of the 108 characters in these games have a line or two of dialogue and just as much backstory, most are decent and have some optional scenes and such to find if you use them.

I played the first ten hours or so of Suikoden V and it was almost entirely cut-scenes and so forth, then Oblivion came out. Does it pick up the pace at some point?

[another coma]

[inmatarian]

I liked the first one. The second one was good too.

But the castle is the real reason we play these games. Collect characters, and get a better place going.
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2993 badness blog email

[tacotaskforce]

You know that urge you have in most games to collect all the items and kill all the monsters? Suikoden is based almost entirely around that feeling (SIII being the exception). The goal in the games is to eventually become leader of an invincible army that spreads across a continent, destroy all that oppose your rule, and then give it all up in the ending because that's what Child Heroes are expected to do.

Also Suikoden games really don't care about that much about the combat so you'll likely never have to grind.
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[Zebadayus]

I can say that I have NEVER grinded in any Suikoden game. Not once. Never needed to.

Anyway, about V...

Yes, it starts off pretty slowly (the dialogue is great, though), but it definitely picks up.

See, it's probably the longest in the series.

Recruiting characters is far more complex in V than it was in the previous games. Lots and lots of backstory on the characters too. Basically, when recruiting a character, it makes sure you see pretty clearly what their personality and motivation is.

Where in the previous games, some characters would almost seems to join you without any real motivation, but in Suikoden V every character has definite, sometimes complex reasons to join and help you. It's very nice.

[professor_scissors]

[Zebadayus]

Also, Internisus...

The Suikoden franchise generally completely lacks all the JRPG bullshit.

This is reason enough to play them.

Good luck finding Suikoden II for under 70 dollars, though. Luckily I got it back when it was cheap. A friend of mine happened to find it at Gamestop for 50 once. I saw it for 100 one time!

[The Ichiban Crush]

S1 and S2 are one of those rare sets of games that are actually worth the rare game price. Especially S2, which as far as I'm concerned is the best of the series, and definitely one of the best of the genre.

S3 is a bit underrated, but that's mostly due to the fact that production was shaky and the awful, Awful, AWFUL graphics. But seeing who turns out to be the main villain is really a stunner if you've played the first two games.

The only game I refuse to pick up ever again is S4. I own it, but I just don't have the sadomasochism to go through with it. It's THAT BAD. Also: Hot shorts. I rest my case.

S5 I haven't had a whole lot of time to fool around with, despite the fact I've had it since it dropped. (I get video game ADD real easily) But it's leagues better than S4, and from what I can tell so far, better than S3. I can overlook the fact that the main character is the most androgynous Suikoden hero to date.

Also, Suikoden Tactics is not a bad game either. I'm not sure if it's worth playing S4 to get all the extra bonus things, but it's certainly a really underrated title.

And while I'm at it, I'll confess: Yuber is definitely one the most stylized characters in the series. Not the most evil, but definitely my favorite.
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[gooktime]

I'd definitely suggest playing the first two in order, by the way. Not only does Suikoden 2 take place the next country over, there are a lot of returning characters and references. You can even load your save game from the first one to unlock a sidequest relating to the hero of the original - this also transfers over your hero/army names when referenced for consistency.

I also vaguely remember this feature returning in Suikoden 3, where you could load data from the first games and have your characters perform some of the key scenes from them in the theatre.

[Felix]

i've played one and three start to finish, and haven't touched any of the others.

i enjoyed them a lot. one has a lot of jrpg archetypes, but it's mostly the good ones, and the stuff it uses to fill in the cracks is mostly very good stuff. i recall liking the battle system and dialogue of 3 a whole lot, probably more than any ps2 rpg except final fantasy xii. our tastes seem to be a least a little similar in this regard, so.

[BotageL]

I've always respected and enjoyed the fact that the Suikoden games are always on a much closer scale - one country or a few nearby countries, rather than some comically simplistic globe-trotting adventure to the one industrial city, the one Japanese city, the one ice city, the gigantic casino, and the rural village. The world of the games seems more like, well, a world.
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[another coma]

[Ebrey]

[Churippu]

[negativedge]

The first game is fun and cute, and is basically a pre-req to the second game, which is just fucking brilliant, and will be even more brilliant if you've played the original. Do it. If you feel like spending a lot of money.

[Ebrey]

[Wyndian]

[gooktime]

I vaguely remember reading a very heated, raving article about how horrible IV is on Suikosource, it was pretty funny.

[negativedge]

Suikosource was pretty neat to dive into back when I was really into this series.

[Felix]

dude, that's not a canonical true rune.

[Zebadayus]

I really support the playing of 1 and 2 (at least 2) before 3. I mean, REALLY.

[Wyndian]

[internisus]

I really like the idea of playing through the series chronologically according to the story, so I'll do it 4-5-1-2-3. I'm really excited about the tight scope of the game, and I'm hoping for story and characters on the level of Final Fantasy Tactics. In any case, I'm definitely convinced. Thanks, everyone!

[Zebadayus]

Final Fantasy Tactics is actually a really good game to compare them to.

Just remember when you're playing through 4... it's not a good representative of the quality of the rest of the series.

But hey, you may enjoy it! At least it's not that long. And it has a few decent moments.

[tacotaskforce]

[tacotaskforce]

The one part of Suiko IV that is really good is the hero's relationship with Snowe and how Snowe comes to terms with not being the hero he thinks he is.
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[Takashi]

[gooktime]

Seconding that. If you start with 4, you likely won't play the rest.

[negativedge]

For the love of god please start with 1 and then play 2. They are companion games, and I really don't see anyone liking the rest of the series without having played the first two. They're just...different. And better.

[internisus]

[negativedge]

Character development is very, very straightforward. This is a blessing, because there are eight million of them, and you'd never use more than your favorite six if you had to do all sorts of special things with them. Basically, you pay money to upgrade their weapons, and you throw a few runes (read: simplified materia) on them. The complexity comes in recruiting and managing all these characters (managing is particularly of import in Suikoden III). Also, the castle. Oh god, the castle.

As far as lore is concerned...yeah, I think you could make the FFT comparision. However, it's sort of hard to do that on a per game basis. As you start to ingest the series as a whole, yes, it is fairly deep. Suikoden II in particular does a good job of letting you know that you're only dealing with a fraction of the world, in one particular time period. It's nice.

[Felix]

it's interesting to me the way you seem to regard games that both of us like quite a bit (fft in this example, previously mentioned: trauma center) as "coming close" to being great, but ultimately squandering it in the end - in either example, because they couldn't help being videogames - whereas i'm not bothered in the least by these things.

question: how do you feel about being john malkovich? i don't really like the content of the movie so much as i admire the hell out of kaufman seemingly working a bit too long on the script before going to bed one evening and subsequently opting to take it as far as he could in such an out-of-left-field direction, rather than going back and making it a bit more sane. (this applies to adaptation too to an extent, although it's less focused in that regard and certainly has other merit, so)

i, uh, don't really know where i'm going with this.. i love fft. i don't think suikoden is fft. i think you're looking too hard, lately. i think it's extremely comfortable with its own archetypes, in any event.

as regards the strategy (and again i'm going to have to profess to loving fft all the more in this regard) - play 3. i say that as somebody who never got around to 2 for no good reason, but really. 3's quite something.

[internisus]

Oh shit. You asked me about Being John Malkovich. Thread tangent coming tomorrow.

As for "looking too hard", yeah, that's something I always do. I become emotionally involved with charm and detail and character and story, and when those things are presented within a flawed system or fall apart in the endgame I forever look for something that can replace it.

extralife, the idea of sensing the epic scale and historical lore as the series gradually unfolds sounds just wonderful. I'm not sure if I have any non-tv media experience that has managed that. I guess the experience of the first three metroid games did something like that for me, but of course there was much less reading and information involved in that.

more tomorrow

[Ebrey]

Internisus, you need to play the SNES/Playstation Tactics Ogre. It's like FFT, except it doesn't get whacky at the end. And it's got 3 very different paths you can take. And the translation is slightly less shitty. The gameplay is frustrating at the beginning but becomes more satisfying as you get into it.

[Felix]

been waiting on the sufami translation patch of that for a while now.

i hear it's almost done!

[internisus]

i have Ogre Battle for the ps, but yeah i never got very far. i'll have to give it another go.

Don't know much about Tactics Ogre though.