Massive, immersive, beautiful, and fun. One of the best written stories seen in an RPG. Great and varied combat.
The story is filled with intrigue and back stabbing, but along with it is a cast of characters that are conflicted, multi-faceted, full loving, loyal, brave, and quirky. The game does a great job of holding your hand and teaching you the basics without boring you or getting in your way. The sheer variety of towns, dungeons, people, shops, and of course the potential of recruiting characters, means the game as a whole keeps you interested and engaged. The character collection aspect is time consuming though, so unless you're someone who enjoys back tracking an awful lot, you may find it tedious.
Combat is based on random encounters but the game makes automatically fighting lesser enemies easy as a single press of a button. The variety of combat, from standard 6 member party battles, to one-on-one duels, to full out war, provide alot of game play options and variety and all are implemented with slick, easy to use and understand user interfaces. One-on-one duels, in my opinion, don't happen often enough, and I think a turn based wargame would have been better than the real-time one in place, but overall the combat systems are fun and easy to use.
The graphics are sharp and crisp and the art style is excellent. It helps to really immerse you in the time period and story. The graphics, I might add, are consistent, something many other big RPGs don't spend enough time getting right. Sound, too, is very well done. Sound effects, music, and spoken dialogue are all consistently good. Cut scenes are gorgeous but somewhat infrequent. Oftentimes a short introduction is made using a cut-scene and then in-engine story telling takes place. Not unusual for a Japanese console RPG but it can sometimes be disruptive to the flow of the story.
Many aspects of Suikoden V could have been improved, from the diffcult to manage war battles to the too infrequent use of cut scenes, but overall this is a game with a great story, and is definitely a great value. The developer has done an incredible job of introducing new game play elements over the course of the entire game, and always updating the story in a convincing manner. It is hard to predict where the story is going and the resolution is always experted handled.
This so far has been a great year for RPGs. First there was the wonderful Grandia III, now we have Suikoden V. Hopefully other games coming out this year (Final Fantasy XII, for instance) will live up to the hype and deliver similary compelling game play.
Gord_Mose