mould

REVIEW: Suikoden V
Prince!

The obvious thing to think is obviously that this blog, like many others, has been relegated to the nether realm of blogs, forgotten by writer and reader, badly in need of an update, delinked and so on. Not so! The only reason I haven't updated is that there have been few stories inspiring enough to get me to blog, up till now. Well I read some Murakami, I think I read Flying Fox on a Snowy Mountain...but all those weren't enough to trigger in me the need to -yes you guessed it- record the memories of their particular journeys. Suikoden V, Vth in one of the more successful RPG series out there, on the other hand, has. Spoilers abound.

At first I thought of doing a comparative analysis between Kingdom Hearts 2, representing the new-generation of snazzy graphics and super smooth uber fun game engines, and Suikoden, hailing from a long, proud tradition of strong storyline and characters, but I think that will have to wait for next time. If I'm good enough maybe I'll even throw in some Digital Devil Saga. But for now, Suikoden.

The series is by Konami. Its full name is Genso Suikoden, or 幻想水滸伝 - yep, based on the famous Chinese classic The Water Margin. I played the first game in the series and liked it very much, though for some reason it never made its way into my list of top tier RPGs. Thinking about it, that's somewhat surprising because Suiko1 had a few nice concepts, very strong cast and a good story as well. Maybe the music and graphics didn't stand out? So superficial of me. Anyway, said nice concepts, which have carried over into V are:

The 108 characters thing. This can get a bit tedious at times, with some characters involving entire dungeons unto themselves. However it's quite nice to collect 108 characters, though 1 complaint I have is that it makes switching limited equipment and runes very troublesome. One thing I'd like to do is compare the various Stars of Destiny in all 5 of the games and see what similarities there are. E.g. the Hero is always the Tenkai (I think?) Star, the Tactician the Tenki Star and so on. Anyway the only other RPG I know of with such a huge set of characters is Chrono Cross. Chrono Cross was good because each character had a script for the entire game, so you would get different comments at key scenes in the game based on which character you brought. Unfortunately that didn't seem sufficient to give the rest of the characters sufficient depth. Suikoden obviously has that failing as well, but to a much lesser extent considering the number of characters.

This is in no small part due to the Castle idea, which has all your characters gathering in some castle, which expands as the story progresses. You can play minigames, do your admin, talk to characters, follow mini plotlines that develop character and so on. Notable features include a Comments Box, which has characters providing feedback to the Hero about other characters, a Bath, where special scenes can be activated, and Oboro's Investigation Agency, which has you paying small sums to find out the backgrounds of other characters. The result of this is that I have quite a solid impression of almost all the characters, from key ones like Lyon and Georg all the way down to Bastan and Levi.

The rune idea is interesting, though it's just ASO (another shiny object), a medium of magic in many RPGs (Zodiac Stones, Materia, Runes, Crests, Magicite etc.). If I'm not wrong in every game, some of the 27 True Runes, the powerful things which created the world or something, are brought in as the basis of the main storyline. There was the Soul Eater in 1, the Sword and Shield in 2, the True Flame in 4 and the Sun in 5. So that's quite nice. Other interesting things are the duel system, which is basically scissors paper stone, and the large scale battle, which is more like rock scissors paper. Using 3 types of combat systems fits in very well with the grander scope of the Suikoden series, which always involves politics of some kind (traceable to the first game and the story upon which it was based) - how individuals get caught up in big, historical events and are tided along, swept away, or end up shaping the flow of those events.

The big historical events of SuikoV go as follows. The Queendom of Falena (there's a distinctly matriarchial aspect to this game - even the main character looks DAMN BLOODY SISSY in his SEXY HALTER TOP UGHUGHUGH) is ruled by Queen Arshtat and her husband, who's Commander of the Army or something. At the same time there's a Senate where factions led by various houses play and make things difficult. Royal power has always been a matter of bloody dispute, but this queen in particular stopped all that nonsense. So this faction is liberal-progressive (like they want to abolish the gladiator system, they allow autonomy to beavers and dwarves and they don't want to suck the elvish forest dry of gold). There's a house called the Godwins, who are hardliners and want to purify Falena and conquer the rest of the world. They end up invading the palace, causing non-trivial death and destruction and chasing the main character, the son of the queen and brother to the heiress to the throne, out. He goes around uniting various parts of the Queendom and kicks the Godwins out. Now that I've put it like that the story doesn't seem that impressive. But it's quite gripping and I enjoyed it quite a lot.

The characters clearly helped a lot. Some stood out, others didn't, but those that did pushed the story along quite well.

So we have the main character, who's a bit sissy and dresses damn gayly later on. He's ok as main characters go but not particularly fantastic, because he doesn't say much. I wonder why RPGs are sometimes loathe to let the hero speak.
There're the Queen's Knights: Lyon, the cute bodyguard who yells "Prince!" in a cute way; Miakis, the princess's bodyguard, who is pretty cute as well and cracks quite funny/ribald jokes; Kyle, a womaniser; Georg, the strong silent type. Miakis and Kyle are fighter-mages; Georg is just a damn powerful physical fighter (in one dungeon I was forced to form three seperate parties - I put him and another damage-dealer with 4 pretty sad people and they basically carried the party through).
Lucretia is the strategist of the game, planning the overall strategy to retake the castle and taking charge of each battle's tactics as well. She's a genius but I think she ended up a tad bit flat, and took some lustre away from the Hero. She's quite cute too, though there seems to be something going on between her and Lelei, her female bodyguard-cum-student.
My party had, at various points, Cathari, this super-destructive high-attack person who uses a gun; Richard, aforesaid damage-dealer, a young guy who appears to want a little too much to make his male superior, Mueller, happy; Killey, a descendant of an ancient race who dresses all in red; Zerase, the archetypical character who pops up every so often to make cryptic remarks until she joins me and becomes a TG Cid with her Star Rune; there's Viki and Jeane, Suikoden mainstays (the former a cute mage who helps you teleport around after you get her, the latter a scantily-clad woman who helps you equip and de-equip runes); Belcoot, a gladiator who's quite powerful until the late game when his speed just doesn't cut it...uhm I think that's it.
Other interesting characters include Oboro's Investigation Agency, consisting of Oboro, Shigure and Sagiri (who are ex-members of Nether-Gate, a mysterious assassin group which was used in the bloody disputes for royal power). Sagiri in particular is a Seta Soujirou, always smiling due to tragic brain-washing when she was a little girl. Shigure is a Shikamaru, always complaining about how troublesome things are.
Lastly there're the villains. Gizel Godwin stands out as quite a cool Machiavellian type guy; Dolph, the shady Nether Gate nemesis to Lyon is quite nice as well; and there's Sialeeds, possibly the best character in the game. Basically she appears to betray you halfway through the game but later dies and reveals that she had some masterplan to help you out. Quite a touching moment. I guess the only problem is that she isn't that strong stats-wise.

Yep I guess that's it. This was a good game, not exceptionally outstanding, but still nice in a heartwarming sort of way. It also had the Suikoden hallmarks - making you think about choices and morality from both sides. Though there were serious issues - the main character's relationship with his sister definitely isn't normal. And the Richard and Lucretia things were already mentioned. And there were lotsa perverts in the game: Kyle, Garaya, Wilhelm...actually that's it. But that's still quite a lot because they make a lot of noise.

Hope to do the Kingdom Hearts/Suikoden comparison soon.