I just played Suikoden.
This is an RPG released by Konami for the PlayStation in 1995.
I played the digital download version on the PSTV.
In Suikoden, the hero is the son of Teo McDohl, one of the Great Generals of the Scarlet Moon Empire.
The player can freely name the hero, but I went with the canon name Tir.
Early on in the story, Tir McDohl is tasked with carrying out the emperor's dirty work, and soon enough, he realises just how corrupt the empire is.
The story involves Tir joining and eventually becoming the leader of the Liberation Army. He gathers people to join the cause, and tears down the empire, piece by piece.
The game plays like a standard kind of classic JRPG, with random encounters, towns, an overworld map, and all that good stuff.
Battles in this game are fairly simple. You have a team of six party members - three in the front row, and three in the back row.
Short-range characters can only attack if they are in the front row, Mid-range characters can attack from any row, and Long-range characters can also reach the enemy's back row too. You can freely change formation outside of battle, but not during battle. Short-range characters tend to be tougher, which helps offset the disadvantage.
There's also a magic system - you can equip Runes to your characters (or some characters come with special Runes of their own), and these allow you to cast spells. There is no MP bar - rather, each spell has a number of uses before it runs out, which is replenished when you heal at an inn. The number of spell uses will increase upon level up too. There is no way to recover spell uses aside from resting in town, so it's better to conserve them for the tougher enemies. There are also Runes that have no spells, but give passive effects such as increasing critical hit chance, or lowering enemy accuracy.
Aside from the row system, combat is pretty basic. Most of the time you are just using regular attacks on enemies, using the odd healing item when you need to. The game has an option called "Free Will" that automatically sets everyone to use a basic attack for one round, which is very handy in saving you from having to select the regular attack command six times in a row.
Combat in this game is thankfully very fast and snappy. Every time I play a PlayStation 1 RPG, I'm always dreading how slow the combat might be... Final Fantasy 7,8,9, Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Cross - these are all examples of PS1 RPGs with really obnoxiously slow battles.
Thankfully, Suikoden does not have this problem at all. There is no loading screen transition between field and combat, and the attacking animations are very quick. And this game does something I've never seen before in a turn-based game - multiple characters' attacks can happen at the same time! If you set all six of your characters to do a regular attack, once you press confirm you might see two or three of them jump toward the enemies together - it certainly helps speed things up, and it definitely feels much more natural than having to watch six regular attacks play out one by one.
I really like the way they handled it here.
That being said, the combat doesn't really have a ton of depth to it. The vast majority of the fights in the game are simply just using regular attacks and outlasting the enemy. Equipping the increased critical hit chance rune seems to be the best option for the majority of characters for this reason.
The overall difficulty level of the game is rather low, which I think is a good thing, because there really isn't enough mechanical depth here that would make more difficult encounters interesting. If enemies had more HP, it would only really amount to having to bring more healing items with you, since the fights would last longer. ...so I do like the way the difficulty is balanced in this game.
...
Suikoden's unique claim to fame is the character recruiting and the home base system.
For the first few hours of the game, it plays like a typical JRPG with a team of six predefined characters journeying together. But after a certain point in the story, once Tir becomes leader of the Liberation Army, a base of operations is established where the members of the army will hang out. Throughout the game, Tir can find and recruit people to join the army. Recruitable characters are referred to as the Stars of Destiny, and their names are etched into a stone slab in the base as you collect them.
Some of the Stars of Destiny need a bit of convincing to join your side - sometimes you need to find a specific item for them, or you need to talk to them with a specific character in your team. But at the same time, there are plenty who have no reason to join your army but do so anyway... You talk to a lady in one of the towns and she says "Who are you people? I'm just doing laundry. ...The Liberation Army? Oh! That should be plenty of laundry. Ok, I'll join." . It gets pretty silly at times. I do like this kind of silliness btw, i'm not complaining. :D
A number of these people will set up shop within the home base, giving you access to useful utilities. Some of them will unlock additional features, minigames, and other miscellaneous things. Most of them can be used as playable party members. And a few of them do absolutely nothing too.
In total there are 108 Stars of Destiny, 76 of which can be used as playable fighters. That's a lot of characters!
The main differences between each character are their stats and whether they are S, M or L range. Some characters have equipment or runes unique to them as well. Some characters also have special "Unite" techniques that require you to have specific other characters in the team. The game never actually tells who who can Unite together, but if you decide to put characters who are friends or are otherwise associated with each other on the same team, you'll generally find combinations that work. I do always like it when gameplay options are determined by the characters' story and relations like this. :D
For the most part, there is absolutely no downside to just using a small set of characters you like, completely ignoring the majority of them.
But if you do want to try using someone new, thankfully the EXP scaling is very generous in this game - if you have a very underleveled character win against a higher-level enemy, usually they will gain so much EXP to level up five or six times from just one battle. And they're not even in much danger of dying during the fight if you keep them in the back row. So it is not at all difficult to get underutilised characters up to speed with the rest of the team. It feels like they really went out of their way to design it in a way that does not feel grindy, which I appreciate.
The majority of characters can be recruited at any point in the story, however there are a small number of them that can be missed. Which is really unfortunate, because I ended the game with 107 out of the 108 characters. I won't spoil the plot details, but there is a cutoff point in the story where if you don't have 107 characters before a certain endgame cutscene, you cannot get the 108th one. And... yeah, I did not. :(
The general game structure is pretty standard classic RPG fare - you explore the overworld, go to the next town, talk to NPCs until you can go to the next objective, explore a dungeon, beat a boss, return to home base, and do it again for the next area. And honestly, it's a very nicely-paced adventure. The dungeons are standard RPG mazes, with forks and dead ends and treasure chests, and none of them felt particularly annoying to traverse. Sometimes the encounters could feel a bit overly-frequent, but running away is normally successful, and they even give you a "Bribe" option which allows you to spend money to guarantee a run away if you want to. So no complaints from me here! The adventuring is fun. :D
Throughout the story, there are moments where the entire Liberation Army fights in a large-scale battle against an opposing army. These battles are represented by a screen showing two miniaturised crowds of soldiers from the two opposing sides, and big numbers representing how many soldiers remain on each side. These battles are fought by selecting from a menu whether you want to Charge, Bow, or Magic. It works kind of like rock-paper-scissors, where the winning play will prevent your side from losing as many soldiers. The effectiveness of each attack depends on who you have recruited into your army, and you can also use some special abilities such as spying to see your opponent's next move, or powering up your next Charge command.
It seems that your characters' levels and equipment don't actually have any effect during these battles - attack power seems to come purely from the number of people you have recruited. I kind of like this actually - it gives a purpose to recruiting lots of characters, even if you aren't using them in your main team.
Strangely enough, if you lose enough soldiers during these war battles, occasionally you will get a message saying one of your Stars of Destiny has died in battle. When this happens, they are actually gone for good, and their name appears greyed-out in the stone slab. ...If this happens, it's probably best to just restart the game from a prior save and try again.
It's not possible for anyone to permanently die in regular battles - it's only in these large-scale war scenes where that can happen, and it seems to be somewhat random too.
...
So far so good, eh? Well, now I will talk about the game's weaknesses.
The biggest weakness for me is with the way the story is conveyed. Everything happens so briskly, the cutscenes are so short and awkward, the dialogue is very basic and stilted, and it doesn't feel like the events in the game have enough weight behind them.
Some sections of the game don't make a lot of sense storywise - the one that stands out to me most is when the elves need help from the dwarves to stop the Empire from burinng their village down, but the dwarf elder says "nope, i don't believe you - i'll only believe you if you go to the very bottom of this huge maze and get me this tree root i hid down there". And so you do, and by the time you get back up, the elf village is destroyed. Like... that's so annoying lol. I get it that the point of this section is to show that the dwarves really don't care about dealing with human or elf matters, but it feels so stupid that the heroes decide to go along with this plan when time is supposedly of the essence. Maybe it's supposed to show Tir's naivete, as he hasn't grown into a competent leader yet? Well, it certainly isn't conveying that very well either. :/
Important characters can die, climactic showdowns can occur, the tides of war can swing wildly, but then two seconds later, it cuts back to your base and your guys still only say their default dialogue like "Where's my food". The tonal whiplash is ridiculous.
While it is fun to see your home base grow as you recruit more people, they only really have one line of dialogue each. I would really have liked for them to update their dialogue as the story progresses, it would have made things feel more alive.
It doesn't help matters that the English translation is incredibly sloppy, too. It's actually really, really poor. :/ Thankfully the story comes through, but there are definitely some nonsense lines, and some of the item and ability descriptions are just flat-out incorrect.
...I guess I'm expecting too much for a 1995 game, huh? I feel like modern RPGs have spoiled me, haha.
The biggest gameplay issue for me is how tedious things are when you want to equip and upgrade your characters. You can't swap out party members whenever you like, you have to go to the top floor of your base and talk to Sanchez in order to do that. You can't access your item storage any time, you have to go to the second floor and talk to Rock to do that. You can't exchange runes whenever you like, you need to find a Rune Shop in town, or recruit Jeane to get a Rune Shop in your base on the first floor. You need to recruit Chapman to get an equipment shop in your base, otherwise, you're just running around the whole world finding shops to equip your team. Most annoyingly of all, you can't even save your game at the home base until you find and recruit Marie. Until that point, you have to leave and find a town just to use a save point...
Changing equipment is annoying, as you can't exchange items with someone who has a full inventory, but the item storage and equipment shops are on different floors, and you can't unequip Runes from anyone unless they're in your team, so if you want to use a rune from someone not in your active party, you need to go to the top floor to get them, and then take them to the first floor, swap the Runes, then go back to the top floor to swap party members again, and... argh! It gets so so sooooo fiddly! It's even more annoying to deal with Runes before you have Jeane in your base, because then you also have to leave and find a Rune shop in a town somewhere, and then come back. Might as well not even bother.
I'm not saying the game should allow me to exchange party members or use the item storage when I'm deep within a dungeon - I don't want to break the gameplay balance like that. I just wish it wasn't such a pain to manage these things while at home base. I wish I could just bring up a menu with everyone's equips and change it all to my liking in one single interface, without having to keep running up and down the stairs all the time.
I had some other initial misgivings with the game - I felt like the lack of a minimap on the world map was a big problem when it came to navigating, but then I found Templeton whose only purpose is to make a minimap appear on the world map after recruiting him. So okay then, I guess that wasn't actually an issue with the game after all lol.
I also felt like the movement speed was a bit too sluggish, but recruiting Stallion fixes this issue too...sort of. He only makes you walk faster if you bring him with you, which is a bit of a pain, because it's not necessarily the best for your party to have him with you all the time. (though I'll admit that Stallion does pair well with Kirkis and Sylvina for a pretty strong Unite attack)
... The other huge issue I have is with how the game handles your party makeup. They give you such a huge choice of characters, yet so incredibly often you're forced to use specific story-significant people. This is especially a problem when it comes to recruiting Mace the blacksmith. In order to get him, you need to have Moose, Maas, Meese and Mose in your team at the same time - however during the endgame, the game forces you to have Tir, Flik and Viktor in your team - so you only have three other slots open, making it impossible to recruit Mace! What the heck! (thankfully I did get him before this point)
I know that these characters have to be in the team for the upcoming story scenes to work properly, but they should definitely allow you to use whoever you want if you're just doing sidequest stuff. It's so annoying to be forced into a certain team when you're trying to do something else with the less important characters. And I hate that the endgame state only gives you three free slots to work with. Endgame should be when you have the most options available, not the least!
Another huge issue - throughout the story, characters can join and leave the army whenever the plot demands, and while they're gone they take away any items they had with them! This is especially annoying with a certain character who leaves permanently... If you had the Blinking Mirror (an item that allows you to teleport back to home base) in his inventory before he leaves, then you might as well start a new playthrough from the beginning, because playing without having access to the Mirror's teleportation makes the game unnecessarily tedious from that point on. They really, really should have made the Mirror a key item that doesn't use up inventory space. Or at least have it appear in your storage box if it was lost like this. ...Holy heck, what an awful oversight. Thankfully, this did not happen to me, but the fact that is is possible is very troublesome.
It's also annoying when characters decide to leave for story-related reasons without telling you. At some point, I was using Stallion a lot for his fast walking speed, when suddenly, I couldn't find him in the list of characters to choose from. His name wasn't even on the stone slab any more. What the heck was going on??? Turns out, he was just doing a bit of recon as part of the plot, as he appears in a cutscene later on. After this scene, he's available as normal. ...I mean, it makes sense, but it sure was worrying to see his name disappear from the stone slab like that. I wish the game was a little less obtuse like this.
Okay so
Overall, I like the game. I really do like the game. It's fun. I like recruiting characters, and the RPG combat is simple and fast, especially for PS1 standards. Even if the story isn't told very tactfully, I still do enjoy the story, and the characters have definitely grown on me throughout my playthrough.
However, it is undeniable that the game is very very rough around the edges. It feels very unpolished, both gameplaywise and storywise.
There are so many small little things that really bothered me while I was playing, but it definitely wasn't enough to sour my experience overall.
Thankfully the pace of the game was fast enough that it made up for the annoying parts.
My overall feelings of Suikoden is that I really like it. Hooray! :D :D :D
