Suikoden III

"If it wasn't before, it is now definitely a must-buy,"

Almost a year after Suikoden III’s release, I blundered into my local game store and picked up this fairly unnoticed game. I had a big RPG jones, and the game had been slashed down to thirty bucks, can’t go wrong, right? I had no idea how right I was. I went home, tossed the game CD into that black box on top of my VCR (that would be my Playstation), and proceeded to stay up in the wee hours for many weeks, my eyes fixated on the epic tale unfolding in front of me.
Suikoden III is really an example for all other game designers to take to heart. It takes an excellent story and compelling characters, and really drives them home with a solid combat system and wonderful pacing.

STORY 10/10: This game, has by far, the best story of any RPG I have played on a console. Many, if not almost all console RPGs fall under two story categories. In exhibit A, we see a bunch of kids who somehow get mixed up in the biggest catastrophe to ever occur on their world, while anyone over the age of 16 is for whatever reason on sabbatical and can do nothing in the way of stopping the impending apocalypse (Crono Trigger, Lunar: Silver Story, Dark Cloud 2). In Exhibit B, a main character who has almost no self initiative gets caught up in a completely non-personal series of events and somehow gets dragged along to save the planet, while possibly having some deeeep daaark secret (Crono Cross, Final Fantasy 3). Usually everyone in these games is more interesting than the main character by a large margin. However, Suikoden III offers three compelling main characters. All of them seem pretty cliché to begin with, you have the naïve young tribal Hugo, the callous knight captain Chris, and the brooding mercenary Geddoe. However, none of these three are what they seem – they not only grow, but impact each other in ways that often surprise you. You play as each of them in their own separate campaigns, consisting of three chapters each. There is also a fourth, optional character who I found to be almost a complete parody of older RPGs. The optional character is Thomas, who is a complete wimp, and must help work out the problems of being the new master of a castle while seeing to the whims of its goofball staff. Finally, the game is also very cool in that almost anyone who is important, and has a divested interest in what’s happening in the world will be doing something, rather than just sitting around on his/her duff. I also feel it is important to say that Suikoden III has some of the best written dialogue to grace a role-playing game; I never laughed so hard or got more riled up by any other game, and playing Geddoe’s storyline is worth it just to watch the constant infighting of his party members.

GRAPHICS 8/10: This game definitely has graphics that show a little age. Though it has scrolling 3D backgrounds, the textures get a little “samey”, especially in larger dungeon areas. However, all the characters are well rendered and reflect their personality well. You will not have issues differentiating between party members or important NPCs. Also, character portraits are excellent as per the norm. My only other qualm was that the running animations of the main characters seem funny when you first start out. It looks like their strides are taken a little too quickly. Regardless, you get used to it fairly quickly and it is genuinely a non-issue. The opening movie is also a blast to watch, with excellent cartoon-style animation.

Sound/Music 7/10: It’s rather hard to rate sounds on an old-school, text dialogue RPG. They are all fairly good, in a generic sense, for what they convey. Nothing spectacular, but enough to break up the wordless void that is non-voice acting. The music, on the other hand, is mediocre. The opening theme is excellent, a great sort of tribal song, while the rest of the tracks are hit or miss. Some of the areas have excellent music conveying their feel, while other areas’ music is completely generic. The battle music isn’t great, and since you’ll be hearing it a lot, it should generally be of the best tracks in the game. However the music is far from awful and completely bearable, it’s just not amazing.

GAMEPLAY 9/10: I’m mostly rating combat and the core game play elements in this section, whereas other features will be covered elsewhere. Combat is excellent in that it forces you to actually make party decisions, and assemble it with some sense of strategy. Your party consists of three combat pairs. These pairs can consist of two characters, or a character and his/her mount. The front character generally protects the rear character from physical attacks, unless he/she is a complete lunatic who just dives into battle. The catch is, you can only command the pair, not all six characters. Each pair can either attack, cast one spell, use one item, or defend. As such, a pair of two spell casters couldn’t be laying down two spells per turn. Also, depending on the pair, characters can execute combo attacks that do something special. Some gripe that the pair system doesn’t give you enough control over your party, but it adds a whole level of strategy in putting together different parties in order to get the best results. Considering there are 108 characters in the game, it gives you a lot of options. Traveling around is done much in the same way as Final Fantasy X or Dark Cloud 2. Instead of having a big world map that you run around on, you are given a map with connecting points to different areas. A few gripes: you cannot bypass areas if you have already gone through them. This can be a BIG hassle and make getting around a pain, especially later one when all you want to do is go to one shop in a far away town. A tip to increase your enjoyment: There are a couple characters who can get you around the map much easier, feel no shame in doing whatever it takes to acquire them. Also, some monsters have rather long attack animations, increasing frustration when fighting them. Almost all RPGs are guilty of this, but that’s still no excuse. The menus are also a little hard to operate, however the game handles the exchanging of equipment among dozens of characters extremely well, this could have been a nightmare, but it wasn’t.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT 10/10: This category tackles leveling up and all that, considering there are so many different ways that games do it these days. Defeated enemies give out two things, experience and skill points. Experience is used to level up, and here the game much more resembles Crono Cross than, say, Final Fantasy. Each area has a level cap of sorts, where you gain quite a large amount of experience up to a certain point. Once you get up to a certain level, you gain almost no experience from battles there. People wondered why this was the case, and mostly it has to do with pacing. This allows you the freedom to not fight random battles for hours just to get to level X to beat that big boss. If you stop getting XP for your whole party, you are generally ready to move on to the next area. It also allows you to level up new characters you get later on in the story. In many games, if you pick up a low level character later into the game he will be so far behind that he’s not even worth using. However this game’s method allows the player to bring along a weaker character and get him up to speed quickly and efficiently due to the fact that battles are fairly generous with experience. And yet, skill points are still there to reward you for those extra battles you fight. Each character can learn different skills, some are gained innately with levels, others can be taught by people in the game world. Depending on your character’s aptitude, skills cost varying amounts of points to increase, and can be raised to different levels, varying from E (the worst) to S (da best). This gives the player the ability to customize characters while also keeping them all unique in their effectiveness.

TANGENTS 9/10: I really don’t like calling this “replay value”, as it really addresses, for me, the things that you can do beyond just following the story. I really don’t believe in playing an RPG twice myself, unless I missed a butt-load of stuff story or game play wise. In this sense the game is excellent. There are tons of potential party members for you to pick up. There is a castle where your gargantuan entourage gathers, and it gets more interesting as you gain people. Inside you can race horses, put on plays with your characters (these are great), and read their comments in your suggestion box, among other things. There’s also boss monsters that respawn fairly regularly, which you can go fight to acquire many new items to augment your party. The fact that there is an entire extra character to play is great, many people forget that he is an extra feature, but the designers could have merely decided not to put him in the game. The story does split off into different tangents at points in the game, and you can explore the differences if you feel like it. Also, there is a very suitable reward for acquiring all “108 stars of destiny” that will eat up another hour or so of your precious time.

WORTH IT?
Suikoden III is truly amazing. It is far more compelling than any RPG I have played in front of a television, with great extras and an awesome cast. At the low price of thirty dollars, I really can’t recommend not buying this game. If you enjoy a good story, and are open to something a little different from the standard RPG affair, run down and pick this bad boy up. It’s great.

FINAL TALLY: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/19/03