Suikoden Tactics

"Short, and a waste of effort"

I never bothered about making a bad review for a game, usually I dislike the game and tell anyone who ASKS that the game in question is horrible cause of X Y and Z, hope it sells bad, and their developers don't ever find work in game industry to produce more of the same again. But.. this one is different, first it comes from Konami, and this game has some good points, unfortunately, these good points get strongly ruined by mostly everything else.

If you're not a fan and don't know Suikoden series, must tell you to stay away from this one and I've only endured to finish it so that I could say how flawed it is without having a single worry to bother my conscience. Konami should not be SO lazy next time around. Spending money on a game like this may get them encouraged to make more of the same.

Sticked most to facts in this review, theres nothing said here that you will find to be untrue in the game (unfortunately so), and English is my 3rd language so forgive mistakes.

GRAPHICS - 5

I don't really mind about the graphics of an RPG - SRPG if the story OR the battle system is good, most locations and most visual effects here are quite pleasant to view. Camera angles and characters themselves could use improvements (hard to tell if some are male or female without a face image), however, the general graphics are ok. The item system is a different story, theres not a single picture or animation, items are a bunch of names and statistics, and your characters always use the same clothes.

SOUNDS & MUSIC - 5

Its not Sephiroths theme, neither something to hate, nothing special about the musics and the sound effects, however the character voices are of that kind we normally hate, they talk with the enthusiasm of a dead, rotten corpse, and that only when they're not using the voice of that girl around the neighbourhood whose tone is so DISTINGUISHED you wish her family would move to somewhere far, far away.

STORY - 3

The way the plot is presented in this game defines shallow, also, theres nothing even good enough to be worth mentioning or remembering in the whole plot, its pretty much walk around, majority of dialogs are very uninteresting, key characters are very uninteresting, and SOME cut-scenes are so inexplicably hard to believe that makes you wonder what kind of people are working in the game industry nowadays.

Ships that get attacked from the flank and flee as if this was nothing, people that get shot by cannons at point blank every now and then because they're too lazy to move, bandits and thugs that try to take you all the time as if they were some type of trained soldiers, trained soldiers that talk and behave like bandits or thugs and attack the princess of their own country. The big mans of the country barely have decent troops, and the villain does everything he wants as if he was untouchable, alas the whole impression of the "Empire" in which you travel inside is that its so organized that could be dominated by a pair of tamed Polar Bears in ten minutes.

Oh, and I did not mention its a short game, very short, in fact that counts as a good point here, if the game was to have a bad AND long story.. geez, I could still like it, in fact I can love a game that has ZERO score in all the three categories posted so far, as long as the game has a decent gameplay, but...

GAME PLAY - 2

Now it comes the really ugly part.. How can I put this, I liked the engine of the game, liked the way battles play and also liked the way characters go about and do their stuff in battle, but.. do not be fooled because the game looks promising at first glance, it has just so many cons to these pros:

1 - Extremely poor AI - Enemies most of the time have higher level, even then... they can't do much, the ones that do have the same or lower level than your group are like.. nothing, you barely notice their presence before they die, unless they have ubber equipment they die fast and barely scratch you. The enemies only trace of remote intelligence is ganging up on someone whos going to die or beating up the character over the ground element in which he becomes weak. They do most actions individually and do not act like a team at all, on the contrary, they hit themselves with damage spells, move to suicidal positions, rush to certain death in small groups even when there are lots of them, and they are very easy to manipulate and predict.. well.. the AI is really messed up, that alone already ruined the game for me.

So what do we have.. we have a short game, that has horrible AI, characters and story that are uninteresting... I guess they needed something to keep the players into the game for more than 4 hours, so some GENIUS must have come up with number 2.

2 - In this game theres an EXTREMELY ANNOYING rule, essential characters always withdraw on zero HP, but every time one of the non-essentials (story wise) characters gets to zero HP, he will either withdraw from battle or DIE. Problem is that they simply *love* dying, and some non-essential characters are much much cooler than the story wise ones, and also, there are much more of them in the game.

You're going to end a battle, enemy scores critical hit, character dies, you have to START AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING or loose the char. Playing some battles even 3-4 times until you can have the blessing of finishing it without deaths is very boring. This is so annoying you really have to play the game to understand how bad this factor is.

3 - Save the guest anyone ? Well, we have suicidal AI, guests that cannot die or you loose the map, and they start positioned halfway from your group and the enemies, so you guess what comes next, they trow themselves amidst a whole bunch of enemies, forcing you to enter in a bad position to protect them, and even when you're doing a good battle, someone criticals your guest, he dies, remake whole battle, wow.. thats so lovely.

4 - Sigh.. yes theres still more. The way XP and levels are earned is very unbalanced, it takes forever to level up on someone who has the same or lower level as you, it takes 2 or 3 actions to level on someone that has 1-2 levels above you. Some characters have only non-battle abilities that return ridiculously low xp. You always get completely healed and bad status are removed when you level up, yeah.. if one of your chars has 1 hp and is poisoned, you level him up and he's in better shape that when the battle started, talk about cheapness.

Its not enough that enemies have mediocre AI, they do not get the benefit of leveling up, nor do they use support actions or special attacks. Enemies do not gain experience in battle, nor does guests. You on the other side level up all the time. Well I find it insanely cheap that my troops would heal fully from leveling, I guess it would just make the whole thing a complete chaos if enemies did this as well, at least half of the mistake the developers avoided.

5 - Well, whats left after all that ? Skills ? Not really, there are very few skills and special attacks in the game, that if we talk about our group, if we go talk about the enemies, then theres really nothing to talk about, aside from moving, attacking and countering, rarely they do anything else, even when enemies have skills they cant make decent use of these. Spellcasters on enemy troops are also hard to come by, and the whole game does not make much use of height factors, nor obstruction, as projectiles fly no matter the obstacles in the way.

Other things worth mentioning about gameplay:

Theres a subquest system, its even better than the one from FFT in terms of potential. However, the subquests are only accessible in the second city, and you have to keep traveling back and forth the whole rest of the map to reach it, another un-needed nuisance. Also, lots of quests need the non-essentials chars to be dispatched, so you'll have to keep them leveled, equipped, and ALIVE.

2 kinds of mounts too, but the whole system for mounting could use tons of improvements, its pretty lame to tell the truth.

Element system, most characters have elements, and you can change the ground to reflect elemental attributes, however this system was not well adjusted, it provides too much unbalance as it is. A character on his ground element is god and on his opposite element is dead as soon as he get a decent attacker to hit him.

REPLAY VALUE - 5

You can attain Rank S on practically all scenarios, and receive unique items for doing so, but its sometimes hard to attain rank S and most likely you should do so in the second run. I did not find this game worthwhile enough to try and attain rank S in most of the maps, and I lost any will to replay it. You get to keep all your equip on a new game+ and 1 to 3 extra characters as well.

OVERALL - 4

At least it is not as bad as Stella Deus, that one really comes from the dephts of hell, still some people gave it a good score, makes me wonder not just what kind of new blood is producing games, but also what kind of people is playing games, seems they get satisfied with little to nothing.

All in all, it saddens me when a game has, to summarize, good potential, that goes to waste, this game has some good points but lack of development in all major areas has made it a waste. Had it more skills, removal of annoying and not needed stuff like death at zero hp and complete heal at level up, longer story (I dont care how bad the story is in a strategy game, but short is another thing) and principally a MUCH better AI, I would really have loved it and played for countless hours.

Sadly, even (9?) years after we got FFT, the new games of this genre that we are getting seem to be no better than its lovely predecessor, and on most of them things go even worse.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 04/26/06