Favorite RPG Universe: Suikoden
Talk to any fan of J-RPGs, and they'll tell you they have a favorite series of games. Most of the n00bs will tell you Final Fantasy. The "hardcore" ones might tell you Fire Emblem. Others still might tell you the Tales series. (Particularly if they like anime.)
Me? My favorite series has always been Suikoden.
Y'know, I love Japanese RPGs. I really do. But one thing that's always gotten to me is that they seem to have something against continuity. I don't get it, really, but they do. For all the morons that whine about Final Fantasy ("How can it be "Final" when you're up to like, fifteen?"), each one of those games is a completely different world in a completely different universe.
Its a bit disheartening. As I mentioned in my Lunar post, no good RPG ever relies solely on its story, seeing as how the story is probably going to have a few cliches in it. The key to a good RPG is in world building. You create a world in which gamers WANT to play in, and the story (though still important) generally becomes secondary. So imagine playing a video game in which they've done everything right (in your opinion) in creating this really fun world that you're almost dying to see again, and then you hear about a sequel! And you wait and wait for information, and the FIRST thing you hear is that this game will have absolutely zero ties to the last game. You'd be pretty upset, right?
This is why Suikoden is my favorite RPG series. All five games (plus three side games) take place in the same universe and are interconnected, showing you how this world progresses over the course of several decades. Granted, most of them tend to be set on different continents, but it gives you a sort of investment in the world itself as you liberate each continent. Sort of makes me feel like I'm saving that world, which obviously would appeal to me.
Anyhow. Like I said--Suikoden, much like Lunar, has its own interesting world. The first two games all had their major artistic work hand-drawn, which gave the game its own distinctive "feel"--very important for a game you have to invest 40-60 hours in to beat. It all looks very old timey and pre-Industrial Revolution, displaying high fantasy in a way that at least I'd never seen it look before.
Thus far, I've played two of Suikoden's five main games (I have an ISO of Suikoden II, but I just never get that far in it. Takes up too much memory to run it so I always end up forgetting about it. Anyhow, oddly enough the two I've played are the first and the last one.
The first one was one of the four Playstation games I got when I first found myself addicted to games. (The other three were Tales of Destiny, Brave Fencer Musashi, and Final Fantasy VII. All RPGs. Surprise.) Suikoden was the first one to really grip me, and it turned out to be the first game I ever actually finished, so naturally I have a special attachment to it.
For various reasons (let's not make this longer than it already will be), I sadly never got to play Suikos II-IV (of course, IV sucked so no loss there), but Suiko V came out just around the time I was graduating from high school, so my mom bought it for me as a graduation gift.
It was one of the games I'd most anticipated since this decade has been home to mostly average J-RPGs (and endless Halo and GTA clones). Would've been a real downer if this game had sucked, but fortunately it turned out to be just as good, actually in my opinion BETTER than the original, fully cementing my part as a member of this universe's fandom. So, what about the Suikoden universe is so attractive?
- The huge casts. For those who don't know, one of Suikoden's most distinguishing features that truly sets it apart from most J-RPGs, is that a side goal of the game is to collect The 108 Stars of Destiny, which is 108 different characters in the game, to help you in your quest. Now, this isn't entirely necessary, and the game gives you everyone you need to beat it, but to get the "best" ending, the stars are necessary to cause a miracle to occur, generally leading to you saving the life of either one of the stars, or a character that's close to the main hero. The quest itself is very engrossing, requiring you to pay close attention to every town and area you visit with actual people involved in order to recruit every one. Granted, you miss out on a bit of characterization with so many characters, but just recruiting each person gives you a sense of attachment to most of them, honestly.
- The different battles. Another distinguishing feature of Suikoden. Even the basic turn-based battles are quite a bit different than normal RPGs. Rather than tying you down to a mere four, or worse still, a paltry THREE characters, the game grants you a hefty six-member party to beat down the random baddies and bosses. It also forces you to think strategically, since some characters are just short range, and thus have to be placed on the front-line, while other characters are mid-range and thus can be placed on either the front or back line, but will only be able to attack enemies on the front line in the back, and of course there are long-range characters that can attack from anywhere. They also include some pretty cool combo attacks that can be executed with certain groups of characters.
But that's just the turn-based. Being a very political series of games, Suikoden is realistic in that fights are often fought with armies, so every now and again, as you're working toward taking down the oppressive kingdom of the day, you're made to go up against factions of their army. The fights themselves are actually quite simple, since the mechanics break down to rock-paper-scissors--you're given magicians, archers, and warriors. Magicians destroy warriors, archers destroy magicians, and warriors destroy archers. But there's quite a bit of strategy involved since you're usually on the losing side of things, as far as numbers go, so you have to figure out how to work things in your favor so that you lose almost no soldiers while they lose plenty of theirs.
And the last kind of fight is One-on-One matches. These are very personal matches that occur between (usually) the main character and an important villain of the game. They most often come right after a boss battle or a war battle. Again like rock-paper-scissors, you have three options: Attack, Defend, and Special. Attack > Defend, Defend > Special, and Special > Attack. Strategy is again involved because over the course of the fight, your opponent will say various comments that will clue you in to what his move will be, and if you don't pay attention you'll get smashed. The variety in Suikoden makes the most problematic aspect of RPGs--the battles--much less of a problem, and honestly I don't ever really get bored playing a Suiko game, even while power-levelling.
- The castle. One of the coolest things about Suikoden is that if you're going to have an army, you've got to have a base of operations. So in each Suikoden game, one of the things you do very early on is you find a castle to work out of--usually an out of the way place that's been abandoned by an ancient civilization for quite a while. Its pretty cool, having a place you own in a video game (I see how people get attached to that stuff in MMOs), and even more cool is that as your army grows, your castle becomes larger and larger, eventually becoming this grand place with numerous rooms and several floors.
- Scale. Nothing worse to me, in an RPG, than when there's no sense of scale. I can't play RPGs that only take place in one city, for instance (Evolution, Grandia Xtreme). I need things to feel like its bigger than my character and his friends, otherwise I can't invest that many hours. Fortunately, Suikoden, even though it only ever takes place on one continent, always shows an impressive size to its worlds with its different races (Kobolds are awesome) and various cities and areas to explore.
- The plot. Again, no good RPG relies solely on its plots, but Suikoden wouldn't be too bad off if it did. Each game always offers an interesting plot filled with political intrigue and enemies that are a lot more physical and actually...human, as opposed to most of the games I play, where you end up slaying gods, demons, personifications of concepts and all that other shit that's too cosmic for some.
Granted, you usually end up facing some sort of magical being at the end, but that's part of the fun for me!
So yeah. I'm addicted to Suikoden. Want to play Tierkreis, and wish SuikoVI would come out, even if it were on the PS3. Can't wait to collect those stars again and wreak havoc on another kingdom that's lost its shit. Lunar's still my favorite game, but until Lunar 3 hits stands and lives up to expectations, its not really a universe. Suikoden is.
Me? My favorite series has always been Suikoden.
Y'know, I love Japanese RPGs. I really do. But one thing that's always gotten to me is that they seem to have something against continuity. I don't get it, really, but they do. For all the morons that whine about Final Fantasy ("How can it be "Final" when you're up to like, fifteen?"), each one of those games is a completely different world in a completely different universe.
Its a bit disheartening. As I mentioned in my Lunar post, no good RPG ever relies solely on its story, seeing as how the story is probably going to have a few cliches in it. The key to a good RPG is in world building. You create a world in which gamers WANT to play in, and the story (though still important) generally becomes secondary. So imagine playing a video game in which they've done everything right (in your opinion) in creating this really fun world that you're almost dying to see again, and then you hear about a sequel! And you wait and wait for information, and the FIRST thing you hear is that this game will have absolutely zero ties to the last game. You'd be pretty upset, right?
This is why Suikoden is my favorite RPG series. All five games (plus three side games) take place in the same universe and are interconnected, showing you how this world progresses over the course of several decades. Granted, most of them tend to be set on different continents, but it gives you a sort of investment in the world itself as you liberate each continent. Sort of makes me feel like I'm saving that world, which obviously would appeal to me.
Anyhow. Like I said--Suikoden, much like Lunar, has its own interesting world. The first two games all had their major artistic work hand-drawn, which gave the game its own distinctive "feel"--very important for a game you have to invest 40-60 hours in to beat. It all looks very old timey and pre-Industrial Revolution, displaying high fantasy in a way that at least I'd never seen it look before.
Thus far, I've played two of Suikoden's five main games (I have an ISO of Suikoden II, but I just never get that far in it. Takes up too much memory to run it so I always end up forgetting about it. Anyhow, oddly enough the two I've played are the first and the last one.
The first one was one of the four Playstation games I got when I first found myself addicted to games. (The other three were Tales of Destiny, Brave Fencer Musashi, and Final Fantasy VII. All RPGs. Surprise.) Suikoden was the first one to really grip me, and it turned out to be the first game I ever actually finished, so naturally I have a special attachment to it.
For various reasons (let's not make this longer than it already will be), I sadly never got to play Suikos II-IV (of course, IV sucked so no loss there), but Suiko V came out just around the time I was graduating from high school, so my mom bought it for me as a graduation gift.
It was one of the games I'd most anticipated since this decade has been home to mostly average J-RPGs (and endless Halo and GTA clones). Would've been a real downer if this game had sucked, but fortunately it turned out to be just as good, actually in my opinion BETTER than the original, fully cementing my part as a member of this universe's fandom. So, what about the Suikoden universe is so attractive?
- The huge casts. For those who don't know, one of Suikoden's most distinguishing features that truly sets it apart from most J-RPGs, is that a side goal of the game is to collect The 108 Stars of Destiny, which is 108 different characters in the game, to help you in your quest. Now, this isn't entirely necessary, and the game gives you everyone you need to beat it, but to get the "best" ending, the stars are necessary to cause a miracle to occur, generally leading to you saving the life of either one of the stars, or a character that's close to the main hero. The quest itself is very engrossing, requiring you to pay close attention to every town and area you visit with actual people involved in order to recruit every one. Granted, you miss out on a bit of characterization with so many characters, but just recruiting each person gives you a sense of attachment to most of them, honestly.
- The different battles. Another distinguishing feature of Suikoden. Even the basic turn-based battles are quite a bit different than normal RPGs. Rather than tying you down to a mere four, or worse still, a paltry THREE characters, the game grants you a hefty six-member party to beat down the random baddies and bosses. It also forces you to think strategically, since some characters are just short range, and thus have to be placed on the front-line, while other characters are mid-range and thus can be placed on either the front or back line, but will only be able to attack enemies on the front line in the back, and of course there are long-range characters that can attack from anywhere. They also include some pretty cool combo attacks that can be executed with certain groups of characters.
But that's just the turn-based. Being a very political series of games, Suikoden is realistic in that fights are often fought with armies, so every now and again, as you're working toward taking down the oppressive kingdom of the day, you're made to go up against factions of their army. The fights themselves are actually quite simple, since the mechanics break down to rock-paper-scissors--you're given magicians, archers, and warriors. Magicians destroy warriors, archers destroy magicians, and warriors destroy archers. But there's quite a bit of strategy involved since you're usually on the losing side of things, as far as numbers go, so you have to figure out how to work things in your favor so that you lose almost no soldiers while they lose plenty of theirs.
And the last kind of fight is One-on-One matches. These are very personal matches that occur between (usually) the main character and an important villain of the game. They most often come right after a boss battle or a war battle. Again like rock-paper-scissors, you have three options: Attack, Defend, and Special. Attack > Defend, Defend > Special, and Special > Attack. Strategy is again involved because over the course of the fight, your opponent will say various comments that will clue you in to what his move will be, and if you don't pay attention you'll get smashed. The variety in Suikoden makes the most problematic aspect of RPGs--the battles--much less of a problem, and honestly I don't ever really get bored playing a Suiko game, even while power-levelling.
- The castle. One of the coolest things about Suikoden is that if you're going to have an army, you've got to have a base of operations. So in each Suikoden game, one of the things you do very early on is you find a castle to work out of--usually an out of the way place that's been abandoned by an ancient civilization for quite a while. Its pretty cool, having a place you own in a video game (I see how people get attached to that stuff in MMOs), and even more cool is that as your army grows, your castle becomes larger and larger, eventually becoming this grand place with numerous rooms and several floors.
- Scale. Nothing worse to me, in an RPG, than when there's no sense of scale. I can't play RPGs that only take place in one city, for instance (Evolution, Grandia Xtreme). I need things to feel like its bigger than my character and his friends, otherwise I can't invest that many hours. Fortunately, Suikoden, even though it only ever takes place on one continent, always shows an impressive size to its worlds with its different races (Kobolds are awesome) and various cities and areas to explore.
- The plot. Again, no good RPG relies solely on its plots, but Suikoden wouldn't be too bad off if it did. Each game always offers an interesting plot filled with political intrigue and enemies that are a lot more physical and actually...human, as opposed to most of the games I play, where you end up slaying gods, demons, personifications of concepts and all that other shit that's too cosmic for some.
Granted, you usually end up facing some sort of magical being at the end, but that's part of the fun for me!
So yeah. I'm addicted to Suikoden. Want to play Tierkreis, and wish SuikoVI would come out, even if it were on the PS3. Can't wait to collect those stars again and wreak havoc on another kingdom that's lost its shit. Lunar's still my favorite game, but until Lunar 3 hits stands and lives up to expectations, its not really a universe. Suikoden is.
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