Thursday 20 February 2020

Suikoden (PSX)

Suikoden playstation title screen pal europe
Developer:Konami|Release Date:1997 (1995 in Japan)|Systems:PlayStation, Saturn, Windows

This week on Super Adventures, I'm finally getting around to Suikoden, a game that's been sitting on my shelf for ages. I borrowed it from a friend a while ago and he moved away before I could give it back, so it's just been lying there ever since, unplayed. Until today!

I knew the game was an JRPG when I borrowed it (one of the earliest RPGs on the PlayStation in fact), but I had no idea what the title was about. Typically Japanese games will get an English title when they're released in the West (except for games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest which had an English title from the start), but for some reason this has remained Suikoden.

Turns out that it's loosely based on a novel of the same name. Well, that's the name it has in Japan anyway. It's actually a Chinese novel called Shui Hu Zhuan, one of the four great classic novels of Chinese literature (along with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber), and in English the title translates to... Water Margin. Probably for the best they left it as Suikoden.



The game was made right on the borderline between the SNES era and the PlayStation era, so I wasn't sure if the intro was going to be backstory about how the ancient evil was sealed away 1000 years ago, a montage edited together from CGI cutscenes, or an anime opening with all the characters showing off and posing on a cliff to J-pop.

Turns out it's... something different.

It starts with an image of a stained glass window that's soon joined by two black monoliths, both of them somehow reflecting the entire background despite being in the wrong place and tilted the wrong way. Then a spinning gem flies in between them and super low quality clips of gameplay are projected over the top, creating the image you see above. It's a real mess.

Here's a clear clip of some gameplay for you. Well, clearer; the video compression hasn't done it any favours.

I'd heard that the game has army battles in it, and here's what they look like, apparently. Something for me to look forward to. Well, as long as you get to do them in the first few hours. Otherwise they're going to be something for me to miss out on entirely, because I won't be playing it for that long.

Suikoden name entry screen
Oh no, it's asking me to name my character! This is the hardest part of a game for me, because I always feel pressured to come up with something clever and funny, and then I don't.

I could name him '✕△' to teach the game a lesson for tormenting me like this. Actually no, I'm going to call him 'Dan'. He's Suiko Dan.

Suikoden loading screen
For a moment I thought he was running on a CD here, but then I realised it was just a spotlight. Tintin did it better I reckon.

With all this loading I started to get my hopes up, thinking that the real intro was about to come on. Nope, the game just dumped me in some corner of a mansion or palace somewhere with no hint of who I am or why I'm here.

So here I am in this surprisingly ropey looking room. It has me wondering if they had the background tiles painted first, then scaled them down and lowered the colour depth. There's plenty of sharp lines so if that's the case they must have done some clean up afterwards, but it's still scruffier than your average pixel art. Probably looks alright on an old television though.

Hey I just noticed the characters are being reflected in the floor tiles! The walls too. Okay I'm giving them bonus points for that. The music's pretty decent too.

I walked over to chat with the guy by the door and he turned out to be my character's dad. He's Teo McDohl, General of the Imperial Army, I'm Dan McDohl, and we're about to go speak with the Emperor so he can assign us each an important task.

I'm tempted to pick "I don't wanna," but I feel like that would be letting the game win. Plus as a JRPG protagonist it's my duty to serve the Emperor with absolute loyalty up until the point they turn out to be evil.

Teo's getting sent up north to deal with troubling activity, so Dan's being asked to help out while he's gone. My first task: find a way out of this castle.

Every throne room in every JRPG of this era has a red carpet with gold trim leading right up to the big chair and this has no interest in being the exception, so I figured that if I followed it down it'd lead me straight to the entrance and ended up slamming straight into a wall where the door should've been.

Teo and Dan eventually made it home, with a bit of help from a cutscene, and it turns out they live in a pretty crowded house. As far as I can tell, creepy Gremio here looks after Dan, the cooking and the house in general, Ted is Dan's friend (with a secret), and the other two are bodyguards.

Nothing for me to do here but stumble into cutscenes, so Dan decides to go right to bed after his dinner and Teo slips out while he's asleep to begin his journey north.

Gremio wakes Dan up the next morning to remind him that he's got a job to go to now, so Dan walks right out of bed into Gremio's sprite and makes it disappear! Gremio has 'joined the entourage' apparently, which means he has to watch as I search through everyone's stuff for treasure.

I didn't find anything to take, though I have learned that Dan's diary works as a save point. First save: 9 minutes in.

The town's got the same painted look to it as the interiors (and some really obvious tiling in places).

I've got a bit of money on me so I figured I should go grab some potions and decent equipment before I start work and judging by those familiar signs I've found the right place. Unless I'm wrong and this is the lightbulb shop.

Okay, it seems that characters with green names will get better stats from this coat, Gremio's going to end up with worse or equal stats, and Ted just doesn't understand coats at all. I decided to get the coat and another window came up showing me that I actually wouldn't get much of a stat boost from it at all, so I put it back on the rack and left.

Better to stock up on potions I reckon, which are called 'medicine' in this and apparently only come in stacks of 6.

Once my shopping was done I went to visit my new boss, Commander Kraze, so he could tell me where I'm meant to be going.

Oh crap I wasn't expecting him to make me prove I was listening! Usually in games like this I just punish myself for not paying attention by wandering around for hours lost, but if I get this wrong he's going to yell at me right now!

Fortunately I did actually make an effort to remember where I was being sent for once, so I hit the 'Northeast of Gregminster' option without hesitation.

We're going there on a dragon though, and it's up to me to figure out where that's parked.

Hey what the hell Ted? Where did that come from? Just insulting our driver for no reason.

The young Dragon Knight calls him a punk right back, which really aggravates Ted, who claims he's 300 years old. Uh... okay.

We're all going on this job by the way: me, Gremio, Ted... the other two. It's going to be a crowded dragon.

Then I got a cutscene of a dragon flying across the clouds with absolute no one on its back. Maybe they're riding in its mouth.

We're going to Magician's Island, by the way, to pick up some astrological results from Leknaat the Seer (the younger sister of Court Magician Windy). Those two must have had some cruel parents.

Alright, I've landed in the first part of actual gameplay and now Dan's refusing to walk any further up than this. He's just stopped in front of this dark patch of grass. Is this an impassable patch of grass?

Okay, fine, I'll just walk around it, even though every step takes me a little closer to my first random encounter. Except for diagonal steps, because I can't do them.


25 MINUTES INTO THE GAME


It's a good thing I brought my whole entourage with me as it turns out that Magician's Island is full of monsters. Though the two characters in the back row seem to be more interested in the health window. Don't worry, you're both at full, it's fine. Plus you'll likely be taking less damage back there.

I've got four commands up in the command window, and 'Free Will' is tempting, but I'm worried if I let the team make their own decisions they might pick 'Run' or 'Bribe' or Ted might call someone a punk again. That's not how this team operates. We operate by me choosing 'fight' for every character in turn and then waiting to see if anyone needs healing in round two before doing it all over again.

Battles take place at a similar perspective to that Breath of Fire game I played, except here the ground is all polygons. The camera isn't spinning all over the place like in a Final Fantasy game, but it does zoom in when the action kicks off.

There's no victory poses either, but I did get a level up... I think. I'm not actually sure. Either way I have to skip past a page of stats for every character before I can get back to the 2D realm.

I carried on down the path and found myself a treasure chest. I'm not sure it's a great idea to open strange chests on Magician's Island, you know what wizards are like, but I have to know what's inside.

I got a free leather coat! Now I feel even better about my decision not to buy one.

Though I've made a shocking discovery: every character has their own separate inventory and can only carry nine items, including the equipment they're wearing. Dan's carrying his clothes, the tunic he just took off and two stacks of medicine, which means he can only pick up two more items.

I could see if anyone else will get a stat boost from wearing his old tunic, but that means clearing out a space in their inventory so Dan can pass it over to them. When Final Fantasy did this eight years earlier it had the excuse of being a genre pioneer, and Baldur's Gate minimises the pain by giving you way more space and mouse control, but this is just being awkward.


ONE RANDOM ENCOUNTER LATER


Some dude just turned up and summoned a Golem!

I used 'Free Will' to auto battle the second random encounter, but this guy seems like someone who needs the hands-on approach. This means I've got another opportunity to actually look at what my fighting commands are! I've got 'Attack', pretty straightforward that one, 'Defend', same there, 'Rune' is greyed out, I've got 'Item' for when I need my medicine, and that leaves 'Unite'. What does unite do?

Oh, it means Gremio and Pahn can both jump over and attack at once. Well that's good, it's nice to have some options. And I think the option I'm going to pick for the next turn is 'Free Will', because it's kind of boring to tell five characters to 'fight' every turn.


ONE VICTORY LATER


Good news! I collected the astral conclusions for Kraze and that means I'm not the one being shouted at here.

Bad news! The idiot Kanaan is going to be coming with me on my next job. We're heading to a town called Rockford or Rockfield or something that's located to the south or maybe the east. I wasn't really paying as much attention to my briefing as I should've to be honest.

Anyway they haven't been paying their taxes so it's my job to go over there to collect. Somehow I feel like this is going to make us the bad guys (mostly because Kraze could tell me to go out and rescue orphaned kittens and I'd still suspect an evil agenda, he's got that Sheriff of Nottingham vibe). Still, at least not we're not delivering any suspicious packages that might turn out to be explosive, I've been burned by that in games before.

I looked around for another dragon to give me a lift, but it seems like we're walking this time. That's fine though as it gives me a chance to check out the overworld.

It's pretty nice, I like the colours, though the animation of the water is a bit subtle. Plus it's not letting me save, which is a thing you can often do on the world map in RPGs. Okay I'm pretty sure that we're supposed to be heading... east. Now I just need to remember whether that's left or right.


A SHORT WALK TO THE RIGHT LATER


I can't really complain about random encounters so far as I only ran into one group of enemies along the way, and they were right next to the town. That was my fourth fight in the game by the way, including the Golem boss.

This place is called Rockland, by the way. I knew it started with 'Rock'. Seems like these guys started with rocks as well, as these buildings have a very stone look to them (they've still got those 45 degree walls like the buildings back home in Gregminster though).

The town is run by a guy called Grady, who seems like he might be a bit of a bastard. Kanaan's a bit of a bastard as well, but he's not as bright, so Grady talks him into taking on the local bandits to get the tax money off them. Which means that I have to go take on the local bandits.

But that's fine. It'll be nice to have a chance to go do some gameplay in this game. I'm looking forward to random encounter #4.


SOON


I've had plenty of fights down here in the bandit caves under Mt. Seifu. Well, okay there's only been two so far, but I'm going to be randomly encountering a lot more of them if I take the time to see where these five passageways lead. The game's a bit more zoomed in than the old 16 and 8 bit JRPGs so if I want to see what's over there I have to go walking. Then I get to fight more enemies on the way back!

To be honest I'm just auto-battling through all the fights, because it's much faster and it always works. Unfortunately there's no way to auto-skip the part that shows a window of stats for each character in turn after every fight. 

I found the bandit boss! Then I walked away to grind to level 8 because I was already pretty close. After that I figured it'd be a shame not to save, so I walked all the way back to Rock... town? Rockland! I walked all the way to Rockland to save in the inn. Then I decided to go back to Gregminster to get this mysterious vase I'd found appraised, so I could sell it and free up some inventory space. But then I came back to face the bandit boss!

She's some kind of ant-centaur, with an army of minion ants ready to stand in the way of all my attacks, and she loves making the ground eat my team and spit them out. I can survive her special move, but I can't waste turns (and medicine) on healing all the time as I need to knock those three respawning ants out of the way every turn before I can even start to deal any kind of pitiful damage to the boss.

Oh, turns out it's one of those unwinnable boss fights. Fortunately I didn't have to lose for Ted to suddenly reveal his true power and wipe her out with one move. Ted's got secrets.

Okay now I find a save point! The only one I've seen in the game so far, and they put it after the boss. It says that I've been playing for 1h 16m by the way.

I carried on up the path and soon made a shocking discovery: that ant queen boss was just an ant queen and I hadn't even reached the bandits yet.

I took down the first wave of bandits with auto battle, but this is Varkas the Whirlwind Axe and Marksman Sydonia I'm facing, so I'm going to break out the heavy guns: a fire rune I got from Leknaat the Seer half an hour ago! I actually forgot all about it because I use 'Free Will' every fight and my characters always choose to use the basic fight command.

Equipping the fire rune on Cleo has given her three uses of Flaming Arrows, which leads me to assume that the game uses Vancian magic, and I need to rest at an inn to replenish those three shots. I definitely haven't seen 'mana' or 'magic points' listed on any of the stats screens.

Anyway the boss was a pushover, and we returned to Rockland to hand over the prisoners and collect our tax. But once we returned home to Gregminster bad things started to happen...

Turns out that Ted really is 300 years old and Court Magician Windy is his old nemesis!

He uses that ant centaur murdering magic he has to escape her clutches, but ends up wounding himself in the process, and when he makes it back to our house he knows he's too injured to keep running. So he passes his Soul Eater rune to Dan to look after instead. Then the Imperial troops arrive at the front door.

Ted has a brilliant plan to make himself a decoy so that the others can escape with the Soul Eater, and he makes sure to say it out loud so that everyone can hear!

I had another choice here to either let him sacrifice himself or stop him, so I chose to stop him. Didn't matter, he just ignored me. So now he's the decoy and we're on the run.

Hey it's raining outside! I love rain effects in video games, especially when I can make a GIF out of them. I'm less keen on not knowing where I'm supposed to go though.

I was going to mention at some point how good the game's been at telling me exactly where to go to keep the story moving, but now it's just being awkward. I guess I'm supposed to walk around Gregminster and try every door until I find the right one.

Locked, locked, locked...

Turns out I was supposed to go to the inn. But we can't go back outside again because they're hunting for us, so what do I do now? I tried talking to the two characters who stuck with me, then I tried to leave anyway, but I just got told to stay put.

I hate this 'bang your head on all the walls, we'll tell you when you've found the right one', type of storytelling in games, where you can only continue when you guess what comes next in the script.

Oh, turns out I was supposed to try walking out a second time.


EVENTUALLY


Some dude from the inn helped us sneak out of town using the power of bribery, so now we're going to meet some friends of his in a town called Lenankamp located to the... uh. It's somewhere on this earth. I really wish it was possible to check my current quest in a journal.

But forget that for a moment, look at this cute little poison demon tormenting Dan. It's an animated status effect icon! It's also making me feel a lot better about choosing to waste an inventory slot to carry four antidotes around everywhere, as it turns out they're useful after all.


TWO HOURS INTO THE GAME


Right, I've reached the next town and... I'm stuck at the inn as the Imperial troops search outside, again. All I've done since the last time this happened was get poisoned and walk to this other town!

But this time I've been given the choice to fight my way out! Except not really. I chose to fight and the others decided I must be joking. C'mon guys, I'm a semi-silent protagonist, I only ever talk when I'm making a decision, please take my wishes seriously.

Weirdly none of my team notices the smell of sewage despite the fact that the clock is hiding a secret passage to the sewers, which is revealed when someone comes up to rescue them.

Should I even bother to think about what I'm choosing here? It never seems to matter. The dialogue options are only there to give me the illusion that the presence of a player is required, like the battles that I just auto-fight.

The cutscene continues with Dan being enlisted to rescue those bandits he arrested earlier on. Which is good because I remember where Rockland is and I know exactly where to go when I get there. I won't have to walk around all the buildings looking for the one that isn't locked.

But first I need to spend my vast wealth getting better gear. Hopefully my new party member won't wander off with all the top quality stuff I'm giving him like Pahn and Ted did.

At first I wasn't keen on upgrading my weapon because I assumed I'd be finding a better one soon, but then it clicked with me: I haven't seen a weapon shop yet. Also I haven't got a slot to equip a weapon in my menu. I think this staff is going to be mine until the end of the game, so I really should stick a a lightning rune on it and, uh, sharpen it. That apparently raises its level!

I've also been buying armour, though it's a bit of an effort. I have to put it all on whoever has free inventory space, and then swap stuff between characters until everyone's carrying the right armour to equip. Oh hang on, I can't move stuff yet as now everyone's bags are entirely full... man this is a lot of messing around for +1 to armour. I should've just settled for the 56 armour I already have.

Right, time to rescue the bandits.


SOON


I rescued the bandits. Wasn't that hard, I just walked in and auto-battled everyone. In fact it turned out one of them could've escaped on their own at any time, they just stuck around because dying of dehydration was easier than trying to get their friend out as well.

Now that's done I'm gambling all my money on a shell game! It's okay, I won the first couple of games, so it's totally not a con. Time to bet the full 10,000 and get a proper pay out.

Actually it's time for me to quit while I'm ahead, because I was barely able to follow the coin on the medium bet difficulty, and it's only going to get faster (assuming they don't just cheat and take all my cash).

This place looks pretty nice. It's also a pretty good demonstration of what a typical level looks like.

My first quest for the Liberation Army was such a huge success that they've sent me on a second secret mission, which has taken me across a bridge and up a mountain. I was really nervous about that bridge though, as I still remember how Dragon Warrior would use them to separate different levels of enemies. I was worried there'd be 15 T-Rexs waiting on the other side.

Hey look, a treasure chest just lying there in the open! I'm having that.

Oh no, SLASHER RABBITS! I wonder if they were taken from the classic Chinese novel. Hang on, I'm going to check...

No slasher rabbits in Shui Hu Zhuan, sadly. Regardless, there are slasher rabbits in my path and they're mean bunnies. Looks like I'm going to have to use 'Free Will' for this one!

You know, I think I'm still playing this because I'm waiting to get past the prologue and reach the bit where it becomes an actual game, with enemies I have to fight properly, but I don't think I'm going to enjoy it when it happens. Controlling five characters for every turn is going to really drag these battles out, and there's a slot there for a sixth!

Halfway up the mountain I ran into this shady character with his suspicious inn and decided I wanted nothing to do with it. These paths are tiny, we'll be over the mountain in like three more screens, it's not worth the risk. In fact I actually had a dialogue option saying "We'd better go on." and I chose it.

And yet everyone's going in anyway, just totally ignoring me!

For fuck's sake Ledon, take the damn hint! I don't want to drink your obviously poisoned tea in your obvious trap because I'm not an idiot.

I read that this is one of the games that inspired Warren Spector to make Deus Ex, because he liked the idea of the dialogue options and wanted to try making a game where they actually mattered in any way. Incidentally he ranked the game as one of his top 12 favourites back in 2007, putting it above Super Mario 64 and Tetris, but below Ocarina of Time and Guitar Hero.

By the way, here's something I didn't really notice until I was making this GIF: the text boxes come right out of the character's mouths. That's such a nice touch you never see in anything else. At least I don't remember seeing it before.

Well there you go, I drank the tea. Now everyone's dead and it's game over. Windy and Kraze will conquer the world, or whatever it is they're doing, and the Liberation Army will be destroyed.

I mean sure they're just asleep now, but he's likely going to go slit all their throats after he's taken all their swag. It's too dangerous to let them live, they know about his operation!


CONCLUSION

I love those slasher bunnies, man. They're so violent!

I'm sorry there's so much writing about the story up there and barely any talk of the gameplay, but that what the game's been like for me so far. My fights were all automated, the maps were all short and straightforward, my choices were all ignored. The only times I had to really think about what to do was when it neglected to give me directions and when I had to shuffle stuff between five inventories so I could equip a new pair of pants, and honestly this is the kind of problem solving I could do without. The limited space and inventory management really took all the fun out of going shopping or finding new loot and it just seemed unnecessary to me.

The trouble with JRPGs though, is that you have to play them for ages to really get to see their final form, and I had the feeling throughout Suikoden that I was just an hour or so away from it introducing some game changing feature or plot twist. I already knew going in that the game was going to be about collecting over a hundred characters and leading whole armies into battle, and I was hoping to see how that works, but after three hours this is all I got. No base, no building.

Up to this point it's been so generic and traditional that they could've called it JRPG - Vanilla Flavour, and the only hints that it's been built for something more powerful than a SNES have been the 3D battles and the soundtrack (which is pretty good by the way). To be honest I got so bored of the game after the first hour that I caught myself wandering off to finish other things on my 'to do' list. I had to put a podcast on just to keep myself from straying from my chair.

But I didn't hate the game at all. The battles were pretty frequent but not relentless, the plot was interesting enough, it seems to have a decent translation, and the characters have been... well, actual characters. If you want a classic RPG with lots of cutscenes and conversations this has you covered. Every time I visited anywhere all my characters spilled out of Dan to have a chat and my main job as player was often to get him over to the right location so they could begin the next scene.

If you want a fun gameplay loop though, I'm not sure you'll find it here. It offered me a 'Free Will' option to skip combat and I preferred to take it, so you can tell how impressed with what it had me doing. I went back to the original NES Final Fantasy for a minute to check how it compared, and man that game's a slow antiquated pain in the ass, but I found myself spending half an hour getting my party set up with some good gear and a couple of levels before I came to my senses and turned it off. Suikoden's gameplay hasn't come close to drawing me in like that.

I'm glad I played it though, as now I finally know what Suikoden is (the first three hours anyway) and I don't have to wonder about it anymore. And now that I'm done with it I can get back to torturing myself on eBay by looking up how much I could sell this disc for if it was actually mine.


Coming up next week on Super Adventures: the second part of my Xbox Game Pass article! I feel compelled to remind you that these are just games available with a Game Pass subscription, they're not exclusive to the service, or even exclusive to the Xbox One. In fact one of them got taken off Game Pass right after I played it.

I should also remind you to leave a comment, but I think you'll probably remember.

3 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. I had no idea there was a Water Margin TV series at all, or that the English version was written by the same guy who did Monkey a couple of years later. Hey maybe this will have the slasher rabbits in it.

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    2. To be fair, I only know of it because it was still in the cultural zeitgeist when I was growing up. I've never seen it; I'm not even sure if it's possible to get hold of it these days.

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