This is a fun game to play, very similar to our beloved Final Fantasy Tactics, but as the bar was set so high, this game kinda struggles to live up to the measure.
Visuals-Graphics: 7/10
Visuals are nice and refreshing, from characters to animated detailed mini icons, the game is colorful.
Level design is detailed, some static image backgrounds (such as towns and fields) look as if they were hand-drawed.
As every other Suikoden title this one doesnt disappointed with the characters icons, they are detailed with good expressions on the faces depending on each character personality
Music: 6/10
There are plenty of background songs, most of them are good enough, theres not a song you can call bad or ugly but there is such a thing as anticlimatic music, specially on a couple of dungeons where you expect strong battle music, you kinda get a soft song instead which will always play on that specific place. Boss battle themes aren't exciting either, just good. Sound effects are better, they make an impact, dodges sound good, critical hits are satisfying, magic sounds good too.
Gameplay-Combat: 7/10
Gameplay is as the usual SRPG, everything goes around via chat boxes and menus, you can go to towns, listen to gossips, talk to people buy stuff, theres also a quest guild from which you can get extra money and ability points depending on the job you choose to do yourself, some jobs can be assigned to party members so you can be able to perform several tasks at the same time. At the rest points several times, actually often special sequences will automatically trigger showing you a little bit more about the plot, story of the characters and even some quests.
There are plenty of characters to recruit in fact a lot more than what you need, but since characters can actually die during battles, its good to have some extras, but its still annoying to grind up a character just for it to get killed by a giant toad, so im most cases its easier just to reset and try again.
You can even load a Suikoden 4 save file so you can recruit a couple interesting characters from that game (Very useful).
This game is short though, but probably thats good in this case, because of the combat and the plot...
Combat is the strongest point of this game: its a Tactics (Strategy RPG) so you move on tiles and so on, but there are a couple this to spice combat up, such as terrain elements taht affects each player depending on their affinity to it. There are characters interactions during combat so they can perform special/combo attacks or protect each other from harm. Combat includes all abilities from suikoden such as dodge, guard, counter etc etc, including too the different runes that can be attached to each character. it doesnt matter how many times you replay a battle it will always be different and unique and can be won (or lost) by different tactics each time. Just as a note: leveling up mid battle is like a bonus since your character will replenish its hp at full and any status ailment will be removed. BEWARE battles arent easy, and its easy to mess up at any point even getting a character killed. And on most main battles enemies will call reinforcements so battles will take time to complete. This game is challenging!
Grinding gets tedious, at some point of the game you reach some kind of bottleneck where there are no places with strong enemies for you to level up faster and those places available tend to have too many enemies during battles, so those battles take some time to finish, from which, in my opinion, you dont earn enough xp or gold in exchange for the trouble you had. At that point, also, the money will be scarce since a lot of expensive high end equipment will be available AND necessary for the main battles so you'll be dragged down to this tedious grinding at the same place over and over. Cutting a little bit the fun. (gladly the combat system is that good).
Voice Acting: 4/10
Voices are good, but the actors try too hard to make up the personalities its bad, probably amateur actors, or at least sounds like it, I'd recommend turning voice sound off and read dialogs for yourself, either way character personalities will be killed because of the bad voice acting.
Plot-Story: 6/10
Its a good sequel to the Suikoden 4 story, it actually starts good, you'll encounter a lot of familiar faces from that title, and the quest to search for those special weapons is interesting and keeps the game moving forward. You'll watch the protagonist grow up little by little and you will understand why he wants to keep up with the quest at hand. Sadly at some point the plot and storyline loses its focus and it kinda switches the main character story and flips it on into a different less interesting, even annoying, character (the little kid Corselia), going back, at the end, to the protagonist story...Dull in my opinion.
The main Villian's a forgettable character awfully voice acted, theres nothing really special that makes him stand out, even though his motivation is not that good, it makes up for all the mess thats going on during the story.
Replay Value: 6/10
The combat is so enjoyable that replaying this game is an option just for it alone, even ignoring the forgettable plot. You may even want to relay it because probably you missed a character recruit, a secret side quest or something else during the first playthrough.
Overall: This is an enjoyable game, suited for suikoden fans, specially for people who liked Suikoden 4. Srpg fans will definitely appreciate the battle system and use it to its full potential. New commoners of the Srpg genre will most likely enjoy it, people not used to classic RPGs may overlook it, but this game is worth a playthrough, really.