Suikoden II was released in 1999 for the PlayStation.
I played the digital download version of the game on my PSTV.
Suikoden II is an RPG starring a young boy named Riou. (or at least, that's the commonly-agreed upon name among the fandom, as the game itself does not provide a default name).
Riou is a fighter-in-training who is betrayed by his home country of Highland. The Highland army has ambitions to conquer all the neighbouring regions through force, causing destruction and death in their wake.
The story of Suikoden II involves Riou escaping and rebelling against Highland, and eventually becoming the leader of a growing resistance army that will eventually be able to fight back.
Suikoden II's biggest improvement over the first game is absolutely the storytelling.
I did complain that the first game didn't portray its events very well, despite having a solid story underneath the messy presentation. But the second game is so so much better at its storytelling! It fully realises the story it's telling, and it makes a much bigger impact on the player as a result. The cutscenes are very well done. They really show how cruel and malicious the Highland army is, and especially their evil bloodthirsty leader Luca Blight - the game does a great job at portraying his cruelty in particular. And the struggles of the hero as he rises from a powerless youngster to a revered leader is portrayed nicely as well. There are plenty of scenes that show the characters' personalities, and they give plenty of space for each emotional beat to stand out. It certainly feels like they have learned how to tell a more impactful story this time around. I'm very very impressed with this game's storytelling.
The story is rather long and involved this time around. A large portion of the story shows how helpless Riou is against the might of the Highland army, and it does take many hours of playing before Riou actually can lead his army. Highland's oppressive presence is even felt through gameplay, as the Highland Army will occupy and take over some of the towns, leaving them inaccessible to the player. I like this kind of thing where the story directly impacts the world of the game.
What also helps matters is that the English translation is a lot better now. It's still not perfect, but it is no longer super-noticeably poor like the first game. ...Though there are still some odd translation choices here and there - for example there is an equipment called the "Mangosh" that increases parry damage. ....I mean, come on - that really should be "Main Gauche", right? ... And occasionally some characters' names are spelled wrong too. I noticed that (Riou's friend) Jowy's name is sometimes written as "Joei". And Luca Blight is sometimes "Luka" and even "Ruka" at one point. Blahhh, what can you do, right?
There are lots of other improvements too. Micromanaging your team in the home base is a lot smoother now - instead of having to keep swapping party members all the time, it's now possible to equip and upgrade them even when they are not in your team. You still need to talk to a specific character whenever you do want to change your team, though, but overall it feels a lot less fiddly. I also like the layout of the base more in this game. Though I don't like the base's background music as much, it has to be said. :/
The game's main gameplay systems are very similar to the first Suikoden game, with a few updates and modifications. You now have a party inventory in addition to the individual inventories. You can equip healing items and limited-use spells to a character for use during battle, and if they run out, you can spend a turn pulling a new one out from the party inventory mid-fight. This adds some versatility to the combat.
You can also choose to put miscellaneous armour in these slots instead such as boots or gloves, which gives a few extra defense points, but it means you don't have space to put a healing item on. It's always more interesting when you can make choices like this on a character-by-character basis.
Aside from these changes, the battle system in Suikoden II is pretty much the same from Suikoden 1. You have the same fast-paced, six-person turn-paced battles, which includes an auto-battle option, unite moves with specific teams of people, and so on. Though now characters may also sometimes attack more than once per turn if they get a critical hit, which is cool. The party-wide inventory also has a dedicated section for key items, which is a big improvement over the first Suikoden where you could permanently lose an important item like the Blinking Mirror by giving it to the wrong character.
Again, the game features the ability to recruit many new party members. There are 108 Stars of Destiny in the army, and of these, around 72 of them can be chosen as playable characters on your team of six. The rest of them perform some kind of function in the home base, such as managing shops etc.
Interestingly, the game actually features a handful of additional hidden playable characters that aren't counted as Stars of Destiny.
Compared to the previous game, I feel like I get to choose my party members more often, which is a relief. There are still a few moments where you need to take specific ones for story purposes, but it no longer feels so annoyingly frequent like it does in the first game, and it never interferes with the ability to recruit characters or complete sidequests any more.
There is one moment in particular regarding character choices that I felt was quite interesting - when liberating the college town of Greenhill from Highland's grasp, the heroes disguise themselves as newly-enrolled students, and for this mission, you can only take school-aged characters with you - you can't bring any grownups. I thought this was fun. When you have so many characters to choose from, it can sometimes start to feel like you're just comparing their stats, so anything that gives the characters more specific personal individuality like this is a good thing.
There was one bit of the game regarding character choice that felt particularly disappointing though - one of the first characters you get is the Kobold champion Gengen - a cheerful silly doggy boy who is considered a great leader among the Kobold people. At some point during the story, the Kobolds don't permit you to enter their village due to their distrust of humans... and I found it a bit disappointing that having Gengen in your team doesn't change anything. They don't acknowledge Gengen's presence at all, and it just feels off. It feels like a mistake in the script. There should at least be some extra dialogue here, or something.
I guess they couldn't account for every possible party composition, of course, but this particular one feels like an important possible situation they should have addressed.
So this game introduces another style of gameplay to the Suikoden series. Replacing the rock-paper-scissors battle scenes from the first game is a new tactics-style gameplay system, very reminiscent of Fire Emblem actually.
The problem is, I don't really like it that much!
The tactics battles occur occasionally at specific story points. Instead of fighting against enemies with the regular battle system, the game switches to a tactics grid.
These battles take place in a Fire Emblem style grid map. The game automatically chooses who goes on the field, and you can move the units to attack enemy units as you would expect from a tactics game.
At first, the battles are incredibly limited. You are given a handful of units, but you only have control of Riou's squad and nobody else, since at the start Riou hasn't become a leader yet. You can only move 1 tile at a time, which makes your options pretty limited. Meanwhile, the other units that the computer controls are the ones that can actually get anything done, so pretty much the whole gameplay is just waiting around for the computer to win the battle for you. It's not very engaging, and it's made even worse by how much luck is involved. The computer sometimes just doesn't want to select a useful move, and it's rather frustrating.
Later on in the game, when you have control of every unit, it still isn't a very interesting tactics-style system in my opinion. I feel like Suikoden II's battles just don't give me enough information. You have no way of knowing whether you're safe to attack enemy units - you just have to try it and see what happens. Most of the time it looks like nothing happens... you don't even get to see any actual HP values - just a vague mass of little guys representing the squad. If enough of the little guys get killed, that's a hit, and if you take two "hits", then the unit is defeated. But whether or not units inflict hits or receive hits feels completely random.
All the other Stars of Destiny you recruit can have special effects during these battles - such as negating terrain penalties, or being able to cast spells. But most of the time, spells don't seem to do anything at all anyway... ...The objective of these missions isn't always clear either - you can sometimes win a battle just because a cutscene started playing where the other side decides to retreat out of nowhere, or sometimes reinforcements teleport in with no warning to change the victory conditions of the battle midway through.
It's all a very loose and unsatisfying mess of a tactics game.
I also feel like the tactics battles are given way too much emphasis, because these battles only occur during specific story scenes. You can't initiate one whenever you feel like it, unlike the regular JRPG random encounters. Which means that all of this planning and deciding who goes in which squad, or which abilities to assign to each squad etc is extremely situational, and once you reach the endgame when all the tactics battles are done, I'm left feeling a sense of "ok so what was the point in introducing that entire system???" it's already done with before it became interesting. If only there was some repeatable war tactics minigame in the base or something, it would feel a bit more fleshed out and purposeful.
...maybe I'm just completely spoiled by Fire Emblem though. Dang, Fire Emblem is too good. :D
... anyway
I felt like the home base was very much improved in this game compared to the first game. It feels a lot more lively, as characters can be found hanging out in multiple places rather than just having one static location they stand in. And their dialogue actually changes depending on the context! If something important has just happened, characters may have dialogue related to it. It's good stuff.
There's a rather overly in-depth recipe system in this game - you can collect various kitchen ingredients all over the game (fish from the fishing minigame, veggies from finding seeds, meat from finding livestock), and you also find a bunch of recipes that use specific combinations of ingredients. After that, you can optionally also use a condiment (Sugar, Salt, Mayonnaise, Soy Sauce, or Red Pepper) to further modify the recipe. There are 40 recipes in total, so this means there are like... 240 different food items in this game?? All with differing levels of healing, and sometimes additional effects.
The kitchen also doesn't actually use up the ingredients when you ask for a meal - you need to have the ingredients available in order to give the order to the kitchen, but you never lose them, so having all the possible ingredients available is more of a completionist thing than a resource-management thing.
Also, for some reason, the kitchen has its own entire subplot! Every once in a while when you step into the kitchen, a dramatic scene will play out, a rival chef will challenge your chef to a cook-off, and a cooking minigame begins. You win a recipe if you win... but if you lose, then the plot thread drops and you won't be able to see the next cook-off. This cooking thing is way way more in-depth than it needed to be, but it is kinda fun, so I don't mind it.
The home base is also home to a bunch of minigames, and I have to say - they are all ridiculously difficult. Fishing requires you to rapidly mash the button like a madman, and it often comes down to luck regardless. The whack-a-mole minigame requires inhuman reflexes, and the dancing minigame requires "good" rhythm, which the game seems to be incredibly strict about. The one minigame that isn't impossible is also the most boring - the rope-climbing game just takes forever to conclude, and is determined entirely by dice-rolls. ...
Honestly, I'm not a fan of any of the minigames. Thankfully the prizes are purely optional junk, but for someone like me who likes to collect optional junk in RPGs, it's a pain.
Annoyingly, the base's storage warehouse is woefully small in this game. I never ran out of space in Suikoden 1, but here in Suikoden II, you really don't get much storage to work with. Which kind of makes collecting all of the optional prizes not even worth it - you won't have room to keep them anyway!
And there's another thing regarding completion in this game too - the game has many many unfortunate bugs that prevent a player from attaining true 100% completion unless they are following a guide precisely.
For example, it can be made impossible to collect all of the recipes for the base's kitchen because a bug in the game prevents certain recipes from dropping if the player has already turned in specific other ones. ...A player has no way of knowing which recipes are bugged unless they consult a guide.
Another bug prevents a collectible sheep (for livestock) appearing in the game if the player has opened a specific treasure chest elsewhere - because apparently the sheep and the chest share the same "collection ID" flag in the game's memory. How annoying!
So yeah. For all of these reasons. ...no, I did not get absolutely everything in my playthrough. I got all of the Stars of Destiny (which thankfully aren't bugged), but a lot of this extra rubbish was not completed because I opened the wrong chest, or turned in a recipe at the wrong time. Whoop de doo.
Actually, the bugs in this game do need addressing, because they are rather problematic. I played the USA version, which apparently is the buggiest version.
This game has bugs that prevent certain music tracks from playing. During some of the tactics battles, it's just nothing but silence...making an already annoying gameplay style even more of a slog. And most notably, the dancing minigame is also completely silent. How do they expect me to have good rhythm if the music isn't even playing?? Apparently, it is only the USA version that is bugged like this, and the Japanese and PAL versions work fine. ....wow, I'm so lucky to have picked the USA version to play, huh?
The USA version also has some bugged text. You see an NPC in town, they say, "Hey, do you want to hear a secret? pay me 200 gold". And then when you pay, it's just gibberish text. Wow. money well spent I guess. Apparently the gibberish text is for lines that were missed during the translation process. A couple of lines of Japanese text were just never translated, and the Japanese fonts were removed from the ROM, so it ends up as gibberish. ....
The game has multiple endings. I could not get the best ending because I did not find all of the Stars of Destiny before a certain cutoff point in the main story, but I did find an optional second-best ending that requires you to fulfil a promise made at the start of the game. It's cool how it turns out, actually. I won't say any more, but it's really really cool.
Finding all of the characters is kind of a pain. There is some in-game guidance in the form of Richmond, the private-eye who can tell you the locations of characters for a fee. But even with Richmond's help, I still needed to consult a guide at the end because for whatever reason, Richmond never told me about one of the characters, Vincent. Is that another bug? Vincent not appearing in Richmond's list? Perhaps so. ... And also Richmond's clue about how to find the hidden squirrel characters was not descriptive enough for me to actually find them without a guide. So yeah, I did in fact use a walkthrough for this.
What's crazy is that the game actually contains a hidden bad ending, and I just so happened to find it completely on my own!
So in these kinds of RPGs, the hero is often asked a lot of questions that don't actually affect the plot. They let you choose between "Yes" and "No" just to let you feel more like you have an active role in the protagonist's journey, but in reality, both options always lead to the same outcome. ....... right?
Well Suikoden II actually has a crazy hidden bad ending that comes out of nowhere. At some point around two-thirds of the way through the story, you get asked, "maybe we should just run away from the war". And like normal Riou can say yes or no.... but if you actually select yes, then it triggers an elaborate alternate sequence of events involving Riou running from his duties as leader, escaping from his friends, betraying his army, leaving everything behind, and just running away to live out the rest of his days in peace. ....and then the game ends right there and then! I was absolutely flabbergasted with how elaborate this sequence was. I was just selecting the contrarian dialogue choices because I was thinking "haha wouldn't it be funny if Riou said he wanted to give up after all this", but then the game really went out of its way to show me how NOT funny it would be if it really played out that way. ...Absolutely amazing.
...Of course you can reload your game to continue normally after this, but wow, it's so cool to see something like this occur so unexpectedly.
...
So yeah! Suikoden II is a fantastic RPG. While I'm not a fan of the tactics war sections, and the bugs do bring it down a bit, the overall experience is that Suikoden II is a really really good RPG. And it's huge! I spent 60 hours on my playthrough! Wow.
What a cool game!
I am definitely hotly anticipating the upcoming release of the Nintendo Switch version of this game! I hope they fix the bugs and make everything perfect with the new version. :)
I really do want to play Suikoden III next, but I need a teensy bit of a breather between games. Don't want to get burnt out, you know? So it might be a moment before I get around to Suikoden III. But I do plan on playing all of them!
