My head's spinning

[startredder]

After a hundred-and-fourty-two hours ...

I finished Suikoden V.

And while I'm going to talk about everything in a non-spoilery fashion in the usual review at some point, I feel as though I kind of need to talk about the ending in spoilery, gory detail first.

Comments

[sub_divided]

Suikoden V! I enjoyed the final dungeon -- it's decently designed -- but story-wise...yeah. I didn't like the ending for a lot of reasons, only one of these was that my younger brother predicted Elder Godwin for the final boss and I hate it when he's right. ("Gizel is cool, it won't be him," he said. "Suikoden isn't like that!" I said. HA.)

It's out of character for Gizel, for one. Since when was he his father's pawn? I never got that impression. The game ends and you never really know why he did it, since that obviously wasn't the reason.

It's not in character for the game either. It's such an odd punch to pull. If you think about it, the Prince kills a lot of people in this game. Directly. And there are all those massacres by people doing what they think is right. Suikoden V didn't flinch away from those things, why should it flinch away from keeping its ambiguous villain the ambiguous villain until the end? Making Gizel a pawn isn't doing him any favors, and it isn't doing the Prince any favors either.

My favorite part of this game was right after the Sol-Falena fell the first time, when the Prince tried to recruit people to his cause and they all refused. That was great. Just Imperial politics! Hahaha. Of course, you can't make gameplay out of stuff like this, so that had to change eventually. But the game did a pretty good job of making this believeable. (Though the slughter-by-Godwins thing got old after a while -- amost as old as all those secret passages XD -- and you wonder why anyone as smart as Godwin would do something so obviously counterproductive).

Anyway there are gameplay considerations, and then there are story considerations, but they'd been managed so well up till then, the ending was really a letdown. Maybe if it hadn't also failed at what it set out to do, which was to keep Gizel as an enjoyable character.

Laptop: Everyone in the world has a Dell. I have an Inspiron 5050 with decent (read: good for four hours' web-surfing) battery life and processing power, but it weighs a ton and doesn't have external volume control. I like IBM's Thinkpads, honestly. The screens are small -- you can use an external screen, though, if you plan to keep it in one place most of the time -- but they are super light, no-nonsense black, very durable, good speed, eight hour battery life. You can get the newer ones with fingerprint recognition; this is completely useless but SO COOL, like something out of a spy movie.

And I'd get a dock for it with extra processing and USB ports. Best of both worlds -- works like a desktop when you aren't moving it, like a laptop when you are (and is good at the things laptops are supposed to be good at, that is it's light and you can use it anywhere, even places without power outlets).

Er sorry for the intrusion, I'll go back to watching now.

[startredder]

I keep wondering if I missed something, some big clue about why Gizel did what he did, because why Sialeeds betrayed you isn't made totally obvious unless you hunt around, but ... I'm kind of at a loss. It hardly makes sense for him to have been his father's pawn, because he was the one scheming at the beginning so he had to have had /some/ motive, but damned if I know what it was. Getting together with Sialeeds again? Dubious.

Sometimes, I just had to sit and boggle at how /stupidly/ the Godwin side had things playing out. I mean, Childerich? As a Queen's Knight? Did /anyone/ think putting him in charge of /anything/ would be a step in the right direction? I suppose Zahak and Alenia are a bit more excusable, without Ferid there to make them be decent human beings ... but damn, they went to some crazy lengths in the name of their duty. I'm still kind of miffed that Alenia apparently did it all because Gizel Godwin was hot.

I did more or less enjoy the ending itself, though. Enough that I at least temporarily forgot about how stupid it was that I was fighting Lord Godwin in the form of a giant floating sun-thing.

I already have a desktop PC, so the laptop will be for strictly laptoppy purposes, but these are good things to know.

Also, people who are Suikoden fans are /always/ welcome.