Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

I just played Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.

This is a puzzle-solving, point-and-click kinda game released by Capcom, created by the director of the Ace Attorney series. Released in 2011 on the Nintendo DS and 2023 for modern platforms.

I played the Nintendo DS version. But from what I can tell, the modern versions are exactly the same as the DS original, so there's nothing to worry about here.

2011 is pretty late for a DS game, huh? The Nintendo 3DS came out a couple months after this game's release. Maybe that's why I don't remember hearing much about this game back in the day.



The story of Ghost Trick is a murder-mystery, with the twist that the main character Sissel is a ghost, solving his own murder. And with all of these supernatural shenanigans going on, the case is a lot less straightforward than it first appears.

The game is a puzzle-solving game where you must manipulate objects in order to find a path to solve the scenarios.

As a ghost, Sissel appears as a little blue flaming soul inhabiting an object within the scene. Using the DS touchscreen, you can drag Sissel's soul around a little bit, and if there is another nearby object within reach, you can transfer his soul over to it. This is how you move around the rooms.
Many of the objects Sissel can possess have an action he can perform with his ghost powers - he can turn on fans or lamps, open umbrellas, swing doors, ring bells, pull down curtains, and all sorts of other poltergeistery shenanigans. Manipulating the objects in the room is the key to solving the puzzles.

For example, in order to get something to fall down from a high shelf, Sissel must cause a chandelier on the ceiling to rock back and forth, which just so happens to light on fire the tail of a rat living in the ceiling, who then, in a panic, runs towards the wall clock and clings on to its pendulum, which Sissel must then possess to make the pendulum swing harder than normal, which reaches just far enough for the rat's tail to light the nearby candelabra, which, when angled correctly, can burn the string that holds the shelf up, loosening the shelf and causing the item to fall down.

The puzzles are all very amusingly contrived like this, which is something I always love to see in point-and-click games. It's fun to see what ridiculous sequence of events you must make happen in order to solve each puzzle.

Many of the puzzles involve manipulating the behaviours of the people who are in the room, by startling them with sudden ghostly movements, or making them respond to a strange noise or occurrence. It does involve a lot of trial and error and experimentation to see how the characters respond to every action you can do, and you need to figure out whether their reaction is helpful in any way. For example, in a police station, you can jostle a memo on the noticeboard to make it fall off, which causes the nearby policeman to catch it in mid-air, crumple it up, and throw it into the nearby bin. If Sissel is possessing the memo while this happens, then he's just earned himself a free flight across the room. But not every interaction like this is necessarily useful.

Throughout the story, more murders take place, and this is when Sissel's other ability comes into play, his ability to connect to recently-deceased spirits to travel back in time to the moments just before their death. In these scenarios, you see a short scene play out that shows the moments before the victim's death. You are then are taken back to the start of the scene, and now need to find a way to prevent the death from occurring as the scene plays out in real time. You need to observe how each character moves, which objects in the room they happen to interact with, and how these objects can be used to change the course of events. Maybe you need to startle the culprit before they can take their shot by turning on a spotlight that shines on them, or by making a loud noise elsewhere. These timed puzzles are the highlights of the game for me.

The game is very generous in giving you hints, and I never felt stumped on any of the puzzles for this reason. Maybe it was a bit too forgiving, but this is the kind of game where getting stuck would maybe be a little too frustrating, so I don't mind the overall low difficulty. The hints appear as speech bubbles that you need to click on to read, so they are optional in that you can just ignore them. But of course I want to click on them to see every piece of dialogue in this game, because the game's characters and writing are really funny and likable.

This game has a cast of very fun and distinct characters who all have very over-the-top personalities. The animations for these characters are very detailed and expressive in a way that makes every cutscene fun to watch. Especially with Inspector Cabanela, who moves everywhere with an exaggerated dramatic flourish and strikes dramatic poses at every opportunity. Every single character has some kind of odd quirk about them - the jolly chef who's always singing to himself about chicken, or the fancy novelist lady who's always holding a glass of wine, or the bored policeman who breaks out into an elaborate dance whenever he gets nervous. Every single character is a delight to watch in every scene.

The story of this game is really good. Any story would be fun with such a great cast of characters, but this game's story is also very compelling with its mystery as well. There are so many revelations and plot twists that make me want to keep playing to see how the story goes.
The game is only 18 chapters, so it's not a very long story by any means, but it is certainly a fun one. And this game also has one particular plot twist at the end that really got to me - it might be one of my favourite plot twists of any game story ever. I'm not going to spoil it here, but it's so perfect and so bizarre that it just made me love the game even more.

The game doesn't have much replay value - there's only one solution to each puzzle, and the story only has one way it can play out. But that's okay too - sometimes a good story with some good puzzles is all you need to make a good game.


So yeah, it's a great game, and I'm very glad I played it. Ahh, I need to play more point-and-click adventure games! I've been on a big RPG kick recently, but I've also got a big backlog of point-and-clicks to get through too. ...ahh, oh well. I'll play 'em when I get to 'em, I guess.

Poinie's Poin

 I played a very bizarre game called Poinie's Poin.

It's a PlayStation 2 game released by Sony in 2002 in Japan only.

Despite being a Japan-only release, it inexplicably contains an option for English, including a full English dub too.

The game is a short and simplistic, colourful, childish 3D platformer game, starring a weird pink baby thing named Poinie.

Poinie has the power to use "poins", which are round jelly bubble things, to manipulate the emotional state of people around him. Blue poins make sadness, yellow poins make cheerfulness, and red poins make anger.

One day in Jelly Town, Poinie gets distracted by a TV. Now he's lost sight of his mother and can't find his way home. Poinie wanders around town and finds Lilin, a girl who is being chased by Lolo, a mean girl who has an evil plan to poison everyone in Jelly Town with poisonous poins. Lilin gives Poinie a wisecracking yellow poin with a duck face, named Poin, who gets attached to Poinie's rear like a tail, and acts as Poinie's partner for the duration of the game. Poinie must use the power of poins to undo the damage caused by Lolo's poison poins, while also trying to find someone who knows how to get him home.

The gameplay is not very complicated. You've got a handful of short and simple little 3D platforming stages, where you need to un-poison the NPCs by throwing the correct coloured poin at them. You also need to throw poins to occasionally solve environmental puzzles too - like if you need to get a big flowerpot out of the way, turn a nearby NPC angry with a red poin, and they'll knock it over. Or if you need to fill up a lake, turn a nearby npc sad with a blue poin, and they will cry tears to fill it up. Things like that.

The game isn't anything special from a gameplay perspective, but it does have a lot of silly style to make up for it. 

The game is full of ridiculous slapstick - there's like three different cutscenes where Jelly Town gets destroyed in some way or another (but it's always fine again afterwards), and I particularly enjoy how bizarre the game's English is. Characters have ridiculous catchphrases that they say all the time, like "Coolio to the max!", or Poinie's personal favourite, "Yippie yo! You can't touch this!" which he says after every boss battle. 

Mean girl Lolo likes to say "Nanny-nanny-boo-boo!", and the brash bulldog chef guy likes to say "Bombdadidydabombbomb!". ... My favourite character is Pillow, the duck who talks in long-winded sentences. When Poinie asks Pillow about how to get home, Pillow responds with: "A House? A home, a domicile, a place of residence? A place to hang your hat, to call your home, to put your feet up?". Despite being a Japan-only game, the English in this game is quite well-written, even though there are also a lot of typos and other errors in the text.

And the game even has some risque language and a few swears for good measure - which is particularly unusual to see in what is otherwise supposed to be a kids' game, but it does add to the slightly unhinged vibe the game has. ...Actually, the game does ask for the player's age when you first boot it up - and I've heard that the game self-censors itself and cuts the swears out if you input an age below 18. Which is something I have never seen a game do before. ...Not sure how true that is since I didn't try putting in a lower age myself, but I can't think of another reason as to why the game asks for your age anyway, so it's probably true.

(the only other game I know of that asks for the player's age is Mischief Makers, but it only affects the ending cutscene there)

Anyway. I really like Poinie's Poin. It's short, it's extremely silly, it's very unique, and while it's not a gameplay masterpiece by any means, it's certainly a fun time while it lasts. 

Suikoden III

 Suikoden III

This game was released in 2002 for the PlayStation 2 in Japan and the USA. Europe didn't get it until 2015 when it became available for digital download on the PlayStation 3 shop. This is the version I played.

When you first boot up Suikoden III, it asks you if you want to load completed Suikoden II data from the same memory card. However, it is unfortunately completely impossible for the digital PS3 version to make use of this feature due to the way the PS3's method of creating internal PS2 memory cards doesn't allow transfer of other data to them. So despite having completed Suikoden II earlier this year, I couldn't unlock the bonuses here. ...I looked it up, and it turns out I'm not really missing much anyway. The only things of note that I can't get are two very minor collectible items. 

But anyway...

Suikoden III has a unique approach to its storytelling structure - it uses something called the "Trinity Sight System", which is a fancy way of saying that the game has three different protagonists.

The three protagonists in this game are:

Hugo, the son of the chief of the Karaya tribe of the Grasslands.

Lady Chris, the championed captain of the Zexen Knights.

Geddoe, a mysterious mercenary working for the Harmonian Southern Frontier Defense Force.

Each protagonist has three chapters to play through. After completing all 9 of these chapters, then the last two chapters, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 come next. 

Additionally, the first time one of the protagonists reaches Budehuc Castle (Hugo can access it in his chapter 3, Chris in her chapter 2, and Geddoe as early as his chapter 1), then we unlock a bonus story of Thomas, the young master of the castle, who has two of his own optional chapters to play through.

After clearing a chapter, the game goes back to the story selection menu, however you are not able to access this menu at any time - you must complete a chapter before being allowed to start a different one. (and you can never replay old chapters either)

At the beginning of Chapter 4, you need to choose which of the main three is going to become the hero of the story, and thus the main playable character for the rest of the game. I decided to pick Hugo. 

The order in which you play the majority of the chapters in this game is completely up to the player.

I decided to do the game in this order:

Hugo 1, Chris 1, Geddoe 1, Thomas 1, Hugo 2, Chris 2, Geddoe 2, Thomas 2, Hugo 3, Chris 3, Geddoe 3, Hugo 4, Hugo 5, THE END.

I feel like the Trinity Sight System can make the game feel a bit lopsided, and the pacing can get awkward if you make the story jump around as much as I did. The swapping of perspectives forces the story to "start over" quite frequently. I decided to play four "Chapter 1"s in a row, and because of this, even after 10+ hours of gameplay, it had barely felt like anything had actually happened in the story yet. Maybe my experience would have been different had I decided to play all the way to Hugo's chapter 3 before switching to someone else... who knows?

I do like the order I played it though, as it allowed the storytelling to keep to a relatively linear timeline.

So, Suikoden III takes place around 15 years after Suikoden II, however the story for the most part is entirely separate from the previous game. A couple of characters from the previous game make a return, (in fact, Hugo's mother Lucia was a minor antagonist from Suikoden II) but the continuity is not necessary to understand the story.

The story involves three different perspectives of the same events. A war between Zexen and Grassland, which has more going on behind the scenes than it first appears. Chris's knights invade Hugo's domain, while Geddoe snoops behind the scenes gathering knowledge about the situation. It's an interesting way to present the story, quite unique from other RPGs. 

Overall, though, I felt the story was actually a bit weak. The conflict between Zexen and Grasslands takes the majority of the screentime, but in the end, it doesn't end up mattering all that much after the two sides find a common enemy. And it feels like a lot of the game consists of a whole lot of buildup to various mysteries, the majority of which never really end up getting answered all that definitively. The story is engaging enough for me to want to see it through to the end, but it never became truly intense like the story of Suikoden II, and it never hit me with any real big surprises either.

The gameplay is largely similar to the previous games, however there are some key differences.

The combat system of this game has been changed since the previous two games. 

You still use a team of six, but now everyone is grouped into pairs. So you must organise your team of six into three pairs of two.

This pairing system is kind of strange, because it doesn't seem to benefit the player in any way, and instead only serves to force a bunch of extra restrictions that didn't exist before.

When you command your team members, you can only command a pair, and not any of them individually.

If you select "attack", then both of them will attack the target.

If you want to use magic, then you only get to select a single spell from the both of them, and the other member will just automatically do a regular attack. This means that if you pair two mages together, you can only tell one of them to cast per turn, and the other will just uselessly bonk the enemy with their staff.

Casting a spell now takes time, and it can even take multiple turns. If a spellcaster is attacked during their casting, they may get interrupted and lose their turn. And the spellcaster's partner can only do regular attacks until the spell has been cast.

If you want to use an item, a character can only use the item on themselves or their partner, and not on anyone else in the party. Though there is the added option to "share" a healing item, letting both in the pair have half of the restored HP, which is fun I guess. And just like with casting, the other member who isn't using the item will just automatically do a regular attack.

Combo attacks return from the previous Suikoden games, but now there is the added restriction that the party members involved with the combo must be paired with each other, otherwise the option to do the combo attack isn't available. To make up for this, the game now lets you know straight away if a paired team has a combo available, rather than you having to figure it out through trial and error like before.

The concept of positioning has also been changed. In the previous two games, you had three front-row members, and three back-row members, and that was that. But in Suikoden III, the party members like to walk all over the place, and they automatically reposition themselves based on which enemy they're attacking. This is annoying when the weaker party members expose themselves...you really don't have much control over where they decide to stand.

Annoyingly, Fire magic in this game has the added caveat of also damaging any party members that are standing too close to the target enemy. You can't actually tell your guys to get out of the way, so this means that using Fire magic is just not worth the hassle most of the time, unless you can perfectly time it so that the caster's turn goes before the other party members decide to move in the way... Lightning magic does not have this problem, so if you're using mages, you should pretty much just use lightning magic and ignore fire, I guess?

So yeah... combat is similar to the previous game, except they just added a whoole bunch of restrictions to it, and didn't change anything else to compensate. The player just has strictly fewer options now compared to the previous game's system. 

It's not actually a bad thing though... in fact, the added restrictions do make this game more strategically interesting. It's just that... I feel like it's not very intuitive. It kinda feels "wrong" that a pair of two mages is a bad idea, purely due to the arbitrary restriction that only one of them can cast at a time... and a full team of six mages is entirely unfeasible as you can only cast a maximum of three spells per turn.

I don't dislike the combat, but I don't think it's the ideal form of JRPG combat by any means. I feel like Suikoden I and II, while much simpler, were a lot more elegant in their simplicity, and they didn't give me the feeling of "incompleteness" that Suikoden III's combat does.

Suikoden III did however add a great new feature to the series with the Skill Points system.

Previously, the only way to intrinsically improve your characters (aside from regular leveling-up) was to upgrade their weapon by spending money at the smithy. Suikoden III still has the smithy which works the same way, but we also now have skills. In addition to EXP, characters now also earn skill points from every encounter, and these can be spent at the training center to upgrade specific aspects of each character. Aspects such as accuracy, crit chance, adding additional hits per attack, reducing damage taken - all sorts of things. Each character has a different set of skills that they are better at than others, each character has their own number of available skill slots, and some characters gain access to unique skills that others don't get. (for example, Ace, one of Geddoe's crew, has a skill that gives him a chance to steal gold with every regular attack)

I think this skill system is great - it allows you to customise your guys in finer detail, and it further differentiates all of the playable characters, giving more space for them to have unique traits. I also really enjoy how it uses a different currency than money, so the resource management for skills is self-contained and doesn't conflict with the smithy or armour shops.

Of all the things Suikoden III added to the series, I think the skill point system is the best one.

Suikoden III uses a different world map system. The previous two games used a very classic "classic JRPG" style of traversable world map with encounters as you walk, but Suikoden III instead uses a map menu screen with a point-and-click interface. The towns, routes and dungeon areas are all points on the map screen that you select with a cursor. You can only select points that are adjacent to your current position, so this doesn't serve as a fast-travel option by any means. The route areas consist of plains and forests and mountains - they are positioned in-between towns, and these are where the general random encounters are fought. Every time you want to travel between towns, you must go through the routes in-between, fighting whatever monsters appear along the way.

This system does make sense for a storyline involving multiple viewpoints. The areas only appear on the map screen when they become relevant to the current story, so this system is a good way of keeping the other stories away from places where they have no current relevance. However, this system does have the effect of making the game world feel a lot "smaller" than previous games. 

My biggest complaint with this game comes from the sheer number of times the game expects you to travel through these routes to go between towns. It gets extremely repetitive, as the three different stories tend to end up visiting the same locations as each other quite often. And since the towns can contain unique shops and other things of interest, there are plenty of other reasons a player would want to make a trip to a far-away town, even when it's not the next story destination... causing more trips back and forth through these routes. 

The "dungeon" areas aren't exactly what I would call 'proper' RPG dungeons. In fact, they are designed very similarly to the "route" areas, in that they take the form of a linear path with encounters throughout. However, instead of an exit on the other side, they have a dead-end room with a mini-boss monster, and a treasure chest containing the reward for defeating it. The chest actually gives you a LOT of loot, like around 15 items or so at a time, so it is definitely worth it to seek these mini-bosses out. The mini-bosses seem to respawn every once in a while - I don't know if it's purely timer-based, or if they just reappear with every new chapter or what, but the fact that they reappear means that it's definitely worth making repeat trips through the dungeons every so often to get a new stash of loot. ..... as cool as this is, it really doesn't help with the problem of constant backtracking. Not only do you need to go through the routes so often to visit towns, you now have to go through the routes AND the dungeons many times just to keep checking whether the miniboss has come back yet. ...it's so annoying how frequently I have to travel through these routes. 

I know it is optional to keep checking these minibosses, but.... I don't wanna miss potential loot, do I? Especially if the minibosses change with every new chapter - I might miss something important! Sometimes the loot contains unique items that cannot be gotten elsewhere, so I very much feel like I want to check these minibosses often... 

This wouldn't be so annoying if we had some kind of fast-travel system....but fast-travel is only unlocked once you reach chapter 4. So if you want to make use of town facilities or check miniboss loot during the first 9 chapters, you have absolutely no choice but to walk through the routes back and forth over and over. It's definitely appreciated that fast-travel does eventually become available, but it really is unlocked way way way too late.

Just like the previous two games, Suikoden III also features a castle and 108 recruitable characters, known as the Stars of Destiny. However, I felt like this system was rather de-emphasised compared to the previous games.

For a large portion of the game, the recruitable characters don't see much use. Hugo doesn't gain access to the castle until his chapter 3, Chris generally has her entourage of knights by her side, and Geddoe has his ragtag mercenary team with him at all times. This means that, before chapter 4, (which is basically approaching the endgame), the most you'll be seeing from the recruitable characters is during Thomas's chapters. Thomas's goal in his chapter 1 is to recruit as many people to Budehuc Castle as possible. However, this becomes a bit of a trap, as characters recruited during Thomas's story can't actually be used by any of the main three protagonists during their individual stories... you only gain access to them once you've reached chapter 4 where the stories converge.

People online seem to recommend recruiting the two ninja characters, Watari and Ayame, with Chris, as her chapter 3 has her venturing without her knights by her side, and the ninjas can really help her out during this time. However, I had already recruited the ninjas in Thomas's chapter 1 earlier, so I was just not allowed to add the ninjas to Chris's team at all. 

I don't particularly understand why this restriction is in place to be honest. It just further removes opportunities to actually make use of the recruitable characters.

I don't really mind the lesser emphasis on the recruitable characters so much, since everyone has their own story-relevant group traveling alongside them anyway, and all of them are good characters to use. But it is rather limiting - unlike the previous Suikoden games where I felt like changing out my team quite often, in this one I never really have much opportunity to do so.

That being said, the focus on using the three protagonists' comrades for most of the story does mean that this game has a lot more characterisation than the previous games. Many more of the 108 Stars of Destiny are story-relevant and important compared to the previous games, which is something I very much think is a good thing. This game's cast of characters is very memorable for this reason.

And it still is fun to run around towns finding all of the other Stars of Destiny anyway. I also like the new feature where you can take a non-combat Star of Destiny with you as a "support" unit, who conveys passive utilities such as increased gold drops, or the ability to sell items anywhere without having to find a shop. That's another great new addition.

And just like in Suikoden II, one of the Stars is a detective who will tell you the location of any Stars of Destiny you haven't found yet, so it is not difficult to acquire them without a guide. I didn't miss a single Star of Destiny during my playthrough. Hooray! Getting all of the Stars of Destiny in this game actually unlocks a short bonus story, so I'm glad I got the chance to see it.

The castle itself is a lot smaller than the castles from the previous two games. In the previous games, the castle started small, but would gradually expand as you acquired more Stars. But in Suikoden III, the castle starts off small, and.... never changes. The castle is rundown and crumbling and has holes in the walls, and I honestly believed I'd have a magnificent giant palace by the end of the game, but nope... even with all 108 Stars, the castle is still small and crumbling and still has holes in the walls. What a letdown! There's even a cutscene in one of Thomas's chapters where they make an effort to repair the castle, but nothing visually changes about it at all! What's up with that?

The castle is nowhere near as lively as the one from Suikoden II. Characters just have their one spot they always stand in, instead of the more dynamic system from Suikoden II where you could find them in various different places. In Suikoden II the bar and the restaurant always had varying different characters hanging out, and it was fun to see who was there every time you visited. In Suikoden III, though, the bar and restaurant areas are mostly empty chairs, and that's that. It's definitely a downgrade, but I guess it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

The other big system to receive an overhaul is the tactical war scenes. I was not a big fan of the Fire Emblem-style tactics battles from Suikoden II, as I felt like there was little opportunity to actually make meaningful decisions during them.

Suikoden III's version of them, though, I like much better. Instead of a square grid, the battles now take place on a series of spaces connected by dotted lines. You expand your territory by moving units to adjacent unclaimed spaces, and units can move more freely within claimed spaces. Some spaces give defense boosts for units occupying them. When you get attacked, units on adjacent spaces will "cover" the attacked unit, increasing their defense, and if the enemy attacks a space that has multiple units on it, you get to decide which unit takes the attack.

The attack scenes are also a lot better - instead of an inscrutable crowd of miniature fighters vaguely attacking each other like in Suikoden II, the fights in Suikoden III use the same mechanics as the regular battle system, with the same stats and skills and everything. However, the player does not get to command their units during them - they attack randomly, so you have to make sure beforehand that everyone is as battle-ready as can be.

It is honestly such a huge improvement to me. The fact that it uses the main battle system to determine the results of a skirmish means that the player can actually properly prepare and strategise for these war scenes, rather than being completely in the dark. And the change in playfield from a grid of squares to a series of connected spaces means that all of your units have much more opportunity to actually participate during war battles. 

These wars are so much better to play through than in the previous game.

Hmmm... So overall, Suikoden III is an interesting case.

The story feels less intense than the previous games, and while the multiple-character perspective system makes for a unique style of storytelling, I think I'd say that overall, the story is definitely less interesting than before. However, I do feel like the characters have a lot more personality and memorability. Gameplaywise, the changes to combat are weird, but they do make the gameplay "better" in a roundabout way by forcing you to have a bit more strategy to overcome the added restrictions. The addition of skill points is a great thing, and the new tactical war battles are much more palatable for me. 

But overall... I think I'd still say that Suikoden II is the "better" game. Suikoden II just impressed me more, its story was more interesting and impactful, and I really do feel that Suikoden III is let down by the ridiculous amount of backtracking you have to do in order to stay on top of things. 

I still very much enjoy Suikoden III, though! It's a good game for sure.

Alrighty so. ... I suppose next I'll have to play Suikoden IV? I may take a small break from Suikoden for a while, but I'm certainly eager to continue playing through the whole series.

Eiyuden Chronicle Rising

 Eiyuden Chronicle Rising

I just finished playing a game called Eiyuden Chronicle Rising.

This game was released in 2022 for all current major platforms. I played the Nintendo Switch version.

This game caught my attention because last week, it became free-to-try for 1 week for all subscribers to Nintendo Switch Online. I decided to give it a go. And then I saw that it was available on the eShop at a heavy discount, so after I had already gotten a decent ways into the game, I thought I might as well just buy it so I can continue playing past the trial period. ... haha, I guess they got me, huh?

Eiyuden Chronicle Rising is a strange case, because it is a spinoff. It's supposedly a companion piece for the "main" game, which is called "Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes".

So why did I play this before playing the main game then? Well, the main game isn't out yet. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes comes out on April 23 2024. ...And today's April 20. It's out in three days! ...It's unusual that the spinoff came out years before the main game proper, huh?

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes has been getting a lot of attention online, as it was directed by Yoshitaka Murayama, the creator of Suikoden who has very very recently passed away. It's unfortunate that he isn't going to be able to see his new game released. :(

Well, I'll get to Hundred Heroes another time. For now, it's time to talk about Rising, the spinoff prequel. 

Eiyuden Chronicle Rising follows the story of an energetic treasure-hunting girl named CJ. She arrives at the town of New Nevaeh, which is famous for its quarry and its barrows, which are full of treasures and secrets. During the story CJ teams up with two companions: a kangaroo mercenary named Garoo, and a young mage named Isha who is currently the acting mayor of New Nevaeh. The three of them delve deep into the barrows to uncover the truth of what lies beneath, and to hunt for treasure along the way. 

The town of New Nevaeh is in disarray due to the anomalous activity occurring in the barrows beneath it, but as CJ completes tasks from the townsfolk and brings back materials from the caves, the town begins to rebuild itself anew, and eventually becomes bigger and livelier than it has ever been.

The game is a sidescrolling action game. It's strictly 2D, and you can run, jump, and attack. CJ attacks with a short-range slash, and she can also dash. Garoo has a huge heavy sword, and can also guard with a parry. Isha shoots projectiles, and she can also hover in the air.

At first your actions are very limited and rather clumsy, but as you upgrade your weapon, you become able to string more attacks together, and as you upgrade your armour, your special moves improve (CJ's dash distance increases, etc)

The main gameplay involves exploring through a roughly linear series of 2D rooms, attacking enemies and collecting resources as you go.

Most of the gameplay involves following quest markers to reach a specific spot, and then collecting or defeating whatever is in that spot in order to complete the quest.

The game has an abundance of quests in which the goal is to collect materials or to follow a quest marker. The game only has five locations to explore through, but because the game keeps sending you to go pick up items in specific spots again and again, you'll be going through these areas quite often.

The game does not give a great first impression - the first few hours of the game consist of literally nothing but menial fetch-quests, where you have to go pick up materials and bring them back to town. And you're not even allowed to fully explore the areas until you complete these quests. It's not that great to be honest. It's frustrating to explore a little bit of the first area, only to be told a few rooms in that you need to turn around and go back to town so you can have a cutscene with a shopkeeper, only to then be told to go back and continue exploring where you left off. There is a TON of back-and-forth in these opening hours of the game, and it does get pretty repetitive.

Later on in the game, it does let you explore at your own pace a bit more, which is good, but the fetch quests never stop. Every time you go back to town, you'll see more quest markers from NPCs telling you to pick up 5 ores, or 5 lumbers, or kill 10 slimes, or whatever. It's very tedious, but you have to do them because the quest rewards are too useful to miss out on.

As you complete sidequests, the town expands. You gain access to new shops, and the shops begin to stock new equipment. New weapon and armour upgrades become available, and all sorts of other things in town get unlocked as a direct result of completing these quests. In order to be equipped with the best gear, it is very necessary to complete all of these menial tasks...

At some point you unlock the ability to equip elemental runes to your characters. For CJ and Garoo, it just means your attacks have an elemental property that affects damage depending on enemy weakness and resistance - but for Isha, the equipped element also affects her projectile behaviour - with Earth she throws rocks in an arc, with Ice she sends shards flying horizontally, with Wind she creates close-range electric spheres, and with Fire she shoots homing fireballs. It's nice that they gave her some unique properties for her attacks, it gives you some more options for finding your preferred play style. 

These elemental attacks are also the only way to destroy "elemental barriers" that block certain rooms in the areas. A brown barrier is destroyed by an Earth attack, a blue barrier by an Ice attack etc. I guess it's a way of making the areas seem more "replayable", since you can only unlock each element in a set order based on your story progress. So when you have to inevitably explore the same area again later on, there's at least one new room to find if you remember where the barriers were.

The game's story is fun, but nothing mindblowing. There's some strange goings-on going on under the town, and some ancient sorcery shenanigans that get uncovered as you keep exploring. Overall, the story works to drive the adventure forward, but it's not an amazing narrative by any means.

The characters are fun and have a lot of personality. CJ is energetic and treasure-obsessed (but of course she is heroic and good-natured underneath), Garoo is cynical and bad-tempered (but of course has a good heart underneath), and Isha is stoic and bureaucratic as a result of having to take up a leadership position at such a young age (but of course she is sensitive and caring underneath). Rather typical character archetypes, but they work well off of each other, and I do enjoy seeing their cutscenes.

My overall verdict on the game is...I don't think it's that good, honestly. ..... the gameplay is not that great. Switching between the three characters is a bit fiddly, and the combat is absolutely nothing to write home about. The fetch-quests are unrelenting and very repetitive, and overall I don't think it's actually all that fun to play on a moment-to-moment basis. Basically all you do in this game is complete fetch-quests, and this is true even if you wanted to ignore the sidequests and focus only on the main story. Because the main story quests are also mostly just fetch-quests too.

That being said, I didn't hate my time with this game. The characters are charming and the environments are nice enough to run around in. And sometimes I do enjoy filling out quests and expanding a town, just for the intrinsic satisfaction of completion.

I will say that the game does outstay its welcome. For a cute but shallow game like this, I would say it would be best if it were around 9 or so hours long. ... but this game took me 25 hours to fully 100% it. And by the end of it I was just so sick of running through the same forest and same quarry rooms over and over following quest markers. ...

So yeah. I'm glad I'm done with it. This game is not really worth replaying, but I didn't mind completing it one time through. It wasn't a terrible time, but it's definitely not a good game either.

I'm glad I played it anyway though, because apparently Hundred Heroes will check to see if it can find a Rising save file, and reward the player with a few goodies for having played the prequel beforehand. In true Suikoden-inspired tradition!

Anyway... even though Hundred Heroes is out in a few days, I'm not going to play it straight away. I'm still in the middle of a Suikoden III playthrough at the moment. Eiyuden Rising was good to have as a light adventure to play in between Suikoden III sessions, but Hundred Heroes is going to be its own huge thing, so I'm not gonna start it until I can dedicate myself to it properly.

So I guess it's back to playing more Suikoden III for me, then, huh?

Suikoden II

 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!

Suikoden

 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 burning 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

Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails

 The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails

First game of 2024! :D

Legend of Nayuta is a platformer-style action-RPG released by Nihon Falcom on the PSP in 2012 in Japan only.

In 2023, a full English translated version was released for the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch.

I played the Nintendo Switch version.

Legend of Nayuta follows the adventure of a boy named Nayuta as he explores a mysterious alternate world that was thought to only be fantasy, with the help of a tiny fairy named Noi.

You start the game in your hometown, with a small community of NPCs to talk to, a few shops, and other important characters. What I like about Falcom games is that they tend to have rather detailed NPCs - every town NPC is a unique individual with their own name and character design, and they all have something new to say to Nayuta after every story scene. There is only one town in this game, and it's nice to see how each character changes and reacts to the story.

The game is divided up into stages accessed through a world map screen. Each level takes the form of an RPG-style maze with monsters and platforming. In each stage, there are three hidden crystals, one hidden treasure chest, and one bonus mission to complete, such as "beat the stage taking damage fewer than 10 times", or something like that. Each stage has a different bonus mission. When you complete bonus missions and find the hidden treasures, you earn star points, which are used to learn new sword techniques in town.

Nayuta can find and equip weapons, armour and helmets that improve his stats - the way equipment is presented is very similar to classic Ys, where every item is obtained in a row for you to select, which is a system I do like. Nayuta can use either small swords or broadswords, which both have different attack speeds, but to be honest, the difference felt fairly minor to me. 

Noi can also get her own equipment, which confers benefits to Nayuta such as "enemies drop more items" or "you don't take damage from falling into pits". So while every new piece of Nayuta's equipment outclasses the older ones, Noi's equipment has a bit more situational purpose to them. Which is nice!

Noi also can equip various magic spells, which work on a cooldown timer system. Most spells are some form of projectile magic attack, but they have a nice variety to them - fast-shooting orbs, slow-moving poison sludge, multi-hit tornados, homing icicles - there's plenty of different spells, and they all have their uses. When Noi uses a spell enough times, it can level up and get stronger, which is nice. It's fun to collect and try out all the different spells.

The first four worlds each take place on a separate continent, and as you progress through the game, you unlock different seasonal variations of each level. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. This means that each level actually has four levels in one - the level design changes drastically depending on the season, so even though the basic geometry layout is the same each time, the way they actually play is completely different. Sometimes paths are blocked off in certain seasons, or the path through the level is changed, the switches and gates are in different locations, etc - it's basically an entirely new level.

The season-changing system is not actually utilised as much as I was expecting. Each stage has the "default" season that you play through for the story, and then one additional season gets unlocked after the story arc in that area is completed. The third season for each area is only unlocked as a post-game challenge, and the fourth and final season in each area is exclusive to New Game Plus! So in a regular playthrough with no extras, you're really only going to be playing two seasons of each level. I find this rather odd to be honest. For such a large aspect of the game to be mostly optional content feels a bit unusual.

Actually, there's a rather large amount of other content that is locked behind New Game Plus too for some reason - many quests and smaller character plotlines can only be seen during New Game Plus, including some collectibles, which means that New Game Plus is required for 100% completion of items as well. It's a little bit annoying that they make you replay the game a second time just to see all the content. But thankfully New Game Plus does have quite a bit going for it - you can unlock various benefits such as increasing the level cap, increasing Nayuta's movement speed, removing the cooldown on some of Noi's abilities, etc, and you also unlock a higher difficulty mode for use exclusively in New Game Plus. It's a pretty nice implementation of New Game Plus for this kind of game, but at the same time, I don't particularly enjoy how I was forced to complete an entire second playthrough just because I wanted to see all the quest lines and get all the items.

The story of this game is fun, though it is essentially just a "bad guy wants to destroy the earth" plot for the majority of the game. But the characters are nice, and the plot resolves in a nice way, so it's all good as far as story is concerned. There are a lot of cutscenes, but only a handful of lines have voice acting. And annoyingly, there are quite a few typos in the English script. ... the localisation job does feel rather sloppy at times.

Overall, Legend of Nayuta is a competently-built, but overall rather unremarkable game. The level design is good and fun, but it's not anything mindblowing, and it certainly can get repetitive. I wouldn't particularly recommend this game, because it's not really a must-play by any means. I think Falcom fans would enjoy it, but aside from that, it's just nothing all that special at the end of the day. It's a nice platformer-style RPG, and it's well-made. That's about all there is to it.