god someday I will breathe without the hacking cough. in the meantime, Suikoden.
Okay yes now that I am slightly less dead I can think about topics again. I'm so sorry. There's a whole other post of THINGS to talk about but I'm trying to keep the topics posts uncluttered. We'll just say that in the past week I've had a lot of reminders of people who are no longer in my life and also there was the thing where I almost got prescribed something I have a near-lethal allergy to and ALSO THIS STUPID COLD WON'T GO AWAY (this is related to the preceding point) but. Whatever. Fine, life. Be like that.
Onward!
thenicochan asked me, Have you played Suikoden, or any of the sequels? Would you recommend it? As you know I'm a pretty "old school" gamer, esp when it comes to RPGs, but I've never had the chance to give this one a try.
So, Suikoden. I actually own six Suiko games (I-V and then Tierkreis), but I've only played two. Those of you who've seen my backlog ever are probably not surprised.
...Someday I should do a photo of my game pile of shame, like I did for my book pile of shame. Except so many of my games are digital. Still, the physical ones would make quite a heap.
ANYWAY.
I'm being insistent about playing them in order, which means I've played I and II. Overall I think my reaction to the series is sort of...ambivalent. It's full of themes and characters that execute wild tap-dances on every button for loyalty and honour I've got (Flik skldjfljsdf) and I enjoy the worldbuilding with the runes a lot. Some of the characters are brilliantly written. At the same time, though, I find a lot of the gameplay rather tedious (name of God I hate grinding to sharpen weapons, just shoot me) and actually recruiting all those characters is a bloody pain, one that I don't really feel is necessarily rewarded either mechanically or in terms of story.
I find the concept of collecting the 108 Stars of Destiny to be pretty great in the abstract, but I think it really suffers in execution. A handful of the characters merit real development and get actual arcs and backstories and history, but with 108 characters a great many are barely more than a name (else the script would take up more space than the graphics....) Since most of those characters don't get any development, I don't enjoy the foolish hoops that one jumps through to collect (and upgrade....god, the upgrading) all those characters. And maybe this is where my need to be a completionist means I can't be friends with the series properly, because I can't not collect and upgrade them. It's like the FF6 problem (where half the characters get amazing story arcs and the other half languish) only deeply exacerbated.
The gameplay is really traditional turn-based JRPG; like the LUNAR series, inventory is severely restricted and for a character to use an item it must be in his or her personal inventory. This is a thing that persistently sends me up a wall. GOD BUT I HATE INVENTORY LIMITS.
That being said, though, the characters that are winners are super winners. And I feel like I'm coming off more harshly than I want to, since I enjoyed the first two games and I do intend to play the rest. It's just that when I start trying to discuss something's pros and cons, I end up focusing on the cons (there's several more navel-gazing blog posts in that statement, but whatever, that is not what you asked.)
...If it were not for the price of the first two games (at least last I looked), I would suggest you give them a spin and see if they're for you. I can't speak personally to 3-5, though I know some people who have loved the hell out of them. If you can swipe them off someone else, definitely go for it; if not, I. Well. The $80 I paid for Suiko II, almost thirteen years ago, is probably not going to turn into value by my usual metric of dollars paid to hours played. I still liked it, but maybe not $80 of liked it.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1090961.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
Onward!
thenicochan asked me, Have you played Suikoden, or any of the sequels? Would you recommend it? As you know I'm a pretty "old school" gamer, esp when it comes to RPGs, but I've never had the chance to give this one a try.
So, Suikoden. I actually own six Suiko games (I-V and then Tierkreis), but I've only played two. Those of you who've seen my backlog ever are probably not surprised.
...Someday I should do a photo of my game pile of shame, like I did for my book pile of shame. Except so many of my games are digital. Still, the physical ones would make quite a heap.
ANYWAY.
I'm being insistent about playing them in order, which means I've played I and II. Overall I think my reaction to the series is sort of...ambivalent. It's full of themes and characters that execute wild tap-dances on every button for loyalty and honour I've got (Flik skldjfljsdf) and I enjoy the worldbuilding with the runes a lot. Some of the characters are brilliantly written. At the same time, though, I find a lot of the gameplay rather tedious (name of God I hate grinding to sharpen weapons, just shoot me) and actually recruiting all those characters is a bloody pain, one that I don't really feel is necessarily rewarded either mechanically or in terms of story.
I find the concept of collecting the 108 Stars of Destiny to be pretty great in the abstract, but I think it really suffers in execution. A handful of the characters merit real development and get actual arcs and backstories and history, but with 108 characters a great many are barely more than a name (else the script would take up more space than the graphics....) Since most of those characters don't get any development, I don't enjoy the foolish hoops that one jumps through to collect (and upgrade....god, the upgrading) all those characters. And maybe this is where my need to be a completionist means I can't be friends with the series properly, because I can't not collect and upgrade them. It's like the FF6 problem (where half the characters get amazing story arcs and the other half languish) only deeply exacerbated.
The gameplay is really traditional turn-based JRPG; like the LUNAR series, inventory is severely restricted and for a character to use an item it must be in his or her personal inventory. This is a thing that persistently sends me up a wall. GOD BUT I HATE INVENTORY LIMITS.
That being said, though, the characters that are winners are super winners. And I feel like I'm coming off more harshly than I want to, since I enjoyed the first two games and I do intend to play the rest. It's just that when I start trying to discuss something's pros and cons, I end up focusing on the cons (there's several more navel-gazing blog posts in that statement, but whatever, that is not what you asked.)
...If it were not for the price of the first two games (at least last I looked), I would suggest you give them a spin and see if they're for you. I can't speak personally to 3-5, though I know some people who have loved the hell out of them. If you can swipe them off someone else, definitely go for it; if not, I. Well. The $80 I paid for Suiko II, almost thirteen years ago, is probably not going to turn into value by my usual metric of dollars paid to hours played. I still liked it, but maybe not $80 of liked it.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1090961.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.