The Konami rant I've been threatening to write...

[jyasu]

I just completed Gensou Suikoden II for the first time today. GS2 easily secured a spot near the very top of my list of favourite games. The story is wonderful and compelling, the gameplay mechanics are nicely balanced, the character development and side stories are excellent. I'm very impressed with the overall design of this game, and I truly enjoyed interacting in the world of GS2.

Now for the venom directed at Konami...

Keep my praise of GS2 in mind as I proceed to harshly criticize the publisher of GS2. Konami, publisher of the Suikoden series, has earned themselves a place on the list of companies Jyasu hates due to the wonderful treatment they gave GS2.

Let's start with bugs. Konami actually released GS2 despite the fact that the game has a painfully long list of bugs, some of them quite severe. Most of the bugs are present in the main storyline sequences, so there is no excuse for QA to have missed them. I wonder if Konami even bothered with QA on this game; it's quite possible they first found out about these bugs only after release. Each bug mars the beauty of the game, ultimately hurting the artists who put so much effort into this game, only to have their music mangled and their dialogues butchered.

Now it's easy to blame the game engine programmers and the translators for these bugs, but the simple truth is that mistakes happen. This is why publishers (in theory) have QA departments and editors, to keep at least some of the mistakes from making it into release. As a verification engineer, I know I would be ashamed to let something go by me with the problems GS2 has.

On top of that, it seems that Konami did not handle GS2's release well at all. With indications that Konami recalled and destroyed unsold stock of the game earlier than usual, one can't help but believe Konami had as much respect for GS2 during its release as they obviously had during its development -- none at all. I suspect this was a belated effort to save face after their QA failures, but the noble response would've been to go back and fix the mistakes.

If GS2 had only a mediocre story, so-so characters, or was lacking in side stories, I wouldn't mind so much and I wouldn't be ranting now. I probably would've just stopped playing. But the game itself is so compelling and intriguing, I can't help but be angry that Konami treated GS2 so poorly.

Here's a list of my ``favourite'' bugs in GS2. Note that most of these are technical errors, not design or story problems (I'll limit it to 10 for now):

1. Banner Village game crash -- several unanticipated event sequences will crash the game during a sidequest.
2. Highway Village bug -- can get the game engine to drop to 2 FPS.
3. Audio tracks that stutter or do not loop correctly.
4. Audio tracks that refuse to play, including most vocal tracks, one major battle theme, and surprisingly the ending.
5. Translation errors; entire dialogues that were not translated; grammatical and spelling errors; charset problems; etc. These errors are pervasive in the game and are quite difficult to ignore after awhile.
6. ``TcDohl''.
7. Matilda access bug.
8. Haunted Rockaxe -- someone's opening the doors, but it sure isn't me...
9. Missed button presses on controller in certain menus.
10. Design flaws in major battle interface -- notably, confirm ``Wait'' commands.

Okay, I'm done ranting for now. If I'm not careful this rant will grow to be as long as my Xenogears rant (yikes!).

All in all, it's quite a feat that I rank GS2 so highly despite all the problems with the game. ...or maybe I'm just a sucker for games that don't receive any attention from their publishers?