I played Suikoden Tactics.
This is a PlayStation 2 game released in 2005.
Oddly enough, this game is just titled "Rhapsodia" in Japan, with no mention of Suikoden in the title.
...Apparently, the word "tactics" brings to mind an idea of intense, difficult strategy in Japanese, so they did not want to use it in the Japanese title to avoid giving the wrong impression. Though I still don't understand why it isn't something like "Genso Suikoden Rhapsodia" to keep its association with the rest of the series. I don't even know what "Rhapsodia" means or refers to. There's nothing in the game with that name. ...
but anyway. ...
Suikoden Tactics is a follow-up to Suikoden IV, taking place a few years after the end of the previous story.
Unlike most other Suikoden games, the main character is not a silent protagonist, and is not named by the player. The main character here is Kyril, a boy who sets off on a journey to uncover the truth behind the mysterious "evil eyes", a type of demonic weapon that is being used to turn people into twisted fish-like monsters.
During the course of the story, Kyril will travel across the Island Nations and into the heart of the Kooluk Empire in his search, meeting many familiar characters from Suikoden IV along the way.
As a sequel to Suikoden IV, this game has a save data bonus available for players with Suikoden IV save data on their PlayStation 2 memory card. If their Suikoden IV save data has all 108 Stars of Destiny, then two additional characters become available to use in Suikoden Tactics - and they are the main protagonist of IV (who I named Lazlo), and Lazlo's friend Snowe.
Lazlo is a very strong character in Suikoden Tactics, having access to his incredibly powerful Rune of Punishment spells. Despite making things a lot easier, it actually does make the game more fun to be able to use him, so I think this is a very nicely-done bonus feature.
Suikoden Tactics is a tactical RPG where battles play out on a grid-based map, using a team of units that the player must position on the grid in order to attack opposing units.
The game is a typical tactics RPG style game, played on a square grid, with enemy units versus player units. The units in this game represent individual characters. So, unlike in the tactics battles from Suikoden II, where one unit represented a leader with a battalion of unnamed soldiers... in this game, one unit is just a single, unique, named character - much like in Fire Emblem. I definitely prefer it this way.
In typical tactics RPG fashion, you can move your units a certain number of tiles based on their "Move" stat, and if you position yourself within range of an enemy unit, you can attack them to deal damage.
Turn order in this game uses a timeline system, based on the Speed stat of each unit on the map. Having higher speed means a unit will have their turns earlier and more frequently.
Each character has similar stats as seen in the main Suikoden series, including the ability to upgrade weapon strength at the blacksmith, and the ability to equip rune orbs for magic. Magic works the same way, too - with a list of limited-use spells that increases based on level. And just like in the main Suikoden series, there are also no distinct character classes outside of what kind of weapon each character uses.
The skill system first seen in Suikoden III returns! After every battle you earn Skill Points, and can spend them on your units to add various attributes to them. Attributes such as a chance to dodge, a chance to parry, a chance to counterattack, stronger spells of a certain element, doing multiple attacks in one move... and also other things such as the ability to move, attack, and then move again on the same turn if you have any unused movement left (like how horses work in Fire Emblem. :D ). Unlike in Suikoden III, the skill points are a partywide resource, rather than earned on a per-character basis, which gives you a lot of flexibility with choosing who you want to power up. I actually think the skill point system works better here than it did back in Suikoden III. It feels like learning new skills really does make a difference, whereas in III the skills had a more subtle effect.
Additionally, specific characters can also team up and perform co-op attacks. In order to unlock co-op attacks, you need to position the compatible characters next to each other often enough during battles, and eventually a "talk" option will become available between them. When two units talk, they will increase "good will", which means that they will occasionally defend each other from incoming attacks. And after attaining enough good will, they will then learn co-op attacks.
Co-op attacks require the two units to be positioned in a very specific way, but they are usually extremely powerful. They also have a cooldown, so you cannot keep using them over and over. Choosing which units to bring to a battle is often a matter of seeing which pairs have the most useful co-op attacks, which is something I really like - anything that gives individual characters more unique traits is a good thing.
Overall, I think they did a great job at making this game still "feel like Suikoden" despite the change in gameplay genre. The blacksmith, rune orbs, skill points, and co-op attacks, plus of course the ability to find and recruit lots of new characters... all of these Suikoden-specific mechanics work well in making the game feel like a proper Suikoden game, despite it not being a standard JRPG like the others.
That being said, the one major element that binds all Suikoden games together - the 108 Stars of Destiny - is completely absent from this game. There are around 60 or so recruitable characters in this game, and that's your lot. There is no mention of any Stars of Destiny, and the overseer Leknaat who usually appears before the hero to tell them about the Stars does not make an appearance in this game at all. I guess it's fine since this is a side story.
Speaking of the story, though. ... I felt like the story in this game was pretty weak. A large portion of the game is just Kyril going around the various island nations, investigating rune cannons. Not a lot really happens to move the narrative along until quite near the end of the game when the Kooluk Princess and her family start showing up. This is definitely a game to play for its gameplay and not its narrative. Though the story does resolve in a nice way at the end.
...
The main unique gameplay system in Suikoden Tactics is the elemental ground system. And I feel like this system is at the heart of the tactics in this game.
Each character has an innate elemental affinity of either Fire, Water, Lightning, Wind, or Earth. Their element grants them one elemental strength and one elemental weakness. Kyril has a Fire affinity, so he will be powered-up and will heal HP if he is standing on a fire tile, and weakened and take damage if he is standing on a water tile. And these are not subtle changes in power either, they really do affect you significantly.
Elemental tiles are created whenever magic is used. There are low-level spells just for the purpose of making an elemental tile, but also the higher-level damaging spells will create elemental tiles as a side-effect too. And large area-of-effect spells such as Explosion will create elemental tiles within the entire affected area. Additionally, each battle contains a couple of elemental wisp enemies that don't attack, but instead just spread their element around as they flit about.
Making sure that your characters have the ability to create their element where they or their allies need to be standing is a crucial part of the strategy, as is forcing enemy units to stand in their weak elements. This is where team composition is important too - pairing together lots of characters of the same element can make it easier, since they can all share the same patch of tiles, but then you have less versatility for when the enemy starts creating their own tiles and overwriting yours.
It's also interesting that the healing spells, Healing Wind and Kindness Rain, will create a wind tile or a water tile on whoever they heal. Sometimes this can be a good thing, sometimes not. Sometimes getting healed but standing on a bad tile is a compromise that's worth it. And there are all sorts of interesting tradeoffs and risk-vs-reward decisions like this that arise due to this system. It's actually really cool and unique.
I also appreciate that the game is good at giving reminders. Whenever you are about to force a unit to step on a bad tile, a little speech bubble will appear above them, with a sad face icon. And likewise, if they're on a good tile, the bubble will show the happy face icon. I also like how if you're about to accidentally include an ally in a damaging area-of-affect spell, there's a little "hey, what gives?!" speech bubble for that too, giving you a chance to cancel the spell and aim it better. It's a really good way of making sure that a player is making informed tactical decisions, and that any self-damage the player inflicts upon themselves is done intentionally.
This game also has another really cool feature in that you can swap-out an active unit for a benched unit whenever you like. I think this is really really cool, as it allows for so much more strategic use of your entire team, and not just the ones you've decided to focus on levelling up.
For example, if you have a powerful unit with a slow speed stat, you can make the decision to not put them in the team at first, and instead bring a weaker unit with high speed... and when it's their turn, switch to the slow unit so that they can get a turn earlier than they would have if you had just brought them from the start. Or maybe mid-battle, the enemy ends up creating a large amount of fire tiles, so you have the option to bring out a mage with a "damage all units on fire tiles" spell, who you otherwise wouldn't have known to bring before the battle started. There are all kinds of strategic decisions that come up mid-battle that can't be predicted beforehand, where switching to one of your reserve units is the perfect play. It's so good to have this option. :D This is something I wish Fire Emblem had!
There is a limitation that, if a unit is swapped out, you cannot bring them back into the same fight again, which prevents the system from being completely overpowered. It's a good limitation for game balance.
Throughout the game, you may acquire a few Kangacorns (kangaroo beasts) and Giant Owls, which a portion of your characters are capable of riding. Kangacorns increase movement range considerably, but lower evasion and prevent use of special techniques. Giant Owls allow you to fly over uneven terrain, but you ignore the effects of elemental tiles. Mounts can be mounted and dismounted on a unit's turn at will. It's another option that allows for some interesting flexibility during battles, and I also like how it interacts with the elemental tile system too. It's a good thing when the game mechanics come together so nicely like this.
Oh, and one other mechanic that I found really interesting was how, upon gaining a level-up, a unit's HP is fully restored and all spells become usable again. It's really interesting to me, because it turns gaining EXP into an actual strategic choice. If you've run out of spells, why not attack a nearby elemental wisp and hopefully level up, to get your spells back? Or if you're about to die, why not try going toward the enemy, to attack them and get a level-up instead of fleeing? It gives you some interesting on-the-fly decisions to make, which I really like.
...
In this game, when your unit's HP reaches zero, they can either die or withdraw. If a unit withdraws, that's fine - you'll just have one fewer unit on the field for the remainder of the battle, but otherwise everything's okay. But if they die, then they are permanently gone for good. Some "important" units such as Kyril are immune to dying and will always withdraw, but for the most part, whenever a unit dies or withdraws is just completely down to luck. It can feel really tense when an enemy gets a lucky critical hit on one of your guys, and you are just HOPING that they withdraw instead of die, so that you don't have to restart the battle from the beginning. (because I'm not willing to continue playing if one of my guys dies)
...This is certainly a much more forgiving of a system than in Fire Emblem. In Fire Emblem, any unit that gets killed is dead, end of story. If a plot-critical character is killed, then they will be "wounded" for the rest of the game, so they're still forever unavailable to use, but are still able to appear in the cutscenes that need them. And if the main character dies, it's an immediate game over.
Honestly... as harsh is it is, I actually do prefer Fire Emblem's system. Whenever a character in Suikoden withdraws instead of dies, it just feels like the game is letting me get away with having poor strategy. It's a relief in the moment because it means I don't have to restart the battle, but in general, I think it's a bit of a wishy-washy way of handling it. I really do prefer the clear-cut rules of Fire Emblem.
...And actually, that brings me to another point regarding the way battles pan out, and yeah, I'm going to be doing some more comparisons to Fire Emblem, because I just love Fire Emblem so much...
In Suikoden Tactics, whenever you select an enemy to attack, it does give you a preview of how much damage you will deal and receive, just like in Fire Emblem. But unlike in Fire Emblem, these numbers are not precise. There is still some variance to it, which means that you can't fully 100% trust the game when it says that you will do enough damage to get the kill. If the preview says you'll do just barely enough damage, there is a chance you will get a low damage roll and the enemy will be left alive.
...I guess this is okay, I don't mind there being a bit of luck to make things a little unpredictable, but I will say I do prefer the more precise style of Fire Emblem. Especially since this can be the difference between life and death for your units who can permanently die. I'm more okay with the fuzzy numbers in games like Shining Force, where a dead unit can just be revived in town. But in a game with permanent death, I'm decidedly less okay with the added uncertainty.
But what is a bit more annoying is how I can never seem to figure out how dangerous a particular enemy is from afar. The battle preview window only shows me an enemy's damage if I'm within damage range and if they have the ability to counterattack. Otherwise I kind of just have to "feel it out", and if I get it wrong and someone dies, that's a reset.
I suppose it should be possible to look at an enemy's Attack stat to figure out how much damage they're gonna do to my units, but every time I tried this, I could never end up with an accurate number. ...in Fire Emblem, if you take an enemy's Attack, and subtract your unit's Defense, you will get the EXACT number of HP they will deal, before modifiers. ...So even if I can't reach the enemy to bring up the damage preview, I can still calculate from afar how dangerous they are. But in Suikoden, any attempt to do this didn't seem to work the way I was expecting. ... Maybe I just don't have enough knowledge about how the game calculates damage, and it would be perfectly possible to calculate it if I knew all of the variables. But again, I really do appreciate how precise and simple Fire Emblem is in comparison.
What I didn't appreciate at all is how enemy attack range is not shown to the player. The game shows you enemy move range, which is fine - if an enemy has a sword, then you can tell that their attack range is their move range plus 1 - or if they have a bow, you can surmise that their attack range is their move range plus 2. Which is all well and good. But when it comes to certain long-range attacks, the game kind of just... doesn't tell you? You again kind of just have to feel it out. But when "feeling it out" means stepping too close and taking a cannon to the face, it does start to feel a bit unfair.
This is especially a problem with the Golem enemies, who have a very strong long-range projectile attack, which the game makes no effort to inform us of whether we are in range or not. The game doesn't even tell you that the golems even have a long-range cannon attack in the first place. I'd've assumed that a big hunk of stone would be a close-range attacker only.
...How can I make informed tactical decisions if the game isn't even showing me all of the relevant information?
But anyway. Overall it's not really a big deal. Even if I personally prefer the way Fire Emblem handles the stats and numbers and damage calculations and all that, I'm not going to say Suikoden does it "wrong" or anything. It's still a fun tactics game, and once I got into its way of doing things, I was having a good time with the battles.
...
The way the game is structured, you have the story-critical battles that progress the game, but in between them you can return to previous areas and have additional battles whenever you feel like it. This means that EXP is not a limited resource, and you can grind your guys' levels to your heart's content. For this sort of game where you get tons of characters, this is a good thing. It's always a bit annoying in the older Fire Emblem games that you get so many characters but no opportunities to actually train them.
Travelling across the world map will take the party several "days", which is represented by a calendar number going up as you travel. But it doesn't really seem like spending days has much of an impact on anything. There aren't any things that become locked if you arrive too late or anything. Nothing like that time-limited Clive quest from Suikoden II...
Each day of the week has an associated element, but I'm not sure if the element has much meaning to it. At first I thought it might be like Trials of Mana where the element-of-the-day gets a boost during battles, but I didn't really notice any kind of effect like that at all. I also think it feels weird just how many days go by in a flash. It begins to feel a bit unrealistic that so much time can pass between plot points. Travelling from one end of the map to the other can make the calendar skip over 10+ days or more, and if you're someone who likes to do sidequests, you'll be doing this quite often. It just makes me start thinking... if I've already skipped back and forth across this map like twenty times, that's like 200 days spent, right? But this journey doesn't really come across like one that'd take the best part of a year to complete. And none of my characters are aging, none of the towns are changing, and... it just makes me start questioning things about the timeline of events that I'm not sure the game was anticipating the player questioning. ...
...At least it isn't as dire as in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles where one entire year supposedly passes between each level you play. Now THAT's a game that'll make you start wondering why your characters aren't aging.
In the town of Middleport near the start of the game, there is a quest guild where you can complete various side-objectives to get additional money and skill point rewards. Some of the recruitable characters are also found via these quests.
Some of the quests require sending off one of your characters to do the quest for you offscreen. For example, the Razril Knights might post a quest saying "Lance fighters wanted for training!". So you send off one of your lance guys, and then after 30 days, you can return to the quest guild to see how they did. If they were high level enough, the quest is successful and you get your rewards, but if not, then the quest is failed. A failed quest will reappear in the quest list after a few days, so you won't be locked out, which is a good thing. Though there do exist a couple of quests here and there that can be permanently missed.
I like this sort of thing. Anything that utilises the characters' individual traits that can make them useful beyond the main gameplay is a good thing in my eyes.
However, I do have one annoyance regarding the quests... During my playthrough, I was just accepting every quest I saw, but apparently that's not the most beneficial thing to do. The cat merchant Chiepoo has a rival company, "X & Co", and both of them will post quests to the guild hall. X & Co are a sleazy unlawful company, and Chiepoo is an honest merchant, and for every X & Co quest you complete, the worse off Chiepoo's shop will end up. Apparently there are some secret recruitable mercenaries that can only be obtained if you complete every single Chiepoo quest, while ignoring every single X & Co quest. ....... and I have to say, I think this situation isn't communicated to the player very well at all. There is no way to know, especially early on, that X & Co quests should be avoided. There's just nothing that indicates what's going on, and by the time you realise, it's way too late. I think it would have been much better if there was a completely separate quest menu, maybe a "explore the dark back alleys" option where the X & Co quests could be found, instead of them just being presented as regular quests in the guild hall with all the others. Additionally, I think it's strange that the player can visit Chiepoo's shop, but can never actually visit X & Co's shop. It just further obfuscates who they are if you can never actually see them.
It's a fun idea, but I don't like the way it's implemented.
During my playthrough, I recruited every single character except for the mercenaries obtained through the Chiepoo quest. And it was a bit annoying to be locked out of full completion like this.
Alright. Now I want to take a moment to complain about the game's presentation.
The character models in this game have a very flat-coloured style with thick outlines, which to be honest, doesn't look all that amazing. This was done presumably to increase readability of the characters when they are seen from afar during battles. This works well enough, but it sure doesn't make them look good during cutscenes. They could have made the models more detailed for the story scenes and kept the flat simplified models for the battles, but I guess having visual consistency makes sense too.
The cutscenes definitely don't have a lot going on visually though. Scenes usually are just characters standing around talking, with very basic animations. It's not terrible-looking or anything, but seeing such simplified scenes in a game immediately following Suikoden IV, which had larger character models animated with proper motion capture... it does feel like a significant visual downgrade.
During the battles, I did often have issues discerning which characters were mine or the enemy's at a glance. Sometimes I would have a human enemy surrounded by my units, and then completely forget that he was there because he blended in too well with my guys. They could have given enemies a red outline or red circle under them, like how it is in Fire Emblem... or I guess I just need to pay better attention lol.
During battle, the environment is viewed at an awkward skewed angle, which can be slightly adjusted with the right stick, but you don't really have full control over the camera. I personally find it annoying to have to play diagonally like this, I kind of wish there was an option to just view the grid straight-on. You have three levels of zoom, one which is much too close to be useful, and two others that are okay, but I still ended up wishing I could zoom out even further to see the whole field at once. There is a button to bring up a simplified map of squares that shows the position of each unit, which is helpful, but it still would have been nicer to have more control over the camera in the regular view anyway. It just feels a little bit uncomfortable, but it's nothing I can't get used to.
The presentation of the towns, though... this is where things become quite disappointing. Unlike in all previous Suikoden games, there is no real exploration of towns or the world at all. Everything is done through menus. You enter a town, and it just pops up a background illustration showing a town square, and then you get a menu asking which shops you want to go to and which NPCs you want to talk to.
Sometimes you can find additional recruitable characters in the towns, but it feels so artificial "finding" them by just seeing their name pop up in the NPC talk menu.
When it comes to the Island Nation towns, the ones which were featured in Suikoden IV, I can do a good enough job just imagining the town layouts by remembering them from the previous game... but when we get to the later-game areas that were not in Suikoden IV, I only have an illustration to look at, and it makes me feel rather disconnected. (.....kinda reminds me of Sonic Unleashed in a way. The "real" Xbox 360 Sonic Unleashed had the fully-explorable towns, while the more "low-budget" Wii version just had menus instead. ...was Suikoden Tactics a "low-budget" game from Konami, I wonder? ... )
I wonder why they decided to do it this way. I guess it means that they don't have to create a character movement system for controlling Kyril directly? And they don't have to bother designing town layouts for the later areas? Sure, it saves development time, but it makes the world feel less fully-realised. :/ I know that there do exist plenty of games that use simple menus for towns, and it's not automatically a bad game design decision to do it this way... but Suikoden had never done it before. And Suikoden had always put so much emphasis on its worldbuilding, so maybe that's why it's a bit sad to see it here.
Additionally, regarding the NPC dialogue.. For whatever reason, whenever you talk to a generic villager NPC, their dialogue portrait is drawn without any eyes. And not in a cute way, but in a really rather creepy way. I have absolutely no idea why they decided to do this, and I don't like it one bit. It's distracting and doesn't give the correct mood to the dialogue at all. ...Is drawing generic bystanders without their eyes a cultural Japanese thing that I don't understand?
Hmm, what else...
I will say the map variety is rather nice, and I especially like the one town area where the little boats get their own turn on the timeline to move back and forth. That's pretty cute. And I also do enjoy how some of the returning Suikoden IV characters had their special skills translate over to a tactics game - I'm thinking of Rene the treasure hunter, who is able to find hidden items mid-battle. It's a good use of pre-established character traits.
...
...
Anyway. I think I'm running out of things to talk about with this game.
Overall, Suikoden Tactics is a good tactics RPG, but it is nothing too remarkable. I like how it expands the world of Suikoden IV, but at the same time, I wish it put a bit more effort into the story and worldbuilding aspects. The actual tactical gameplay is quite good though.
Next game on the list is Suikoden V. That's another huge one, so I think I'll take a small break from Suikoden before I begin playing it.
