My my, what a scary look on the young hero’s face.

In my last post, I revealed that I took advantage of my custom firmware for my PSP to play the first Suikoden game, originally for the Playstation. I started playing the Suikoden series when III came out, so I missed out on my chance to play the first two, which were already quite rare when I wanted to buy them ; ; For those that have yet to play the game and would rather not be spoiled, I’d recommend skipping this post as I will reveal parts of the beginning of the story (which may not seem serious now, but are actually quite touching.)

The game starts off normally enough. You play as the son of the Teo McDohl, one of the great generals of the Scarlet Moon Empire. In typical Suikoden fashion, you name your hero. This may surprise some of you, but unlike most RPGs, the great general is not dead. Heck, he isn’t even missing, he still lives at home with his son and three servants (plus Ted, a boy he found wandering on a battlefield years ago.)

The game’s story starts when one of the officers of the imperial officers witnesses Ted using the Soul Eater, one of the 27 True Runes. True runes are not only capable casting more powerful magic than normal, but also give the holder eternal youth, but sometimes they come with unfortunate side effects. This officer leads Ted to the court magician Windy, who tries to take the rune away. Ted manages to escape back to the McDohl residence where he gives his rune to the young hero who escapes the castle town. This series events eventually leads the hero to a path of leading a rebellion against the Scarlet Moon Empire.

The first thing I noticed about Suikoden was that some of its systems are clearly outdated compared to the newer Suikoden games. For example: the rune system in the game only allows for each character to have only one rune. That pretty much sucks for McDohl in the beginning of the game since he doesn’t have access to any of the Soul Eater’s spells. Of course, it being a true rune, it does become awesome (quite quickly, since it gets an insta-death move that works on all non-bosses that works 100% of the time.)

The war battles are also pretty bad compared to the rest of the series. Suikoden I is the only game in the series where war battles hardly involve any kind of actually strategy. More like, it’s just a game of rock, paper, scissors in a not-very-good disguise. Sure, you can do some special things like power up your charge attack or attempt to steal enemy troops, but the actual combat part involving either magic, arrows, or an infantry charge attack, uses a rock, paper, scissors system where magic beats a charge, charge beats an arrow attack, and an arrow attack beats magic. There is no maneuvering of the troops whatsoever, just two armies facing each other. I’m glad that Konami decided to change this in future releases.

As far as story goes, I think it moves a little too quickly sometimes. This is not surprising given the game’s short length (about 20-25 hrs?) His decision to join the rebellion seemed a little too quick. Even though his father is a great general of the empire, he decides to join the rebellion shortly after he escapes from his hometown with Viktor. He hardly even got to see any of the cruelty which apparently was rampant in the Empire before he join (although, he did get to witness some of it way after he decided to join.)

The game also doesn’t spend as much time fleshing out the characters as it should. The only characters that are really fleshed out, in my opinion, are: Mathui, Pahn, Flik, and Viktor. Almost no one else sees any kind of character development. Every other character acts just about the same as they do when you first meet them, which is very disappointing.

It may be that I’m being a little bit too harsh on the game. After all, I did play the last three games of the series (not counting Tactics) before starting this one, all of which, besides IV, had very good character development. In retrospect, I was probably being harsh about the rune system and the battles as well. I’m thinking the dev team must’ve gotten the same criticisms, though, since all of these issues were fixed in the rest of the series (cept for the poor character development in IV, but nobody liked that game, anyway.)

Now that I’ve stated all of my criticisms, it’s only fair for me to state what I liked about this game. I did say in my last post, I think, that I actually loved this game. My favorite thing about the game is actually it’s story. Yes, I know, I did critique the game about moving too quickly through the story. Of course, why would anyone want a longer story if they didn’t at least like the story to begin with . The story has many touching points, none of which I really want to spoil for you guys. I’m sure you can think of at least one in your heads if you think about what the hero’s occupation is while the hero is doing all of his rebellion stuff (hint: Teo is a great general.)

The battle system is also quite well-done compared to other turn-based systems. While most RPG’s usually stick with 3-4 party members, Suikoden sticks you with six. Nonetheless, battles in this series are surprisingly fast. Unlike most RPGs, Suikoden doesn’t bog itself down with lengthly attack animations (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy) Yes, when I say attack animations, I mean every kind of attack, even normal ones. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have any animations, it’s just that they’re all pretty much short (with a few exceptions.) This is true for just about any Suikoden game, except for III which seemed to only have lengthy animations (even for normal attacks, ugh.)

I can easily see why some people say that it gets too much credit due to its launch early in the Playstation’s life. Regardless, I still think that the first game in the series is at least what I would consider a “good” RPG. I really think other RPGs involving war should look to the Suikoden series to see how to present themselves.

P.S. If you can’t tell, this game is getting a high recommendation from me.