(The review contains a fair amount of spoilers. Read at your own risk.)
Flaws
- The story can hardly be worse, especially for a jRPG. The plot is flimsy, unconvincing, predictable. The narration is lifeless, and never moving. A few characters die, but you don’t care about them: they all lack way too much depth.
- No boss is actually evil, and the mute hero becomes the “Liberation Army” leader early in the game without any good reason. Perplexity: that is what you feel throughout the game. Some NPCs say the Empire has become (kind of) oppressive, but it’s never really shown, and you end up killing thousands of soldiers without knowing why. (Also, bandits are obviously good guys.)
- The game includes mandatory, exclusively luck-based mini games. First, they look like a developer whim. In particular, the giant roulette on the mansion floor is completely out of place. Second, they can take away your accumulated gold, should you decide to play fair and save after losing.
- There are 3 types of battles: random encounters, duals, and large scale battles. Duals and large scale battles are completely useless. They use a rock, paper, scissors mechanism, but you are either way stronger than the enemy (duals) or you know in advance their next moves (large scale battle). Thus, they simply can’t be lost, whatever the size of your army.
- Boss battles are not challenging at all. You are fine as long as you have healing items in everyone’s inventory — healing magic is not even necessary. Also, they don’t react to anything or follow any kind of patterns. They all just attack at random.
- Rune pieces are pretty much useless; many spells are useless; runic attacks are useless (and overpowered); around one hundred of playable characters are, in fact, utterly useless…
- The dungeons are simplistic, empty, and ugly. Don’t expect puzzles or interesting encounters. You just go from point A to point B in an almost straight line while opening the blindingly obvious chests.
- Way too much micromanagement to equip and unequip everybody.
Common Flaws
- The game mechanics includes elemental strengths and weaknesses, which is never a good idea: it does not make battles tactical and requires some tedious micromanagement. All battles in Suikoden can be easily brute-forced anyway, including the final one.
- Rare candies, a common flaw in jRPGs, are, once again, never a good idea: they prevent both clever character optimizations and the need to play at least decently to prevail. Not that it matters here, mind you.
Inconveniencies
- There is a ton of playable characters, but the game often locks one or two of them in the group — and the least desirable, at that. It holds true even for the last dungeon, where you can bring only 3 characters of your choice!
- There is a ton of playable characters, but many of them need to be together to enable unite attacks. Such a constraint is never a good idea.
- A lot of boring round trips are required to recruit some characters, without side quests or side stories along the way.
- Runes and rune pieces are both called runes but they don’t serve the same purpose. Runes are used to cast spells, while rune pieces straighten weapons or permanently increase attributes. This is ambiguous.
- You never know if a character can wear a piece of equipment before handing it over to him.
Inconsistencies
- Runes can be attached and removed at will, but rune pieces cannot be removed and are destroyed when replaced.
- Some types of rune pieces are dropped by enemies, while others are limited.
- All of the five generals are antagonists (at first), but only two of them have their personality altered by a “black rune”. Were they too good for their own sake? What is a black rune? You never know.
Dirty Tricks
- It becomes impossible to recruit a certain character after the last large scale battle, because the conditions can’t be met anymore. If you are a completionist but not a cautious player using at least two save slots, you’re screwed.
- Many rune pieces are limited in number, but they can’t be replaced without being destroyed.