Welcome to Gregminster, Imperial Capital of the Scarlet Moon Empire, and the home to Emperor Barbarosa and his five great generals. Tir McDohl, son to General Teo McDohl is called up for service in the Imperial Service, and accompanied by his guardians Gremio, Pahn, and Cleo, along with his friend Ted, enters service under Commander Kraze.
This our first introduction to the world of Suikoden, a PlayStation game that was released in Japan in December 1995, and came America and Europe in December 96 and March 97 respectively. In the years following this, four more games would be released to the Suikoden world, but discussions about the other games are for another day.
Suikoden is a Role Playing Game, and a very traditional JRPG at that. It uses a world map for travel between towns and dungeons, battles occur randomly whilst in dangerous areas, and those battles are played out in a traditional turn based style, with the usual scope for uniqueness and individuality. In town screens you move in the four cardinal directions, and view the player top down, with the characters represented by nicely animated sprites. If you have ever played a SNES era Final Fantasy game, you will feel at home immediately. As you enter the world map, your party is reduced to a small sprite on a giant map. Again moving in four directions, you walk around the world map, getting in to fights and walking to your next destination. Dungeons are similar to towns, but with random battles, and more interesting visuals, from dark caves to Dwarvish ruins, to misty mountains and enemy strongholds.
When you enter a battle, the screen zooms to an isometric scene, again with sprites for the player’s party of up to six characters at a time. Both the player’s party and the enemy are split in to two rows each, three members per row, with different ranged weapons having different possible targets based on positioning. Each round of combat, the player designates the commands for all six party members, and then in order of quickest character to slowest characters, all attacks and actions are performed.
The basic attacks of the JRPG are augmented by the game’s magic system, which relies on the core ‘Rune’ mechanic, that is central to the Suikoden series. Each character can equip a single rune, which changes what they can do in battle. Some characters are better with some runes than others, but most characters can equip most runes, albeit with reduced efficiency for the less magical characters. Rather than relying on a traditional MP system, the runes each have up to four abilities, which each have a set number of uses. The more powerful magics are often limited to only a single use even for higher levelled characters, with only the strongest mages getting more uses. Likewise, the more physical and agile characters aren’t left without useful runes, with some runes containing special attacks, or even special effects.
Joining the magic and swordplay, is the game’s Unite system, where certain characters with something in common can unite and work together to make a special attack. These are usually more powerful attacks with both positive and negative effects for your party, and takes place with more than one character, so it also reduces the number of attacks you can make in a turn, but often they are a good idea to use or plan your party around.
In addition to the regular battles, Suikoden has two other types of combat. There are the story-based duels, where your character faces off solo against an opponent, and based on how they taunt or speak to you before each of their attacks, you choose how you want to act, and the battle takes place in a rock/paper/scissors style setting. Often these duels aren’t crucial to the completion of the game, but they open up possibilities of a more complete game, which actually has a major impact in this game. The other type of combat is the large battles. In Suikoden these are similar but different to the duels, but also rely on a rock/paper/scissors formula, but with added tactics and more plot. In these battles, if you perform poorly, you can actually lose some party members for good, with them dying and stopping you from reaching 100% completion.
With the talk about character dying, and the importance of a complete game, it needs to be mentioned just how many characters there are in Suikoden. The game is loosely based on the Water Margin, by Shi Nai’an, and as such it revolves around it’s 108 stars of destiny. Within the world of Suikoden, there are 108 characters that can join the side of Tir, and aid in in his war, and that is what it is. War. From the start, the game presents you with a world with armies, generals, and combat, and through meeting characters, losing characters, and the circumstance of being a main character in a JRPG, Tir finds himself in command of an army with a mission, and based on which characters you recruit, your bases grows to house all of the possible assets of a city, from a Blacksmith to an Item Shop. There are also more interesting utilities, like a cups mini-game and a girl who can teleport you to any major location you’ve visited before.
For fans of RPG characters, there are many to choose from. Whilst not all 108 characters can be takin in to regular battle, a majority of them can. Using everything from a sword to a saucepan, each character has a different use. Some are good tanks, whilst others are powerful mages. Each has a back story, and whilst some join your army automatically, others won’t join you unless you make an effort to speak to them and sometimes complete a little mini-quest. Some of these characters are very well hidden, and it isn’t always obvious just how they are supposed to join you, but given time and effort they will eventually agree, and join the fight.
The large number of characters opens Suikoden up for a very good amount of replayability, as you play through to try to get more characters, use those characters you’ve not used before, and to try and reach that magic number of 108 recruited characters before a pivotal moment and the start of the final chapters of the storyline.
The music for Suikoden is some of the best RPG music on the PlayStation, with Miki Higashino’s score rivalling some of Nobuo Uematsu’s best efforts for the Final Fantasy games of the era. Like most games of it’s time it doesn’t use voices acting, and has the text in boxes at the bottom of the screen, accompanied by some beautiful character artwork for the important characters. This can often be a giveaway when speaking to characters in towns, as if you see a character standing around who has a picture on their name, they are either recruitable or a major plot point further down the line.
Suikoden was one of the best RPGs in a golden age of great RPGs. Even today, the game sells for stupid amounts in Europe, with a good copy selling on eBay for as much as £100, and despite the price for the original game being much lower in America, the second game in the series reaches similarly high prices in North American markets. It is the often mentioned, underdog of the RPG world, which is well worth a revisit, or an first experience if you’ve never had the pleasure of playing it.
Suikoden is available in North American markets on PlayStation 3, PSP, and PS Vita through the PlayStation Network’s classics line for a low price, and there are rumours that the second game may follow but for now it’s only available on PS1 disc. Suikoden’s III, IV, and V are more common, and are only available on PS2, with Suikoden III having never been released in Europe for various PAL related issues.
This Tuesday is the fourth Suikoden Day, a celebration of all things Suikoden, organised by the Suikoden Revival Movement, a group on Facebook campaigning to get Konami to revisit the main Suikoden series, which has been dormant since Suikoden V was released in 2006, with only two spinoff games (Suikoden Tierkreis in for DS 2008, and Suikoden The Woven Web of a Century for PSP in 2012) to show for themselves. On this, a good day for a very good RPG series, join me in celebrating a classic RPG.
I rarely include video with my blog entries, but I had to include the original opening to Suikoden below to celebrate this wonderful game.
You should stop doing reviews if you’re going to use false information. Suikoden Day is NOT organised by the Suikoden Revival Movement. They have absolutely nothing to do with it.