Suikoden

"One of the Great RPG's of our Times"

Well I decided to review one of my favorite games to tell the world about it. Suikoden was one of the first RPG's to come to the european markets and since I live in Europe where only few console-RPG's had been published at the time. It happened so that Suikoden was the first RPG I played.

Story 9/10

Story is where Suikoden is at it's strongest. The story includes dramatic twists, great characters (some of the greatest in RPG history, no kidding!) The story has more balls than most childish RPG stuff, and I really don't want to spoil it. but I'll tell you that you'll meet many crazy, cool and magnificent characters on your journey. Suikoden involves strong themes like honor, death, revenge etc. in the midst of a war.

You can name the hero, who doesn't really have a personality, he's supposed to be you, during the game you live trough him. You can also choose some of his responses, that affect how the other characters behave towards you.

You start as the son of the great General Teo mcDohl. One of the great generals of Scarlet Moon Empire. You are to continue in your fathers footsteps and serve the empire. But corruption lies within the empire and soon you are not so sure if serving the empire serves the people living on it's lands. I won't tell more because it would spoil it, but expect a ride!

Gameplay 9/10

Another area where Suikoden stands strong. The meat and potatoes of the game is to recruit the 108 Stars of Destiny to your castle. Most of them are playable which means you can use them in battles and some help you in your castle. Recruiting the characters is fun, you have to do chores for them or maybe bring them a rare item, some automatically join you in the midst of the story, sometimes you need to bring someone you already recruited to meet a certain person so he/she will change his/her mind and join you.

Suikoden has random battles. The battle system is quick and it works well. When you walk in the field, the screen suddenly changes to the battle screen along with a little visual effect and you can almost immediately choose commands, quick and painless.
You can bring six characters to battle with you. The characters stand in two rows. weapons have three ranges: short range, medium range and long range. Short range characters can only fight in the front row. Medium range characters in both rows, long range weapons are projectiles so you can't be countered when you use them.

Magics are handled as runes that are embedded to your hand, there are runes like fire rune, wind rune etc. Spells have four levels so level 1 fire spell does much less damage than level 4 fire spell.

The big battles are a nice touch, although not magnificent gameplay-wise, they work nicely with the story.

Simply put they play out as a visual rock-paper-scissors game, rock being ''fight'', paper ''arrows'' and scissors ''magic'' there are also special commands that can tell you what the enemys next turn is and so on. It's more fun than it sound, really.

Graphics 6/10

The graphics were really dated even when Suikoden originally came out. The field graphics are basically Snes quality, but the battles look somewhat better with a moving camera and decent effects. The graphics do their job, but that's about it. All key characters have drawn potraits in the text windows which really is important to me. If you just had to look at sprites talking the experience wouldn't be the same.

Audio 9/10

Shortly put one of the best console-RPG sountracks ever. The music is great, quality of the sound not so great and dated sound effects too, but who cares when the music is so damn good. Suikoden has many memorable pieces of music. You have to believe me! It really is damn good! Enjoyable music is what makes some of the games scenes affect you strongly. Music can make the difference of some scene being mediocre or great.

Overall 9/10

Maybe Suikoden doesn't deserve a full 10/10 because of the dated looks. But it has so many qualities that makes it one of the greatest RPG's of all times. Truly a wonderful game.

Replay Value 8/10

Lots of replay value, especially getting all 108 Stars of Destiny is very challenging and rewarding. And you probably can't recruit all of them in one try unless you use a guide. After that you'll just want to return to it like you'll want to re-read a great book.

Rent or Buy
Well Suikoden isn't the longest RPG out there, still it's an RPG (long) and it's good so you be a nice boy/girl and buy

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/05/02, Updated 08/05/02