[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.

[negativedge]

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

[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.

[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.