A shining star of destiny amongst RPGs.
One of the best qualities of this game are the diverse amount and genuinely like-able characters. They feel alive and have their own personality. The main cast, the villains, and even fringe characters have their own unique sense of identity. The character design is rather nice and fits in well.
The world of Suikoden does feel interconnected. The land of Falena feels like an actual place not just a collection of areas, if that makes sense. The story is great on how things slowly unfold and carries a good momentum through the game. The presentation of the story is animated nicely through the full-motion cut-scenes in the game.
The gameplay is decent. Most of the time spent will be exploring areas, trying to recruit people, and upgrading equipment. The battles are turn-based random encounters. And the large scale war battles are a nice diversion. The challenge of Suikoden games is not really the battles, but rather finding and recruiting characters to join your party. In this game battles are rather straightforward and relatively easy. While trying to recruit all the characters can be a challenge. The game plays nicely like how rpgs used to be made during the psx era.
The graphics effects are decent and not the most detailed but good/passable for a PlayStation-2 era graphics. The cut-scenes are detailed quite nicely. The sound is mainly orchestral and sets the mood quite well. The technical aspects does okay and gets the job done. Just don't expect anything groundbreaking.
Overall, I feel that Suikoden V is a beautiful game and a pleasure to play. It certainly ranks up near the top for Suikoden games and is also one the best PlayStation-2 rpgs.
pros: great characters, epic story, plenty of exploration
cons: prologue is slow, minor load times and frame-rate slowdown in some areas