I am blazing through these games like someone gave me the Godspeed Rune.
And now I've played Suikoden I!
I was going to do more than one reaction post on it, but it's a pretty short game -- my playthrough was only 25 hours or so, and that's with me recruiting all the Stars of Destiny.
So you know how I complained about how long it took III and V to get the plot rolling? Here's how Suikoden I does it:
HOUR ONE OF GAMEPLAY: Congratulations, your best friend made you abandon him to certain death and gave you his Magical Artifact of Eternal Suckitude, and you're a fugitive from the Empire!
ME: ...wait what
HOUR THREE OF GAMEPLAY: Congratulations, you're the new leader of the rebel army! How does getting yourself a castle sound?
ME: ...wait what why do you even trust me I'm kind of the son of one of your biggest opponents and I haven't even said I'd join you yet WHAT IS HAPPENING WHY DO I ALREADY HAVE MY STRATEGIST I HAVEN'T EVEN DECIDED IF THE EMPIRE IS EVIL YET
Needless to say, it's a different gameplay experience. I don't know whether or not I prefer it. The speed of the plot in the first five or so hours didn't seem to allow enough time for the protagonist's (who I named Tir, because canon) near-complete shift in worldview, much less his assumption of command when he hadn't really done anything of the sort yet. I think the game clicked with me when I realized it wasn't a game about war -- which sounds weird given the premise, but it's true.
This part also helped:
MOONLIT NIGHT: *plays*
ME: ...crap that is always the goodbye song
GREMIO: *delivers heartfelt speech about how much the Young Master has grown up*
ME: ...oh shiiiiit it's this part of the game isn't it shiiiiiiit
VIKTOR: Yo, Gremio, my Genre-Savvy Sense is tingling. You might want to sit this mission out.
GREMIO: omg paws off my buttlover young master I am totally coming RIGHT TIR??????
THE GAME: *railroads me into saying yes even though I say no like ten freaking times, just like with the stupid poisoned tea, WHY DO YOU EVEN BOTHER TO GIVE ME THE ILLUSION OF FREE CHOICE, GAME*
GREMIO: *sacrifices his life to save Tir and co. from terrifying biological weapon that eats him alive while everyone listens jesus christ this game is fucked up sometimes*
WHAT I MEANT TO SAY: ...Mith I apologize for laughing at you every time you told me that Gremio got devoured by man-eating spores and I said it was silly and overly contrived, because this is an extremely moving and dramatically effective scene.
WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID: SOB MILICH OPPENHEIMER I AM GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU NOOOO WHYYYYYY
MITH: *yanks controller out of my hand so I won't kill him and therefore fuck myself out of getting the best ending*
ME: STUPID GAME STUPID GAME STUPID GAME Mith we have to get him back we absolutely have to. ;_;
MITH: *is totally crying, too*
Also, jesus christ, Tir McDohl may have the suckiest life of any JRPG protagonist ever, except maybe for Ramza from FFTactics. I mean, his Rune literally gets upgraded every time someone close to him dies. Including his best friend and his boyfriend protector and his father, two out of three of whom he kills. Thank god I got all the Stars of Destiny so Gremio was resurrected, because otherwise the game would basically have the most depressing ending ever (again, except maybe for FFTactics). I have to say, though, I love that he becomes President of Toran at the end of the game and walks out on it in the middle of the night shortly after, presumably not telling a single soul (other than Gremio) where he's headed. I wouldn't call it tragic, at least not in the perfect ending, but it's definitely bittersweet -- yes, he brought down the Empire, but he doesn't have a role in the Republic, either.
Despite its scope, Suikoden I feels the most personal of the games in the series I've played so far; sure, there's a war going on and you're more-or-less in charge of it, but on a narrative level, the war feels secondary to, well, Tir growing up, and the loss and sacrifice inherent in that. Which isn't to say that the game ends on a hopeless note or anything, but it's oddly quiet for a game about Saving the Nation. You fight a final battle outside the gates of the capital city (and the enemy commander fucks off after he loses, because he's bored, god I love Yuber the attention-deficit demon), you walk through empty and abandoned streets with a much softer version of the town's theme playing, and you confront the emperor standing alone on his balcony, talking about how his garden is all that remains of his empire.
And may I interject how much I fucking love what they did with Barbarosa, and the scene where his generals confront him on top of the castle after you've defeated the Sovereign Rune and he talks about how he missed fighting beside him, and he lied about being under the Big Bad's control the entire time because he loved her, and that was his only mistake? And then he leaps off the tower with her? Like I said, it's a damned quiet ending, and even the celebration after is brief (and the second-to-last scene of the game is actually of your strategist dying, so).
Moving on to the rest of the cast -- the good news is that there aren't nearly as many wacky characters in I, and the wacky characters who do pop up are, with a few exceptions, generally not plot-relevant. The bad news is that this is because the vast majority of them are cardboard cutouts at best, which makes the process of recruiting feel a lot like dutifully gathering up furniture and depositing it in some dusty corner of your castle, never to be seen again. (This feels especially egregious in the case of, say, Leon Silverberg; yes, he's an optional star, but he seriously vanishes after he's recruited, it's a little strange.) The ancillary story characters don't fare a whole lot better, but the relatively small core cast is pretty frickin' fantastic.
In yet another resounding "duh, Puel," moment, Viktor was my insta-favorite. His methods of infiltration involve setting a house on fire and he has a talking sword that kills vampires, okay, how can he not be my favorite. Flik and Odessa and Gremio also ended up as pretty quick favorites of mine (as did Cleo, if only because she said a lot of the shit I was shouting at the game early on), and I latched onto Tir because apparently I like silent protagonists when there is something wrong with them (hi, Megaten). (Or when they have incredibly good facial animation, like Frey in V, but this post is not for V-gushing.) And much to Mith's eternal delight, I am all over Tir/Gremio, because they are the most important people in each others' lives and they need each other so much and alksjdlfkjasfdevotionkink. I, er, may have shouted kiss him, you fool at the screen after Gremio came back, and tried to mash their sprite faces together, which did not work because Konami refuses to cater to my whims. Stupid Konami. I am, however, continuing the tradition of really pinging on the Suikohet by glomming hard onto Flik and Odessa. I want all the fic about them, including the broventures and shenanigans of the Liberation Army pre-Tir (yes, even if that dirty bastard Sanchez is involved). Mith and I may, in fact, have written such a story already. You will see shortly.
Het aside, though...okay, when I first heard of this franchise, I heard it glowingly described in terms of its sheer gay. Now, while the ladies of V clearly wanted to jump each others' bones, and every game thus far seems to have some kind of something-something going on with Chiki and Chimou, I didn't see all that much gay in either V or III, all told. Now, however, I am delighted to report that I found out where they put the gay, because I is an almost unparalleled homoriffic experience, what with the young men tickling each other and sharing intimate secrets and Milich Oppenheimer's see-through bodysuits. I call it like I see it, folks.
Now it's time to be a ~real gamer~ and talk about the mechanics, I suppose, though frankly it doesn't feel like there's that much to discuss. A lot of hallmarks of later games, like unite attacks and duels and strategy battles, are really only present in rudimentary form. There are like three duels in the entire game, and the strategy battles are basically duels with a different rock-paper-scissors system than the ones regular duels operate under. None of this necessarily detracted from my experience, but like character recruitment, they felt more like ideas in the development phase than fully-integrated aspects of gameplay. The random encounters are pretty bog-standard RPG, and are mostly notable to me for their ease. Heck, I didn't need to use healing magic until the last third or fourth of the game, and the lack of said magic only really fucked me over in one boss battle -- I ran out of healing items when I fought Neclord and my party was dropping like flies, so I wanted to restart the game and head in with a better-equipped party, but Mith was like "no, see if you can beat him," and on literally the last turn on which I could have done so, he keeled over. Hurrah for the gamer-penis boost!
And honestly, whatever, I have grown used to not playing Suikoden games for the difficulty, but I tend to associate "twenty-year-old JRPG" with "OUCH I just died again." But you know what, Suikoden wants you to succeed, and considering how cheerfully they destroy your protagonist's life in all other regards, not beating you to death in every boss battle isn't such a bad thing.
The music's a little tinny and not as distinctive as 3's, but I didn't mind it. I did like the coherency of the setting aesthetic, particularly given the graphical constraints of the game. Speaking of which, I know I joke about being able to find Stars of Destiny by looking for the unique sprite designs, but the developers literally copied-and-pasted the same dudes and dames everywhere, without even a palette-swap for camouflage. Lazy, Konami. Laaaaaazyyyy. The good thing about this game being 2D, though, is that I didn't have to deal with the flushbunking fixed cameras of doom and hate that plague later entries in the series.
I do have to note that despite the visual cohesion, Scarlet Moon/Toran itself didn't have as distinct a character as, say, the Grasslands did in III, but again, I is much less about place. Seriously, though, they could have cut down on the damn towns and a good chunk of the damn regions. The only ones that really stuck out to me were Gregminster, Warrior's Village, the Dragon's Den, Kaku (because I kept on calling it Cock Village), Kalekka because it's a burnt-out husk, and Milich's floral abomination of a palace. Oh, and the fucking elves and dwarves stood out, mostly because the dwarf village took freaking forever to navigate (but had cool windmills), and the elf village actually got burned to the ground. Yay! Sorry, I hate the snot out of Suikoden elves, and I'm glad to see their xenophobic arrogance fuck them over so dramatically.
Overall: damn good, and interesting to play after III and V. Gameplay itself is fairly basic and the additions to your bog-standard turn-based RPG formula still feel a little pastede-on-yey, but for a game that's only about 25 hours long I can deal -- particularly when the characters and plot engage me. I didn't feel terribly invested in the nation itself, which is a departure from the other Suikoden games I've played, but hey, first title, they're still working out the worldbuilding kinks. Not necessarily a game where you're going to discover something new every time you replay it if you are a rabid completionist like me, so take that with a grain of salt, and straightforward in some aspects of its presentation, but also damn subtle and effective when it wants to be. And surprisingly good translation localization for the era, though oh god, the American cover art is an atrocity. I'm glad I played it, and I suspect -- nay, KNOW -- that I'm taking some of these guys out for a spin.
On to II! Or, well, more of II. I'm about eight and a half hours in at this point, and Delita!Suzaku I mean Jowy CALLS TO ME.
.
I was going to do more than one reaction post on it, but it's a pretty short game -- my playthrough was only 25 hours or so, and that's with me recruiting all the Stars of Destiny.
So you know how I complained about how long it took III and V to get the plot rolling? Here's how Suikoden I does it:
HOUR ONE OF GAMEPLAY: Congratulations, your best friend made you abandon him to certain death and gave you his Magical Artifact of Eternal Suckitude, and you're a fugitive from the Empire!
ME: ...wait what
HOUR THREE OF GAMEPLAY: Congratulations, you're the new leader of the rebel army! How does getting yourself a castle sound?
ME: ...wait what why do you even trust me I'm kind of the son of one of your biggest opponents and I haven't even said I'd join you yet WHAT IS HAPPENING WHY DO I ALREADY HAVE MY STRATEGIST I HAVEN'T EVEN DECIDED IF THE EMPIRE IS EVIL YET
Needless to say, it's a different gameplay experience. I don't know whether or not I prefer it. The speed of the plot in the first five or so hours didn't seem to allow enough time for the protagonist's (who I named Tir, because canon) near-complete shift in worldview, much less his assumption of command when he hadn't really done anything of the sort yet. I think the game clicked with me when I realized it wasn't a game about war -- which sounds weird given the premise, but it's true.
This part also helped:
MOONLIT NIGHT: *plays*
ME: ...crap that is always the goodbye song
GREMIO: *delivers heartfelt speech about how much the Young Master has grown up*
ME: ...oh shiiiiit it's this part of the game isn't it shiiiiiiit
VIKTOR: Yo, Gremio, my Genre-Savvy Sense is tingling. You might want to sit this mission out.
GREMIO: omg paws off my buttlover young master I am totally coming RIGHT TIR??????
THE GAME: *railroads me into saying yes even though I say no like ten freaking times, just like with the stupid poisoned tea, WHY DO YOU EVEN BOTHER TO GIVE ME THE ILLUSION OF FREE CHOICE, GAME*
GREMIO: *sacrifices his life to save Tir and co. from terrifying biological weapon that eats him alive while everyone listens jesus christ this game is fucked up sometimes*
WHAT I MEANT TO SAY: ...Mith I apologize for laughing at you every time you told me that Gremio got devoured by man-eating spores and I said it was silly and overly contrived, because this is an extremely moving and dramatically effective scene.
WHAT I ACTUALLY SAID: SOB MILICH OPPENHEIMER I AM GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU NOOOO WHYYYYYY
MITH: *yanks controller out of my hand so I won't kill him and therefore fuck myself out of getting the best ending*
ME: STUPID GAME STUPID GAME STUPID GAME Mith we have to get him back we absolutely have to. ;_;
MITH: *is totally crying, too*
Also, jesus christ, Tir McDohl may have the suckiest life of any JRPG protagonist ever, except maybe for Ramza from FFTactics. I mean, his Rune literally gets upgraded every time someone close to him dies. Including his best friend and his boyfriend protector and his father, two out of three of whom he kills. Thank god I got all the Stars of Destiny so Gremio was resurrected, because otherwise the game would basically have the most depressing ending ever (again, except maybe for FFTactics). I have to say, though, I love that he becomes President of Toran at the end of the game and walks out on it in the middle of the night shortly after, presumably not telling a single soul (other than Gremio) where he's headed. I wouldn't call it tragic, at least not in the perfect ending, but it's definitely bittersweet -- yes, he brought down the Empire, but he doesn't have a role in the Republic, either.
Despite its scope, Suikoden I feels the most personal of the games in the series I've played so far; sure, there's a war going on and you're more-or-less in charge of it, but on a narrative level, the war feels secondary to, well, Tir growing up, and the loss and sacrifice inherent in that. Which isn't to say that the game ends on a hopeless note or anything, but it's oddly quiet for a game about Saving the Nation. You fight a final battle outside the gates of the capital city (and the enemy commander fucks off after he loses, because he's bored, god I love Yuber the attention-deficit demon), you walk through empty and abandoned streets with a much softer version of the town's theme playing, and you confront the emperor standing alone on his balcony, talking about how his garden is all that remains of his empire.
And may I interject how much I fucking love what they did with Barbarosa, and the scene where his generals confront him on top of the castle after you've defeated the Sovereign Rune and he talks about how he missed fighting beside him, and he lied about being under the Big Bad's control the entire time because he loved her, and that was his only mistake? And then he leaps off the tower with her? Like I said, it's a damned quiet ending, and even the celebration after is brief (and the second-to-last scene of the game is actually of your strategist dying, so).
Moving on to the rest of the cast -- the good news is that there aren't nearly as many wacky characters in I, and the wacky characters who do pop up are, with a few exceptions, generally not plot-relevant. The bad news is that this is because the vast majority of them are cardboard cutouts at best, which makes the process of recruiting feel a lot like dutifully gathering up furniture and depositing it in some dusty corner of your castle, never to be seen again. (This feels especially egregious in the case of, say, Leon Silverberg; yes, he's an optional star, but he seriously vanishes after he's recruited, it's a little strange.) The ancillary story characters don't fare a whole lot better, but the relatively small core cast is pretty frickin' fantastic.
In yet another resounding "duh, Puel," moment, Viktor was my insta-favorite. His methods of infiltration involve setting a house on fire and he has a talking sword that kills vampires, okay, how can he not be my favorite. Flik and Odessa and Gremio also ended up as pretty quick favorites of mine (as did Cleo, if only because she said a lot of the shit I was shouting at the game early on), and I latched onto Tir because apparently I like silent protagonists when there is something wrong with them (hi, Megaten). (Or when they have incredibly good facial animation, like Frey in V, but this post is not for V-gushing.) And much to Mith's eternal delight, I am all over Tir/Gremio, because they are the most important people in each others' lives and they need each other so much and alksjdlfkjasfdevotionkink. I, er, may have shouted kiss him, you fool at the screen after Gremio came back, and tried to mash their sprite faces together, which did not work because Konami refuses to cater to my whims. Stupid Konami. I am, however, continuing the tradition of really pinging on the Suikohet by glomming hard onto Flik and Odessa. I want all the fic about them, including the broventures and shenanigans of the Liberation Army pre-Tir (yes, even if that dirty bastard Sanchez is involved). Mith and I may, in fact, have written such a story already. You will see shortly.
Het aside, though...okay, when I first heard of this franchise, I heard it glowingly described in terms of its sheer gay. Now, while the ladies of V clearly wanted to jump each others' bones, and every game thus far seems to have some kind of something-something going on with Chiki and Chimou, I didn't see all that much gay in either V or III, all told. Now, however, I am delighted to report that I found out where they put the gay, because I is an almost unparalleled homoriffic experience, what with the young men tickling each other and sharing intimate secrets and Milich Oppenheimer's see-through bodysuits. I call it like I see it, folks.
Now it's time to be a ~real gamer~ and talk about the mechanics, I suppose, though frankly it doesn't feel like there's that much to discuss. A lot of hallmarks of later games, like unite attacks and duels and strategy battles, are really only present in rudimentary form. There are like three duels in the entire game, and the strategy battles are basically duels with a different rock-paper-scissors system than the ones regular duels operate under. None of this necessarily detracted from my experience, but like character recruitment, they felt more like ideas in the development phase than fully-integrated aspects of gameplay. The random encounters are pretty bog-standard RPG, and are mostly notable to me for their ease. Heck, I didn't need to use healing magic until the last third or fourth of the game, and the lack of said magic only really fucked me over in one boss battle -- I ran out of healing items when I fought Neclord and my party was dropping like flies, so I wanted to restart the game and head in with a better-equipped party, but Mith was like "no, see if you can beat him," and on literally the last turn on which I could have done so, he keeled over. Hurrah for the gamer-penis boost!
And honestly, whatever, I have grown used to not playing Suikoden games for the difficulty, but I tend to associate "twenty-year-old JRPG" with "OUCH I just died again." But you know what, Suikoden wants you to succeed, and considering how cheerfully they destroy your protagonist's life in all other regards, not beating you to death in every boss battle isn't such a bad thing.
The music's a little tinny and not as distinctive as 3's, but I didn't mind it. I did like the coherency of the setting aesthetic, particularly given the graphical constraints of the game. Speaking of which, I know I joke about being able to find Stars of Destiny by looking for the unique sprite designs, but the developers literally copied-and-pasted the same dudes and dames everywhere, without even a palette-swap for camouflage. Lazy, Konami. Laaaaaazyyyy. The good thing about this game being 2D, though, is that I didn't have to deal with the flushbunking fixed cameras of doom and hate that plague later entries in the series.
I do have to note that despite the visual cohesion, Scarlet Moon/Toran itself didn't have as distinct a character as, say, the Grasslands did in III, but again, I is much less about place. Seriously, though, they could have cut down on the damn towns and a good chunk of the damn regions. The only ones that really stuck out to me were Gregminster, Warrior's Village, the Dragon's Den, Kaku (because I kept on calling it Cock Village), Kalekka because it's a burnt-out husk, and Milich's floral abomination of a palace. Oh, and the fucking elves and dwarves stood out, mostly because the dwarf village took freaking forever to navigate (but had cool windmills), and the elf village actually got burned to the ground. Yay! Sorry, I hate the snot out of Suikoden elves, and I'm glad to see their xenophobic arrogance fuck them over so dramatically.
Overall: damn good, and interesting to play after III and V. Gameplay itself is fairly basic and the additions to your bog-standard turn-based RPG formula still feel a little pastede-on-yey, but for a game that's only about 25 hours long I can deal -- particularly when the characters and plot engage me. I didn't feel terribly invested in the nation itself, which is a departure from the other Suikoden games I've played, but hey, first title, they're still working out the worldbuilding kinks. Not necessarily a game where you're going to discover something new every time you replay it if you are a rabid completionist like me, so take that with a grain of salt, and straightforward in some aspects of its presentation, but also damn subtle and effective when it wants to be. And surprisingly good translation localization for the era, though oh god, the American cover art is an atrocity. I'm glad I played it, and I suspect -- nay, KNOW -- that I'm taking some of these guys out for a spin.
On to II! Or, well, more of II. I'm about eight and a half hours in at this point, and Delita!Suzaku I mean Jowy CALLS TO ME.
.