The first Suikoden in the PS2 and the first to be presented in 3D, come with some mixed reactions, but it’s still great
Graphically, it’s not an amazing game, but has some good art. Unfortunely it’s not very consistent, having both awesome designs and others that are mediocre at best. Even so its big problem is that it’s completely different from the last 2 games which where 2d, and most fans didn’t like the change. For most people it will simply be average rpg graphics. Its sound does its job. There are no voices, the sound effects are not bad, but nothing memorable, and the same can be said of the music.
The gameplay is another factor that changed a lot from the last 2 games. No longer do you have overland running, now when moving from one area to another you will get a map with the points where you can travel marked, and you’ll have to click the next area that will take you to your destination, one by one until you arrive where you want. It’s a lazy way to save a bit doing it the old way, which I didn’t appreciate.
There is also the big innovation of this game. In the first part you will play each chapter following the point of view of one of three characters, one at a time. You can choose the order you want to follow, and events do overlap at some points in the story. This was really well designed and add allot of interest to the story and the characters. It’s not all good though. It seems to me that the writers focused allot on the first chapters (which are really good) but later when the characters converge it takes a turn for the worse. Another point I didn’t like was that until all the characters converge you will be stuck with some party members, and a good deal of the 108 you can recruit will be left behind because there simply is no space in the party. This gets worse because some of the characters you are stuck with are not interesting in the least.
Yes one of the main objectives of this game is still to gather the 108 stars of destiny, but the fact I just mentioned doesn’t give you much incentive to do that since you won’t be able to use most of them until late in the game.
Like it’s predecessors we still get 3 different battle systems. In the standard you will control 6 characters at a time. They will get divided in 2 rows of 3 and you will only be able to order one of those each round, leaving the other one to act as he finds best. I don’t really understand why we can’t simply control all 6, all that this system achieve is getting your members running into an area effect spell rendering most fire spells useless unless being used in a character able to cast them really really fast, even then I don’t see a reason to use fire over lightning.
Then we get the duel, where your main character will fight another in a rock/paper/scissors turn battle. These are either impossible (where you really are supposed to loose, or quite easy, but always interesting and I wish there where more of these.
The final is the army battle, where we get our army against another and some objective to meet. You will need to organize squads and move them in a sort of connected dots. When squads meet you will get a sort of simplified standard battle where you can only order your team to attack defend or run. This is also quite easy, though you have to keep in mind strategic advantages you get from terrain bonuses and flanking bonuses you get from having another of your squads in an adjacent spot from your target.
For fans and followers of the series this game's value skyrockets. This is a good package offering you more on returning characters, and adding a good deal to the allready rich suikoden World. There realy are few games that are able to give you some much bang for your buck.
There are many small things that aren’t very good in this game, but there are also a lot of small things that are very good. In the end this is a game with a good story, interesting characters (some of them), and fun gameplay, that can last a long time, especially if you go for all the stars of destiny. Easily recommendable though I wont say it’s a must have.