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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Genso Suikoden

  
 
Queer Pirate
18:21 / 17.05.06
First of all, just be warned that what follows is a bit of a fan boy's ravings. Suikoden is a little-known series and the object of this post is to get people interested in it, as I believe great games deserve to be played. However, I'm sure that most people on Barbelith who have played games from this series will also concur that it definitely is worth a try.

Ten years ago, on a lonely weekend at my apartment, I decided to go to the local rental store to rent a PS1 console along with Tobal No. 1, Square Soft's latest fighting game. As I made it to the clerk's counter, she told me that there was a special promo involving getting an extra game for free, for already renting a console along with a game. Being quite annoyed at having to make an unimportant decision such as choosing another game when nothing of interest seemed to be on the shelves, I finally picked this unknown game called Genso Suikoden – and quite honestly, from the description at the back of the game box, I couldn't quite make out what it really was about.

After playing a fairly enjoyable two hours of Tobal, I decided to give that unknown game a go. It was a mistake: I ended up spending three days straight on Suikoden, stopping only for food and sleep. On the third day, I even called in sick to work and I ended up bringing back the console one day late at the store. (I also never played Tobal No. 1 again.)

Suikoden's story started innocuously enough: young McDohl is the son of Teo McDohl, general of the Scarlet Moon Empire and personal friend to the Emperor. Our budding hero is beginning a promising military career. He is sent around on some minor missions, recovering astrological predictions from a remote seer and fighting bandits who are supposedly responsible for stealing tax money from a small village. However, as the story progresses, young McDohl becomes involved in a civil war that will forever change the face of his country and he takes on the mantle of a reluctant war hero who discovers that victory often comes at a bitter price.

I couldn't let the controller down. As the story unfolded, I had to know what would happen next – and as things went on, I laughed, cheered on, yet often got very close to crying on more than one occasion.

This wasn't your run-of-the-mill save-the-world-from-the-ultimate-evil RPG. It was simply about a war, where your opponents were often as honourable as you were, but who just happened to be on the enemy side – and although it was a larger-than-life and romantic depiction of war, things often got ugly, just like real war.

And the music... THE MUSIC!!

Even from a gameplay point of view, the game was pretty unique. Most of the time, it was a typical RPG, yet it allowed you to have up to six characters in your party at once, who could fight in formation and who could often execute combination attacks à la Chrono Trigger, in fast-paced yet interesting combat. There were 108 characters to recruit to build your castle and lead your army, most of which were actually interesting. There were mass battles to be fought when your army would clash with the opponent's forces. Finally, at key moments in the story, you would have to fight adversaries in dramatic one-on-one duels where you had to anticipate your opponent's action depending on the new one-liner he would say at every turn.

A few years later, Suikoden II came out and I bought the game without a second thought. The story took place three years after the war of the original Suikoden game, in a neighbouring country. Many of the first game's secondary characters returned and many references were made to the events of the first game, even though someone new to the series could have understood every event of the second game as a stand-alone story (although I do recommend playing the series in order). Every game system was improved and refined. The story even managed to surpass that of the original. Players could also import a save game from the first Suikoden to unlock young McDohl as a playable character. Suikoden II probably is my favourite game of all time and I will frankly say that it is arguably even better than Chrono Trigger, even though it does not boast the same high production values.

Now, I after a lag of many years, I'm finally playing Suikoden III (and I have yet to play IV and V) and I have to say that it also is one of the most enjoyable RPGs I have played in a long time, although it's not quite as good as Suikoden II. However, I'm really looking forward to completing it and continuing with the series (although I've heard some bad things about the fourth game, but better things about the fifth).

Are there any fans of the series on Barbelith?

If you haven't played it and you think it would be your thing, definitely pick this series up; I'm sure it will provide some great playing time.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:19 / 18.05.06
I've made a few attempts to complete the first game, the most recent of which was last summer. I always end up becoming annoyed by it, or else distracted by something else.

The annoyance comes from the way that you never feel that you know if a character's death *is* actually a death, or if it's just an RPG death - that is, one that's scripted to happen and which you're never going to be able to avoid. It's probably a problem with the genre more than the game, but the way the game's put together is counter-intuitive.

An example, with spoilers. At one point, the character Pahn gets into a one-on-one battle with, iirc, the main character's father. Now, because you've got so many characters to choose from when it comes to putting together your battling party of six, Pahn in my saved game was extremely weak - far too weak for this fight - but the storyline dictated that I had no choice about who was going to take part in this battle. It had to be him. There was no way I was ever going to win the fight. He dies, the story continues. It's only hours later that I discover that he's not ever going to come back to life, that there was an alternative outcome to that fight - would have been, if I'd known about it hours in advance and been able to level him up in readiness - and that, because he'd died, I was already deinied the proper end sequence. This after over twenty hours of playing.

I wasn't happy.

Apart from the 108 Stars of Destiny thing, it's a very formulaic plot. On top of that, I didn't find the most common battle system in the game to be all that much fun - not enough to make me want to begin over from the start again. There are things you feel that you should be able to do - such as swap character positions mid-fight - that you're not given the option to do. Visually, it's extremely basic and quite charmless.

I do still like some of the ideas - finding and recruiting all 108 potential team members, developing the abandoned tower into a fully-functioning, well-populated base of operations - but there are too many stumbling blocks. As such, I never bothered with the second game and after that there seemed no point in picking up any of the subsequent ones.

It's funny. I've really grown to love Konami over the last two or three years. I never appreciated just how amazing and influential their back-catalogue is/was - they don't force the brand onto or into their games in the same way as other publishers, which is one of the reasons why they don't have anything like as strong or recognisable an identity as, say, Namco or Capcom. Suikoden's the one series of theirs that's gained a seriously dedicated cult fanbase, but means nothing to me. The first game lacks the strength of personality that's required to turn a mix of decent ideas and clunky structural problems into something worth losing yourself to. Myself to.
 
 
Queer Pirate
18:03 / 21.05.06
It's one of the issues with the original game: there are some of the 108 characters that you can lose permanently or that you can only obtain in very specific portions of the game - if you miss the opportunity, you can never get them. I would rather have preferred if every Star was availabe at the end of the game and only required to be found.

SPOILER
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Pahn's duel with Teo is difficult to win, even if Pahn is at a good level with optimum equipment for that part of the game. On my first playthrough, I thought the duel was rigged and that his loss was a part of the story.

Now, I actually have a lot of fun fighting the duel for real, though. It's the most challenging and suspenseful in the game, especially considering that for some reason, the designers made the decision to leave Teo with a half-depleted life bar at the start of his duel with the Hero, which was a disappointment for me, considering it's probably the most important duel in the game. Suikoden 1 sometimes feels as if the designers were deathly afraid of throwing a challenge at the player.

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END OF SPOILER

I love Suikoden 1's story, but it's a bit rough around the edges. Suikoden 2 definitely is more polished.

As for the visuals, they seem unimpressive most of the time, but there are many in-game cutscenes in the game where the animation for the 2d character sprites is jaw-dropping - and I just love the spell effects and the choice of colours for the environments. The game's visuals are usually not eye-candy, but they do have an artistic vision behind them and enhance the game's atmosphere. And you gotta love seeing all those tiny soldier running after each other in the mass battles!

I think it's important to remember that it's easy to have awesome graphics when the publisher is willing to throw millions of dollars on a flagship franchise. In the case of Suikoden, it was an experimental foray and it shouldn't be compared with AAA releases. It would be like comparing Braindead with 28 Days Later. Moreover, in Suikoden's case, the artists did make animation frames for over 60 playable characters (in battle), who aren't based on the same base sprite-set, which is a lot of work in itself and shouldn't be overlooked.

The first game lacks the strength of personality that's required to turn a mix of decent ideas and clunky structural problems into something worth losing yourself to.

I'll be honest: I wouldn't describe the original Suikoden as having "clunky structural problems". It definitely has some issues, most of which were improved upon in Suikoden 2 and even 3, but when I look at games like the later Final Fantasies and Chrono Cross who are supposedly leaders of the RPG genre and yet end up with all sorts of weird quirks and mechanics that shouldn't be present in an established franchise, I think that Suikoden 1 fares very well for Konami's first experiment in the RPG genre.

It's not for everyone, however.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:06 / 23.05.06
As for the visuals, they seem unimpressive most of the time, but there are many in-game cutscenes in the game where the animation for the 2d character sprites is jaw-dropping - and I just love the spell effects and the choice of colours for the environments.

It's the art design I don't like. The perspective is off by a large margin - the ground you're walking on is virtually top-down, but standing structures and character sprites are flat, face-on. It's out of whack and feels quite cheap - like they did it this way because they couldn't be bothered making sure that the perspective looked right all the time, so went to the other extreme and had it wrong, but at least wrong consistently.

Battle animation is nice, but the animation in field and town sections isn't - the main character has all of three frames. Left leg forwards, both legs together, right leg forwards.

I think I understand why some people like it so much. I'm nearly one of them - it's one of those things where you get wound up by the fact that you know you'd get more from it if a few small bits and pieces were different.
 
 
Jati no Rei
09:01 / 19.12.06
I'm with you, Queer Pirate! Suikoden 1 is a great game, and Suikoden 2 is quite possibly my favorite PS1 RPG (though there is some competition), and is without a doubt in my top 5 best games ever.

I first got a PS1 a little while before S2 came out, and had never heard of the first one, but I've always loved games where you could get lots of characters. So, when a friend from work told me about this game that he had bought, but become disenchanted with, with 108 (!) characters, I quickly agreed to buy it. and fall in love... and bought the 2nd one the day it came out, along with 3-5 as well.

As for S2, it really did improve upon the original in almost every way. The art was better, the gameplay was better, the character customization was better, the character development was better, which is saying something considering how awesome S1 was in that regard. Nanami, the main character's sister, is just about the most amazingly real fictional character I've come across, ever. Wow. Also, the cooking Mini-game was a work of genius, and this is from someone who is usually bored/annoyed by such things.

S3 was alright, but lacked something for me. I really didn't like the battle system, at all, but the trinity sight system was cool. I actually liked 4 a lot, for what it was, though it was short, esp. for a Suikoden game. It had several Big improvements over 3, and some really fun characters. It should really be played as a companion piece with Suikoden Tactics, which uses many of the same characters.

Suikoden 5, though, is amazing, and even Suikoden Doubters should check it out. It is in the same ballpark as Suikoden 2, and is better than any of the other ones, by quite a bit. Great Story, Great Characters, Cool Battles, Lots of Fun.
 
  
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