Suikoden IV

 I played Suikoden IV. 

Apologies for the extremely long post. And apologies if my thoughts are a little disorganised. I had a lot to say about this one.

Alrighty, so Suikoden IV was released for the PlayStation 2 in 2005.

For this one, I played the game on a proper PlayStation 2 disc. It is available for digital download on PlayStation 3, but its sequel, Suikoden Tactics isn't. And I've heard there are some save data shenanigans with memory cards between the two games, so I specifically made sure to play the original PlayStation 2 version for this reason.

The hero of the story is named by the player, and no default name is provided. From what I can tell, it seems like "Lazlo" is the most commonly-used name for him among the fandom.

...apparently there was at some point an official Konami Pachislot machine that used the name "Razro", but... well, Lazlo sounds better, so that's the one I went with.

...Lol, that certainly isn't the only time Konami's tendency to make gambling machines based on their IPs has caused weirdness in the fandom regarding what's canon. There's also a lot of weird things going on with the Castlevania pachislots... more than I care to keep up with.

Suikoden IV is a seafaring adventure, taking place across a large ocean that's home to a handful of small island nations.

Lazlo begins the story as a Knight of Gaien, on the island of Razril.

 

The story revolves around the Rune of Punishment, one of the "27 True Runes" seen throughout the Suikoden series. The Rune of Punishment has the potential for devastating mass destruction, however it also drains the life force of its bearer. Once the bearer's life energy is fully sapped away, the rune then finds someone else nearby to transfer itself to, making this rune a particularly dangerous artifact.

During the prologue of the story, the True Rune is brought to Razril by pirates, and the circumstances of this event cause Lazlo to become the new bearer of the rune. 

Now Lazlo is being targeted by the Kooluk Empire, as the empire wishes to attain the power of the rune for themselves.

As the story progresses, Lazlo will learn about the true nature of the rune, and will become commander of an army that can hold back and eventually defeat the Kooluk Empire.

So... Immediately as the game begins, we can see some changes to the cutscenes. For starters we have voice acting for the first time. Not every scene is voiced, but the majority of the important ones are, which is good enough. Cutscenes also now use motion-capture animation, which is a nice upgrade. It's interesting to see the series incorporate more modern elements like this as it goes on.

The voice acting is a bit awkward whenever Lazlo is involved, because he is a silent protagonist, so he doesn't respond when other characters address him. And additionally, since Lazlo's name is player-provided, the voice actors can't say his name out loud. This means that the voices don't match the on-screen text in many cases, which is rather distracting. I feel like... if they really wanted to keep the whole silent protagonist thing going, they could have re-written the scenes with it in mind, to reduce the awkward silences as much as possible, you know? But whatever, it's not a big deal.

What is a big deal is just how many loading screens there are mid-cutscene. It's a very frequent thing to a see a cutscene that has been chopped into many parts, with a few seconds of loading in between. Having so many fadeouts to black in one scene can really kill the cinematic flow, and can make me lose focus on the story. It's especially annoying when it fades out to load a two-second establishing shot of a outside of an enemy ship, then immediately does another fadeout to load the dialogue scene inside. :/ I don't know how the technical side of things works, but I have definitely played PlayStation 2 RPGs that don't have this issue, including Suikoden III, so I'm sure there must have been some way they could have managed things better. 

...Oh well, no matter. The story is still nice, even if the presentation is a little wonky.

Overall, I did enjoy the story of the game. In particular, I thought that Lazlo's friend Snowe goes through a rather interesting character arc.

Graphically, the game is a bit on the drab side, I must say. The town environments are not very detailed - Razril is mostly grey walls, and it looks rather unappealing. Some of the more natural environments can look pretty nice though - I did like the Deserted Island's tropical vibe quite a lot.

Some of the character animations are very weird-looking, most notably with Lazlo's running animation, as that's the one you're going to be seeing the most. Lazlo's running looks really ridiculous, because it's just his regular sprinting animation sped up. It's... bad. 

I also thought a lot of the character animations during cutscenes looked weird, especially with Chiepoo, who is Lazlo's cat-kobold friend. He goes around with an awkward hunch-backed posture that I really don't understand. 

We do have full control of the camera for the first time now. We even have a first-person view, which is cute but not really useful anywhere. It lets you get a closer look at all the low-detail environmental textures i suppose lol.

There's an option in the menu that allows you to toggle between being able to walk in first-person, or... not being able to walk in first-person. I have no idea why this toggle exists. If you didn't want to walk during first-person, couldn't you just... not walk? Why do you need to make an option that disables the ability to?

Annoyingly, the camera controls get flipped whenever you switch between first and third person views. Why would they design it this way? It's just confusing for no reason. 

This isn't the sort of game where the first-person view is important by any means. This isn't Legend of Zelda, there are no collectibles hiding on the ceilings or anything. So for the most part, I can completely ignore this aspect of the game. Thankfully the game's regular third-person view works fine, but I do often feel like it is a little bit too zoomed-in at times, especially when walking around corners. Overall, controlling the character and the camera feels very unrefined, which is rather typical of PlayStation 2 games from this era, so it's not unexpected. But it is yet another issue that the previous games didn't have.

Bleh. That's enough complaining about the visuals and controls and things. Let's talk about some gameplay stuff.

The most impactful gameplay change Suikoden IV makes is how we now have unlimited inventory. You can hold 99 of every item. No more storage warehouse, no more running out of room. I'm always a bit of an item hoarder whenever I play RPGs, so this is a good change for me and my playstyle. Though I do have to wonder how it affects the difficulty balance, since you no longer have to make choices about what to carry around. But regardless, I definitely prefer it this way. It's a lot less stressful for me, and it makes me enjoy collecting items more. A good change!

So, the three previous Suikoden games have had battle parties made up of six characters (though Suikoden III was a little unusual with the pair-up system). Suikoden IV decides to reduce the number to four. And in addition to this, it also simplifies combat in many other ways too. 

You don't have to worry about positioning, or range, or rows, or any of that any more - you just have four characters on your side, and they can hit and be hit by anyone on the opposing side. Additionally, you no longer need to equip healing items to characters, you can now easily use them from the main inventory. Couple this with the unlimited inventory, and you have very easy access to healing during fights now.

All of the changes that Suikoden III made to the combat have been reverted, so we now have the much simpler style from the first two games, minus the rows system. We still have the regular attacks, rune spells with limited charges based on your level, combo moves involving specific characters, and the ability to auto-attack for one turn. It's all here. We also additionally have a new move, "Rush". After every fight, a yellow gauge builds up at the bottom of the screen, and when it's full, you gain access to a Rush, which is a free turn of decent damage to all enemies, plus a heal for Lazlo. It's a nice option to get a free heal in, since Lazlo's Rune of Punishment spells have a drawback of costing HP to use, so he'll naturally need healing more than the others. It's a nice addition that adds a little more strategy. 

I will say, it is a little disappointing to go from a party of six to four. I'm not entirely sure why it was necessary to change it, but to be honest, the game is so incredibly easy that it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Suikoden IV might be the easiest game in the series, and I already thought the first game was pretty easygoing as far as classic RPGs go. I suppose they made it four, because having six in the team would have made the easiest game even easier...? ...but is that not a problem they could have solved with better enemy design?

To be honest, I don't really know why we have four instead of six now. Nothing in the game design necessitates the change, so the only thing I can think of is that maybe they wanted to simplify the game to appeal to more casual RPG fans. Who knows.

Combo attacks are still present, however they now have to be unlocked, which is really annoying. You unlock them by having the required characters in your team, and winning around 15 encounters with them. I think this is a really unnecessary system. It's way too much prerequisite grinding for what is in most cases a very under-powered attack. This change also doesn't really mesh well with the reduced party size, as with only four, there's much less opportunity for your team to have the correct characters that can learn the combo. 

The combo moves in this game are just not worth it, because most of them are too underpowered, and the opportunity cost is too great. You have to use up two characters' turns to perform a combo, and two characters is half your party now!

So if the cost is so much greater, both to acquire and to perform... I have to wonder why the combo attacks are so weak??

...The previous three games had the "Unbalanced" status that occurred after performing a combo, to prevent you from using the powerful combo moves too much in one fight. The Unbalanced status has been removed in Suikoden IV, so you can spam 'em all you want now, but in return... the combo moves just kinda suck now. What kind of game balance is that?

...Okay, so I'm being a little unfair - the combo moves are useful in that they don't miss, but as a tradeoff, they also can't crit. So there are strategic reasons to use a "weak" combo move over two regular attacks if you're fighting particularly evasive enemies. But outside of this, I don't really see much use for them throughout most of the game.

The only truly useful combo I used quite often was the one involving Lazlo + Kika, because you always have Lazlo in the team, so it will unlock itself naturally if you use Kika at all, and it's a pretty good multi-target move too. 

Most of the other combo moves are honestly just not worth the hassle of grinding to acquire them, nor really worth it to waste two characters' turns to use them. 

This game's world map takes the form of a big ocean, and you travel to different islands via ship. 

The ocean navigation is... honestly not so great. Suikoden IV in general has a big problem with random encounters, in that they are simply much too frequent. Encounters are WAY more frequent than the previous three games.

It's not too problematic when exploring fields or dungeons (though it can still feel like too much), but it is absolutely, definitely an issue when sailing around the ocean. It can feel like... the ship moves two inches, and you get interrupted with an encounter. And afterwards, when you're trying to get your bearings back after the fight, another encounter begins straight away before you've managed to do anything. It gets tiresome really quickly.

It feels to me like the encounters occur based on time spent moving, rather than actual distance travelled. So when you're just turning the ship in place, or you're building momentum and aren't moving fast, you can still trigger encounters even when you haven't really gone anywhere yet.

The way the ship feels to navigate isn't so great either. It moves slowly and makes large turns, and when you come across an island, there is a gigantic invisible boundary around the landmass that causes the ship to automatically swerve wildly away from it.

Early in the game, the ocean also has additional invisible barriers, in order to keep you from travelling too far from the first few islands. I understand why they are there, but it does feel really bad for players who want to explore the ocean at the first opportunity. To spend a long time going in a straight line, dealing with a billion encounters, only to then be forcibly turned around by an invisible barrier back the way they came. Serves me right for trying to engage with the world, I guess.

While on the ocean, you have a sea chart, however it starts off empty, and it only fills in the exact parts of the map your ship has been in. Which means that, as you continue sailing across the ocean, you'll be drawing lines of traversed space on the chart, with no way to fill the whole thing in to make it look neat.

Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 3 both had a similar kind of thing going on with their maps, but those games were kind enough to automatically fill in the entire map for you once you've found every landmark in the area. Suikoden IV is not so lucky - even after having been to every island in the game, the map still ends up looking like an unfinished spaghetti mess of lines. It's rather unsatisfying.

Once you spend enough time with this game, you do learn some tricks to make sailing and navigating the ocean easier.

Pressing L2 gives you different camera perspectives, including an overhead view where north is always up. This is the view that ended up working best for me, as I could spend less time trying to figure out which way I'm facing, and more time actually getting places. And the most useful trick is that you can instantly change which way your ship is facing by opening the sea chart, clicking somewhere, and when you close the sea chart, your boat will now be directly facing the point you clicked on. So now you don't have to worry about wasting time making large turns and getting into encounters mid-turn.

Once I figured all of this out, sailing became a lot better. It turned from "oh god i don't think i will be able to put up with this ship for the whole game" into "ok this is still annoying, but it's manageable now". ...That's an improvement!

Finding the explorable islands within the ocean isn't easy, since you will be constantly interrupted by monsters, and you don't get a whole lot of hints as to where the islands are located. Thankfully, whenever the plot requires you to visit an island, its location will be revealed on the chart, but for all of the optional islands, there's no such help.

One method I found was to constantly save my game. Your save file's name also mentions which location you're in. So if I'm in the open ocean and I save the game, and the save file says "Location: Ship (Near Deserted Island)", then.... wait a moment, the game knows more about where I am than I do! I guess I'll keep looking around, and keep saving. And when my save file no longer says I'm near the island, I'll turn around and try a different direction.

So this whole sailing thing. ...it feels weird that the most useful methods of navigating the sea involve using the save menu to get information, and clicking on the map to instantly turn around. Like... that doesn't really make me feel like I'm on an epic sailing journey, does it? Relying primarily on weird menu interaction, rather than what I can see with my eyes over the horizon, rather than steering the ship myself. It feels bad that I can never get the true "adventure on the high seas, feeling the breeze in my sails over the open ocean" kinda feeling, because I'm constantly being interrupted by encounters, and the least-confusing way of controlling the ship is to use the top-down perspective, so we don't really get to see the horizon that much anyway. It ends up feeling more like a convoluted menu system rather than a large ocean world to explore.

Maybe I'm just spoiled by The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. That game has such a cool and immersive ocean sailing feeling to it. :( Suikoden's sailing doesn't even come close to feeling as epic and adventurous as Wind Waker's does. Playing Suikoden just made me want to play Wind Waker again lol.

But even then, other RPGs with sailing and random encounters have managed to feel great. My favourite example is Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Plenty of encounters on the ocean there, but exploration still feels epic and adventurous, and the encounters don't disrupt this feeling at all. I'm sorry, Suikoden IV, but your sailing feels like a drag to play, and that makes me a little sad. :(

The previous three Suikoden games involved a castle headquarters where your recruited comrades gather, and Suikoden IV has a fun new twist on this idea - In this adventure, our ship is the castle! I really enjoy this, it's fun to take your base of operations with you as you explore the world.

The ship is definitely a nicer home base than Budehuc Castle from the previous game, as it is bigger and nicer to walk around in. It still doesn't have the more dynamic character behaviours seen in Suikoden II, where people would appear in various different locations around the castle, but aside from this, it's a great version of the home base.

Interestingly, once you get the main ship, you have access to a new feature - the ability to create two Ship Parties. You can assign four characters to Ship Party 1, and four characters to Ship Party 2. And whenever you get into a random encounter on the ocean, you have the option to swap your main team out for one of the Ship Parties. This feature is interesting, but ultimately doesn't amount to much. There were a few occasions where I encountered a very tough enemy on the ocean, so the ability to switch over to a different team to use their spells was cool. But the fact that these reserve teams are only available while on the ocean means that the ability to form strategies around this system is very limited. If the entire game let us have three teams of four at all times, that would have definitely made up for the four-member party. But in practice it doesn't really work out that way. Oh well. 

The facilities on the ship have gone back to the annoying Suikoden 1 system of having to constantly swap out team members to equip them. I have no idea why this was reverted. Suikoden II and III allow you to equip and upgrade anyone, regardless of if they're in your team or not, as long as you're using the in-castle facilities. Suikoden IV doesn't seem to remember about this added convenience, so it forces you to keep going to the second belowdecks floor to talk to Desmond to swap your team every time you want to make changes to someone's equipment. Very annoying.

This game's version of the tactics system is "Naval Battles". It's again played on a tactics grid of squares like in Suikoden II, however it plays rather differently. You only have a few ships on each side, and the main goal is to position your ships so that your rune cannons can hit them. If both you and the enemy ship are within cannon range, then you will both fire at the same time, and the winner is determined by a "rock paper scissors" of which element your cannon shot was. You can see your opponent's available elements before they fire, so winning is just a matter of making sure your ship's element counters the opponent's, which you set up before the battle begins.

Additionally, if you position your ship right next to your opponent's ship, you can select the option to "board ship", which will start a regular combat scene, and you can immediately defeat the opponent ship just by winning the encounter.

On the whole, these naval battles are extremely extremely easy. You only have a small number of enemies to deal with, and the fact that they can be defeated by boarding them to start a regular battle means that you don't really need to engage with the rune cannon system if you don't feel like it. You can just power up your combat team and win via brute force.

On the other hand, once you get access to powerful mage characters like Jeane, Konrad, or Warlock, then suddenly your rune cannons can deal ridiculous damage to the opponent ships, so you can defeat them before they even get an opportunity to hit you at all.

Unlike the previous two games' tactics battles, everything is played completely straight. There are never any new developments mid-battle. The opponent never brings in reinforcements, the goal never changes partway through, and there are no dialogue scenes mid-fight. I think I might prefer this to be honest, it was always a little bewildering in Suikoden II, where it often felt like watching the story scenes was more important than actually moving your units correctly. 

Just like the previous games, it is possible for your characters to permanently die during naval battles, however they were all so incredibly easy that I was never in danger of that happening at any point.

...Okay, so, in my previous post about Suikoden II, I lamented about how wasted the tactics battle system ultimately felt, as there was no way to initiate one on your own terms, right? I suggested that there should have been some kind of repeatable practice battle available in your home base so you could mess with that system to your heart's content.

Well, as it turns out... Suikoden IV had actually already implemented this exact suggestion!! If you talk to Elenor the tactician, she will offer you five practice naval battles, for you to play as often as you like. How nice! It would have been better if she gave you any sort of reward for completing them, but just having the option itself is a good thing, even if playing them accomplishes nothing. 

Just like the other Suikoden games, there is a focus on recruiting the 108 Stars of Destiny into your crew aboard the ship. It is fun to sail around the islands finding them, and thankfully our lovely teleportatrix Viki is back, and this time she's found much earlier in the story compared to Suikoden III. Viki allows us to fast-travel between islands and back to the ship whenever we want, which certainly helps alleviate a lot of the tedium of the sea travel, and makes searching for the Stars of Destiny much more comfortable.

The characters in this game are all very full of personality and individual quirkiness, which is a great thing to see. I enjoy how their personalities are expanded upon with all the funny comments they leave in the "comment box" on the ship, or when they're in the bathhouse together, as well as through other miscellaneous interactions.

As normal, the Stars of Destiny will either become playable fighters, or open up a shop or facility aboard the ship. Of the 108 Stars, 56 of them are playable fighters. And as a returning feature from Suikoden III, some non-combat characters can also join the party as a support unit that provides a small additional buff. One of the very few Suikoden III additions that actually carried over.

There were a few Stars of Destiny that felt really rather redundant. For example, there are five mermaid sisters, and after recruiting the first one, she opens up a jewelry shop. That's fine, but when you rescue the four other mermaids, they appear alongside each other in the same shop, offering the exact same service. What's up with that? Why are there five of them that do the same thing?

If I was designing this part of the game, I would have made it so that each new mermaid you recruit would add new items to the shop's stock, with some cool ultimate item becoming available after gathering all five. Or something like that. I dunno, I just feel like every Star should be meaningful in some way.

A couple of the Stars of Destiny had unclear recruitment methods. Cedric comes to mind - you're supposed to chase him from the inn to the bar, and at the bar he will hide behind Louise the barkeep, and then the two of them will have a short dialogue, and Cedric will then join the team. Simple enough. Except, I just so happened to have Louise in my team, which meant that she wasn't at the bar, and thus the scene couldn't play. So Cedric runs from the inn, goes to the bar, and then disappears. and that's it. Cedric is reset to being at the inn again, and I can keep making him run to the bar as many times as I like, but it's the same thing every time. And I'm left entirely confused about what's supposed to happen, until I read an online guide and take Louise off my team. Then it works.

Little annoyances and confusing things like this make the game feel like it wasn't playtested enough. :(

I do enjoy collecting the Stars of Destiny as always, it's fun to find them, and collecting all of them does apparently give a few bonuses in the sequel, Suikoden Tactics, which I'm looking forward to finding out about when I play it next.

Unlike the previous two games, there is no detective to help locate Stars of Destiny, but there is a fortune teller who will give hints to their locations. Annoyingly, for some reason when I had just a few left, the fortune teller stopped giving me hints. I had to find the last three Stars - Millay, Maxine, and the special 108th member - using help from an online guide.

Some of the Stars are missable, which is annoying, but thankfully I was playing thoroughly enough that I did not miss any.

Speaking of missable things, though, this game does include a few missable items. For no reason other than to just be annoying, I guess? The most egregious example is Old Book Vol 4, which is found in a chest on the other side of a wall you can't reach, no matter how hard you try. There is only one tiny point in the entire story where the heroes are briefly taken past this wall, and only during this extremely tiny window of opportunity can you grab the book.

My question is. ... why?  In my opinion, missable items should at least have some meaning behind them being missable, such as in games where towns get destroyed, or characters have to leave, or other circumstances drastically change, or anything like that. But this example is just them making something missable on purpose, for an extremely mundane reason, just because they felt like it. Is this something developers find fun? Players sure find it annoying.

The most annoying missable, though (at least, from a game design perspective), is monster horns, which are a regular ingredient for crafting. When you've reached the endgame, and have the whole world available to you, you'd think that would be a good time to grind for materials to make what you want to make, right? Well, not quite, because there exists only one enemy in the game that drops horns, and that enemy gets replaced with other enemies later in the story, making them impossible to acquire after this point. This is annoying because, no matter how thorough a player is while playing, there is no way to anticipate that this one specific crafting ingredient is going to become unavailable later on. ... Even if it's not really such a big deal in the grand scheme of things, it feels like extremely careless game design nonetheless. I feel like game developers shouldn't strive to create a game that unnecessarily antagonises their players who are actually trying to engage with all of the gameplay systems.

Anyway. I suppose this would be a good time to talk about the environment design. 

Overall, I found the environments in this game to be fairly lacking. The towns have very few additional locations that aren't part of the critical path, and it can make the world feel very artificial. For example, in the knights' quarters in Razril, there are three rooms - Lazlo's bedroom, the kitchen, and the commander's room. And that's it. And these rooms exist because, as part of the story, Lazlo delivers food from the kitchen to the commander, and then needs to get some rest for the next day. ... So, because that's all that happens here, those three are the only rooms they felt needed to be there. 

It's very peculiar to have a knight's quarters that only has three specific rooms in it like this, with no barracks, or mess hall, or armoury, or anything else that would make the location feel fully-realised. Just compare it to Brass Castle from Suikoden III, and you'll see how empty it looks in comparison. I mean, Brass Castle isn't a masterpiece of environmental design or anything, but it still has everything it needs to feel real within the context of the game. Razril just.... doesn't have enough there.

The most disappointing location is with the Elves' Village on Na-Nal Island - mostly because they didn't bother to make one! As part of the story, the heroes strike a deal with the chief of Na-Nal where they plan to steal the Elven Elixir from the Great Tree. When you explore the tree, you can see that the only things that exist are the altar with the Elixir sitting on top of it, and off to the side is a single prison cell. And that's it. No elven homes, no elven community, no anything. And this is annoying because, when you notice that literally the only thing in this tree is a prison, you can kinda see where the story is gonna go once you steal that elixir, can't you? It's like the game is spoiling its own plot points through the sheer power of poor environment design.

I loved the adorable little Alma-Kinan village from Suikoden III, and when I saw that there was allegedly an elf settlement in this game, I was kind of hoping to see another cute forest village like that in this game too. So it was certainly a let-down when I saw it was just a single room and nothing more.

Additionally, there is another peculiar problem with the environments in this game - and that is the fact that there are enemy encounters within towns! In Na-Nal, right outside the Chief's residence, there are random encounters with Kooluk soldiers. It feels so tonally dissonant... one moment you're chatting with the friendly guard outside the chief's manor, and next thing you know, you're attacking three enemy soldiers. And then after the encounter you're back to standing right next to the guard, and everything's hunky-dory. ... I know that enemy encounters in RPGs are an abstraction, but in this case, it just doesn't make enough logical sense for me to overlook.

This also happens in Mordo Island, which is supposed to be some kind of resort with a spa and a trading shop, but all along the boardwalks, in between the merchant NPCs, you can get attacked by monsters and thrown into encounters. It just feels wrong.

There aren't really very many dungeon areas in the game - there's around 3 or so dungeons in the game, one of which is optional. So I suppose they were really struggling to find locations to include all of the non-ocean encounters. But I feel like they really could have handled it in a way that doesn't feel so weird.

So, every Suikoden game has minigames to play. And it might be surprising to hear that I think Suikoden IV has some of the nicest minigames I've seen in the series. It certainly has the largest number of minigames, at the very least.

Noah's card game, and Rita's "Ritapon" game in particular are the two most interesting and strategic minigames here, and I found myself genuinely getting into the strategy of them, haha.

Additionally, we have the absolutely ridiculous mouse-catching game, where you need to shimmy around on a slippery floor chasing after mice, which is frustrating, but surprisingly satisfying in a way too. I dunno. It was a nice diversion.

I didn't want to play more mouse-catching than necessary, but I did play a decent amount of Noah and Rita's games just because they were engaging on their own merits.

We also have a weird top-spinning game that isn't very good, and a couple of gambling games as per Suikoden tradition.

Also, the fishing minigame from Suikoden II is back again! I hated all of Suikoden II's minigames, but thankfully they toned down the button-mashing... but it can still be overly-difficult to succeed. 

In addition to the rod-fishing minigames, we now have a new net fishing system. You cast down the net, then go into the ocean overworld and wait around for a bit. (6 mins or so is enough). And then you pull the net up to receive goodies. You mostly get junk, but occasionally you get a unique collectible. It's very annoyingly random, and it will take a lot of attempts to get the rarer items. It's honestly not really worth the time, but I did want to collect everything I reasonably could, so I did try net fishing a lot anyway, even if it was overly-tedious. They really did not need to make the unique items as rare as they did.

...

So,  despite all of this complaining I've been doing throughout this entire post, I don't actually think Suikoden IV is a bad game at all. The RPG mechanics are still fun and satisfying, and the characters are nice and full of personality, and it's always a good time exploring and finding new Stars of Destiny to recruit. Battles are easy, but breezy, and it's satisfying to find new islands, collect all the items, upgrade your weapons, and all that good RPG adventuring stuff. I definitely enjoyed my time with the game.

But.... you know, even after all of this, I still haven't actually touched upon the game's biggest flaw.

And that flaw is.... the game is just too dang short! It's ridiculously short! It's disastrously short!

Seriously. The story progression has very few state changes. You get kicked out of Razril, you arrive in Obel and get the ship, Kooluk invades all the island nations, you take back all the nations with your shiny new army, and then it's already the final encounter at the Kooluk fortress. That's IT. That's the ENTIRE game progression right there!

All of the surrounding Suikoden gameplay mechanics are here, and just like in the previous games, they're really good, and they would do well in supporting a longer story just fine. But this game's story is so short that it makes the majority of the progression mechanics feel a bit meaningless. 

Going through the whole rigamarole of upgrading everyone's weapons, crafting everyone the best gear, finding all the collectibles, earning all the minigame prizes, and all that stuff. ... It's all great RPG stuff as you would expect, and it IS intrinsically satisfying to do, but... normally in a game with all this stuff, there is the overarching goal of gradually preparing yourself for the endgame challenges by accumulating resources and power over the course of the adventure.

But in Suikoden IV.... you really don't NEED to engage in pretty much any of the supporting mechanics at all, because the game is already over before you know it.

...

So for example. ...

There are 30 treasure charts to find. I got them all and dug up all the goodies, 'cause I sure do like collecting things. ...But did I actually end up making use of any of the goodies? Well, not really. There were some nice high-level runes among the loot, but... I didn't actually end up finding someone to equip them on, as I was already using a strong endgame team by this point.

You can catch lots of fish with the net, and after recruiting the chefs, we can cook large quantities of healing items. But did I actually end up using a single one of these? Well, not really - the regular healing herbs you find naturally were absolutely sufficient to get through the entire game with, and there was never a time where I was in a long dungeon desperate for healing. In fact, there does not exist a "long dungeon" in the game at all. So why am I able to prepare so much healing food as if there was such a thing?

I literally learned about a new gameplay mechanic during the final dungeon - apparently it's possible for two characters to combine their highest-level rune spells into one super-powered spell - completely separately from the standard Combo moves. Why did I learn about it so late? Well, that's because I never really had any opportunity to use characters with high-level magic until I was already pretty much done with the game.

You can upgrade your ship's rune cannons and mobility for use in naval battles by finding Ocean Rune Pieces. But they are much too rare to actually make any difference at all - It takes 5 ocean rune pieces to upgrade your shooting distance... but throughout the game, you'll naturally come across... maybe 2 or 3 Ocean Rune Pieces? ... The entire game just went by, and I was never given an opportunity to interact with this entire game mechanic. That's how dire this is. 

...And the naval battles are so easy, that intentionally and specifically grinding for more Ocean Rune Pieces to actually upgrade this stuff doesn't even make a practical difference.

All of the above points, in addition to the other systems in this game that are built around gradual progression like this - such as it taking 15 fights to unlock one combo move, or needing to collect lots of materials from enemy drops to craft the unique armour sets..... ... None of them make any sense to exist the way they do in a game that is this short and simple and easy. 

It really feels like every supporting system in this game was designed and built with a much larger story campaign in mind. It feels like the story could have gone on for double or even triple its current length, and everything surrounding it would have fit together much more neatly.

So all of the supporting systems are still there for the player to try and use. But for a game as short as this, it'll only be for the intrinsic satisfaction of completion for its own sake, and not for any actual gameplay benefit at all.

Thankfully I am someone who enjoys completion for completion's sake, but it can't be denied that there is a huge problem here.

I have no problem with short RPGs. You better believe I love the old Ys games. But this is a short RPG that thinks of itself as a long RPG. And that's what's causing this disparity within the game's systems and features.

And this brings me to my final huge complaint I have with the game.

New Game Plus.

So. This is a momentous occasion for the Suikoden series - it's the first game to include a New Game Plus feature! Wow! Now all of these long-running completion projects can maybe be carried out across multiple playthroughs, right? It would at least make it all make a little more sense. But. .... nope. Nope nope nope. That's not how it works here. 

New Game Plus allows you to keep your inventory and your gold. It doesn't let you keep unique items, which is annoying, but whatever... but even more annoyingly, you also don't get to keep any of the items your characters were equipping. So if you want to make use of New Game Plus, you have to manually unequip everything from all 56 of your party members, BEFORE heading into the final boss. They really didn't feel like making this simple for us, huh?

But that's not the main problem. The actual big issue with New Game Plus is how basically nothing else is carried over. Upgrading your weapon at the smithy is extremely expensive, but it's worth it because your character will be stronger forever right? Well, turns out, if you plan on using New Game Plus, you just wasted all of that money, because gold transfers over, but weapon levels don't. 

And what about the other kinds of character-growth progression, such as from using the stat-boosting stones, or smithing rune shards, or even just regular EXP? Nope. If you used any stat stones, you wasted them. You should have just kept them in your inventory the whole time if you wanted them to transfer over. How foolish of you. 

How about all the optional collectibles, such as all that stuff you have to get via net fishing that's so random and takes so long to get? Nope. None of that carries over either. If you want that stuff again, you gotta do all the net fishing again. And all other minigame prizes are reset too. Gotta do rat-catching and top-spinning all over again. ...

How about all that extraneous grinding we did to learn Combo moves, and all that item farming to get enough overly-rare Ocean Rune Pieces for the ship upgrades? NOPE. ALLLL GONE! 

....so what exactly is the point of including so many systems that take entirely too long to become relevant during a single playthrough, and then RESETTING their progress when a New Game Plus begins??? Isn't this exactly the sort of stuff that New Game Plus is supposed to keep??? so you can gradually accumulate progress across multiple playthroughs? no? am i the crazy one here? what even is game design anyway?

New Game Plus might as well not exist at this rate, right? Well, New Game Plus DOES have two interesting benefits. One: You can now skip all cutscenes. And two: you can decide to swap Lazlo out of the team if you want.

...which is cool, but. ...i kind of just wish these were options by default? I kind of hate that cutscene skipping is programmed into the game, but the game doesn't feel like you deserve such a convenience until you're already finished with it. Very cool, game, I'm so glad you're such a good judge of what I want from you. :/

And swapping out Lazlo... I guess that's fine to lock behind New Game Plus, but it would have been nicer if there was a way to unlock it regularly too. Maybe from a lategame sidequest or something.

Bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh.

I spent most of this complaining about the game. But I do want to say, I had a fun time playing this game.

I am very glad I played this game. It was very interesting, and I loved seeing how the Suikoden series changes as it continues.

Make no mistake, I do NOT dislike this game. It's a fun time, and I liked my time with it a lot.

But I will absolutely point out every flaw it has, because it is a very very very flawed game.

....so anyway. this game has a sequel. Suikoden Tactics. I'm looking forward to playing it next. :)