So, I technically didn’t beat the game yet. The last dungeon is a fucking nightmare beast of a bad game design decision, and it took every ounce of self-restraint not to spend four paragraphs on my horrible experience with it.
Still, all I need to do is beat the last boss. If my opinion seriously changes that much after seeing the ending, I’ll revise my review.
Let me make something clear before we begin: I really, honestly enjoyed Suikoden 5. It’s better than almost every game in the series (which, if you ask me, isn’t that hard), but it’s also an excellent game in its own right. …But, do you ever just play a game and find yourself baffled by certain game design choices? I struggled with this problem in Suikoden 5, much like I did with the very first game of the series. Thankfully, the assortment of annoyances didn’t prove to be a dealbreaker for me as it did with the original Suikoden. However, it’s hard to believe that we’ve arrived at Suikoden 5, eleven years after the series started, to find similar small problems.
After three experimental installments, Suikoden 5 is a return to the classic form established by the first two games…for better or worse. Movement in towns and on the map is presented in an overhead isometric view, similar to the first two games, only in 3D. Gone are the cinematic, rotating cameras of Suiko 3 and 4; now, all you can do is zoom in and out.
Battles are a return to form, too. You can take six characters into combat that will attack with weapons or cast magic with the aid of Runes - items that give special abilities and spell sets to a character, of which they can use in limited quantities. Hell, even the camera angle for combat is just like the first two games. Returning as always are the 108 recruitable characters, as well as war battles (which are slightly realtime!) and one-on-one duel battles.
However, a return to the form of a game that came out eleven years ago means that the game feels quite antiquated. Why aren’t there any substantial changes to the core gameplay? If Suikoden 3 and 4 were too experimental, then Suikoden 5 is not experimental enough. And, why do the duel battles keep returning? They’re basically Paper-Rock-Scissors where one of the choices is inherently safer than the other two.
The war battles, which are now in semi real-time (you stop to issue orders for healing, long-range attacks, and movement), are pretty cool, but they’re also marred by strange troubles. Every time a unit engages an enemy in combat, the camera has to go all the way over to them and SHOW YOU that they’re going to fight! This throws any notions of micromanagement out the window, as you can be trying to give precision orders and be abruptly whisked away to the other side of the map.
And here’s a doosy of a problem: when a unit engages an enemy in combat, whoever loses the skirmish will retreat in a random direction. Well, if you or your opponent is at the edge of a map, they might not be able to run away, forcing them to engage each other until one of them dies. If the person who is going to die will be you…tough shit. Also, you can force an enemy to retreat into another one of your units. You’d better hope they’re not about to die!
A huge point of contention between me and the entire series is the recruiting of the 108 characters. I don’t dislike the concept in and of itself. What I dislike about it is that you are forced to get all 108 characters to get the best ending. That fact is contrasted by having many characters with obscure, unintuitive recruitment methods, and even characters which can only be recruited within a specific timeframe. Suikoden 5 takes this to a new level - there are over twenty missable characters, and some of those characters can only be recruited if you have certain characters already in your party. This not only forces you to be prudent about it, but it almost forces you do recruit the characters in a certain order, too.
I also feel that this game mechanic interferes with the story’s narrative. Suikoden games always revolve around war. On top of that, you have to be recruiting characters after every storyline event (unless you want to miss some and not get the best ending!). What this means is that you essentially have to tell your military strategist, who demands swift and decisive action from you, “Nah, fuck that, I’m gonna go recruit some guys!”
I know this can be done better, because Suikoden 3 and Suikoden 4 handled it in a much nicer way, with only a few missable characters. Suikoden 5 also frequently wants you to perform lengthy fetch quests/side quests to recruit them, meaning that you have to spend a TON of time recruiting them. I finished Suikoden 5 in about sixty hours, and at LEAST ten of them were spent recruiting - I’d lean more towards fifteen.
…But, aside from the character recruitment and the STUPID last dungeon (you have to fight the bosses all over again if you leave after beating them - seriously?), I have to admit that the combat was just fine, if a bit stale. The war battles, with all their flaws, were never unbeatable as a result (in fact, they were superfluously easy, but I don’t think that should allow them to supersede criticism). The game wound up being pretty fun, even if the design choices left my scratching my head and cussing a little.
There must be more to it than competent-yet-unoriginal gameplay, though, right? That’s where the story comes in. Suikoden 5 is set seven years before the events of the original game. You are the prince of the Queendom of Falena. Your job is to do small political tasks that are important, but not important enough for the Queen herself to oversee. Eventually, the royal capital is invaded, and the prince escapes with his bodyguard Lyon, his Aunt Sialeeds, and one of the Queen’s Knights, Georg Prime (from Suikoden 2). From there, the prince attempts to gather an army and try to retake the capital.
This is pretty standard fare for a Suikoden game, and it’s also one of the only times the whole political warfare/statecraft is done really well in the series. I’ve heard some fans compare the game’s story to Suikoden 2, but I don’t really get it; to me, comparing Suiko 5 to Suiko 2 is like comparing Star Wars to Waiting for Godot. Sure, both are ‘good stories’, but the way in which they are good is completely different. While Suikoden 2 attempts to tell a story that has a lot of depth, Suikoden 5 simply tries to paint an amazing, exciting adventure - a story that has a lot of breadth. I admit that I prefer the depth that Suikoden 2 gave me, but there’s nothing intrinsically better or worse about either style; they’re just different.
That being said, Suikoden 5’s superficial narrative is done very well. The only thing that weirded me out about it is that the game really set the stage for a deep storyline. The first ten or twelve hours of gameplay consist of the prince going from place to place for the Queen, meeting people and overseeing certain tasks with Lyon, Sialeeds, and Georg. During this incredibly long introduction, the game goes to painstaking detail to educate you about Falena’s detailed culture and the state of its governmental affairs and citizens. You can clearly see that something is wrong with the state of the nation, and it seems like the game is going have us scrutinizing the value of tradition, and our need to constantly re-evaluate them in light of an ever-changing national and social climate. This is all before the capital, Sol-Falena, is invaded, and any notion of the themes of tradition are thrown out the window.
Thankfully, while the game sacrifices the good idea it sets up, the sheer excitement and craft of the storytelling is good enough to hold the game afloat on its own. These sorts of stories rely a bit on the originality of their plot twists, something I tend to dislike, since there’s not really that many good surprises one can pull off in a narrative. However, I have to admit that there were some really good ones in Suikoden 5 that successfully surprised me…which is surprising, because I consider myself pretty jaded in that respect.
I should also mention that many of the characters are done very well. Particularly, Georg, Sialeeds, and Miakis - the bodyguard of the princess - all feel really human. Their interactions are interesting. They are serious when the need arises. They are funny when it’s appropriate. The show a wide range of emotion, and in the end, I feel like they are my friends and companions.
There is one character in particular that bothers me, though: the military strategist of the prince’s army - Lucretia Merces. You recruit her by rescuing her from a prison cell. Before you even leave the cell, Lucretia says that the opposing army will be attacking a certain town, if her intuition is correct. Her intuition? Wow. She makes a lot more executive decisions in the course of her game based on her BRILLIANT intuition, and they’re all correct. Funny thing is, she almost never reveals the thought process that gave her these intuitions. This is a big reason why Lucretia is ultimately less interesting than she could be. Shu, Suikoden 2’s strategist, did the craziest things, but would reveal before or after why he decided to do that, and it was always awesome. Lucretia, for all I know, was winning the war on a series of brilliant hunches, leaving me with a sense of bewilderment.
In the end, though, despite all of the game’s flaws, I had a really good time with Suikoden 5. It’s been said by many series fans already, but this game really puts the series back on course. The gameplay had made some puzzling decisions, but it wasn’t terrible. The story was a little bit confused with what it wanted to do, but the experience was enjoyable all the same. I would say something at this point like “I hope they keep going with this”, but I’ve already played the next game in the series - Suikoden Tierkreis - and I know they didn’t. Still, Suikoden 5, if nothing else, is proof that no matter how far you stray from your roots, it’s never too late to turn back.