Long have the Suikoden games lingered on my backlog. I acquired all 5 of the main titles at various stages either out of curiosity for myself or for others to play but I have never got around to playing any of them. I came dangerously close to culling all of them due to lack of interest at one point, but a good friend convinced me to try at least one of them to see what I thought of the series and number 5 was suggested to be one of the strongest so I decided to give it a try.
Things start off in the usual way for most epic tales with everything being fine and then it all suddenly goes to shit. You play the role of a young prince in a Royal family who lays claim to an artefact known as "The Sun Rune". This powerful mcguffin weilded by the Queen has the power to scorch the land with the sun's rays. This power had been used on a neighbouring town before hand and this is where the game starts off with you going to visit said town to try and repair relations. The plot quickly advances with the Royal family being betrayed and fucked over, your characters being cast out as traitors and then you must go about building a rebel army to repel the invaders from your homeland.
You do this by travelling all over the land and trying to rally support of various groups, races and nations. Sometimes this is easy and some will join simply after being asked. But most are not so simple and will require you to do something for them first before you can secure their services. This travelling around the country gives the good feeling of being on an epic quest as you visit many different places and peoples along the way in order to amass a sufficiently sized rebel army.
As with most traditional RPGs, there are several modes of operation in the game:
The world map: where you do most of your travelling moving from places to place either on foot or by a vehicle. Viewpoint is zoomed out to a large scale and when on foot, you are vulnerable to the usual RPG random encounters.
Towns and buildings: where most of the dialogue and story telling occurs. The viewpoint is zoomed in much closer here and you can walk around free from random encounters to talk to other characters, visit shops, etc.
Battles: the meat of the game. Every battle is fought on this field in a traditional statistic based style such as the older Final Fantasy games where both you and your enemy select their moves and they are then performed in the order of which characters have the highest speed rating. These battles allow you to have up to 6 characters in your party which I liked as it produced a sense of action and event that there was so much going on. While in battle, you can do the usual attack, magic, defend, items etc commands but there are also a few new ones worthy of note. Certain pairs of characters that have relationships to one another can do co-op moves which use up both of those characters turns, but usually do more combined damage. There is also an auto-battle feature which will just make everyone do their default attack to allow you to speed through easy battles. Again, I found this quite useful in saving time on the smaller and easier engagements.
Battlefields: a rarer features in RPGs. In many places in this story, you are called upon to command a number of units in large scale ground or naval engagements. These happen in real time and use a rock-paper-scissors approach where there are 3 types of unit and each is weak, strong and normal to attacks from each type. here the races, groups and people that you recruit for your army really come into play as they will bring more units for you to use as well as boost stats and provide special abilities. The goals for these battles can range from wipe out all enemies to survive for X amount of time to get to X point on the map. While these battles seemed fun at first, they became less fun over time as they usually were quite long and slow and started to feel over-used as the game progressed.
You can also recruit optional characters to further boost your army's power through various side quests but this is entirely optional as the units you get through the story are more than adequate.
A couple of other note worthy features were that besides from the 6 main characters you take with you into battles, you can carry an extra 4 alternates should any of these 6 be neutralised and you cannot revive them or if you need to mix up your skills for different engagements. You can also carry 1 non combatant support character who provides you with various skills like a mobile shop, healing after battles and such. Characters can also choose to specialise in 2 areas each. Selectable skills include such things as defence, attack, defensive magic, sword magic and so forth. Characters can be equipped with quite a slew of gear with each one taking up to 6 pieces of armour/accessories. However to balance this, each character keeps the same weapon throughout the whole game and it is improved at various shops throughout the course of the adventure. All these extra twists on the battle system provided something a little different than the usual which I found quite interesting.
But still, having said all that, it didn't draw me in enough to continue on playing more games in the series. It was a fun RPG while it lasted, but didn't fill me with much of a desire to continue playing more in the Suikoden series. I'll just leave it there, I think.
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