Fans rejoice! ...Anyone else...? Just try not to explode for the first few hours.
First off, THE FIRST FEW HOURS ARE TERRIBLE. Definitely not a good game for newcomers... fans will sit through it though. Battles are simply scarce at the beginning... it nearly plays out like an interactive novel... and then having no maps means not knowing where the hell to go. Lyon is there to help guide you, but half the time doesn't help at all. This especially gets irritating when first visiting the arena. Another mechanic to make it more "old-school" is the areas being set, which means no rotating. Also, because the view is zoomed out to an extreme, bar the cutscenes, the game feels extremely impersonal and doesn't do a good job of making you feel like you're part of it. They were obviously aiming for the 2D feel, but it's just so zoomed out that you can't see any detail in any of the characters. Therefore, you're more omniscent and not actually within the game. The third-person views from 3 and 4 were best suited for 3D graphics, and it should have remained as such.
Then there's the voice acting, which is passable, but takes away from the experience simply because it's that and that alone. And the music is okay. An improvement over 3 and 4, but there's just too much looping and nothing that grabs you... which gets annoying since the cities are huge... Speaking of which, cities are huge! Completists will feel like they've been given a gigantic chore which is such a pain to complete. Then there are the many flaws within the gameplay. Battle load times are borderline irritating. I've counted 16 seconds. That's 16 seconds to do three or four 4 push-ups. Gotta get your excersise some way. Then the controls are somewhat unresponsive... such as, clicking a treasure chest a hundred times because you think the game is just taking its time... until you realize its not even a treasure chest you're clicking; also an added fault of the zoomed out view. Plus the townspeople talk way too much and a lot of the time give you the same information. No way to skip text makes this more irritating than it should be. Then although this didn't irritate me personally I heard a lot about it in forums... there is no universal pause button, and no way to skip cut scenes, so you have to sit through them while you're being yelled at to clean your room.
That's quite a bit of what I found problematic with the game, but the good outweighs the bad (believe me). First off, the cast is believable. You'll grow to love many of the characters. A lot of dialogue means a lot of getting to know the characters. So it's definitely done much better than a lot of RPGs. Recruiting characters has always been the best part of suikoden, but this one is probably the best yet when it comes to recruitment. The characters are the biggest point in the reason why 5 is a feat for the series. Then the story is somewhat unpredictable and very well done even if a bit cliche. I like how this one focuses much more on family instead of friends. Just a nice twist to the formula. And although a lot of the characters you grow to love (or could grow to love) kind of die a little prematurely, the story is still fairly intelligent, with one of the more enjoyable tacticians and supporting cast.
Then all the gameplay goodness to be had starts here. First off, the game is long and makes way for a very epic war-torn tale. What Suikoden is meant to be. The battles are still fun once you get over the load times.
The skill system is back and better laid out than 3, although not quite as much emphasis is put into it (it's seems somewhat like an optional gameplay mechanic tossed in there). And the awesome battle formations (at first seeming like a gimmick), give it more depth and strategy. Although I still think 3 had the best battle system, this is still just as fun as #2 and 1. Also, the duels have a much needed facelift and time limit which makes it a bit more realistic and fast-paced. The naval/regular army battles are nothing special, but are still a bit more fun than 3 and 4's war battles. And then the wealth of minigames, can't forget those.
Overall, Suikoden V is not a huge improvement over 3 and 4, but still, quite a substantial one. It simply gives the fans what they want and even some patient newbies a nice place to start out in the series. Get it before it starts going up like Suikoden 2 has.