| 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.
Turns out it's... something different.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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
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
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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!
And yet everyone's going in anyway, just totally ignoring me!
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.
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.
I should also remind you to leave a comment, but I think you'll probably remember.
Water Margin? I had no idea this game was based on the same story as a TV series that everyone talked about when I was a child, but was on just before I was born so I never saw it.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
DeleteTo 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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