Suikoden 5 review.

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.

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.
Told you you’d like him.

Never denied it :stuck_out_tongue:

Ah, c’mon, that was perfectly logical.

There were two possible targets at that point:

  1. Any advance into Barows territory meant going through or around Rainwall, to Estrise or Sable, any of which would require a sizable force they couldn’t yet deploy since they were still getting things in order and didn’t have the whole army available for use.
  2. A shabby, badly armed collection of fishermen they already had a bone to pick with, with little to no fighting ability but a huge use for logistics that could become a pain in the ass if allied with the enemy, which to boot had been recently approached about allying with the enemy.

Since she was clearly kept updated by the guards, it was pretty damn obvious what would happen. And remember, Barows tells you to go there precisely because he wants Raftfleet on his side before Godwin takes it.

Granted, that’s probably the most logical one, and I never said I wasn’t able to infer why. But she always, ALWAYS says that she has a hunch, or a guess, or an intuition…or Georg Prime will come back out of nowhere and be like “Yes, your intuition was correct, this and that thing is exactly what’s happening.” It’s great that she’s so smart, but it’s more fun to be in on what she’s thinking, and she never, ever allows any insight. It feels unstable and bewildering as her commander to never understand her reasoning, and even moreso when you ask why in certain situations and she still won’t tell you.

It’s pretty clear that she’s brilliant, especially after the whole abandon every town we occupy but make it look like we’re defending it, lure them into our castle and flood the army out strategy. But! There doesn’t have to be any chance of Roy dying if she just explains her fucking thought process! That’s the problem I have with Lucretia Merces. She’s not a bad strategist like Suiko 3’s Caesar (although he was bad for a good reason), but the whole mystery thing doesn’t do the trick for me.

She’s a genderswapped Zhuge Liang, the whole “You gave me the job so do what I say and don’t complain” thing kinda comes with the huge silly fan.

To be serious, you have got to be pretty damned stupid to stay and guard the castle when the whole game pretty much hammers the Always Obey Lucretia thing down your throat, nevermind that every other cutscene in that section was clearly her pulling a scorched-earth retreat on the enemy, I found the very existence of that choice to be as if the game temporarily allowed you to be completely retarded.

You can guess where she gets her guesses from after the fact. Take the dragon egg fiasco: She obviously sent Georg off to investigate long before you even went there. How did she know? Godwin seemed like he could ask for foreign help, that would prompt the Dragon Cavalry to move, so they may do something to prevent that. How do you paralize the whole army? Kidnapping the eggs. She only sent Georg to scout at first because, as you said, it was basically just a guess and didn’t send Frey there until it seemed more certain.

I found her nowhere near less open about her thinking than Mr. “Here, pull a card. Oh goodie, we’re going with arson then, see you tomorrow”.

Yeah, but that’s still missing the point. Yes, it’s obviously bad to make that certain decision, given the way that things are happening. Still, when you ask her for her reasoning, the best thing she can say is “We haven’t lost the war if we’ve lost the castle.” Okay, good point, but that doesn’t mean you have a PLAN.

You can guess where she gets her guesses from after the fact. Take the dragon egg fiasco: She obviously sent Georg off to investigate long before you even went there. How did she know? Godwin seemed like he could ask for foreign help, that would prompt the Dragon Cavalry to move, so they may do something to prevent that. How do you paralize the whole army? Kidnapping the eggs. She only sent Georg to scout at first because, as you said, it was basically just a guess and didn’t send Frey there until it seemed more certain.

Yes, you can figure out where she gets her guesses from. That’s still not the point - the point is that she never explains things, and as her commander, that’s just downright flimsy, and whether or not I trust her, it doesn’t make it any easier when I have no idea what’s going on.

Besides that, the game also tries to cast doubt on her the entire time: She explains what she did to Arshtat, and that she betrayed Godwin because his descisions upset her personal sense of ethics. For a long time afterwards, you are treated to scenes of the Godwins denouncing her and insulting her, basically making her out to be unfaithful and fickle. The Godwins hate her and don’t trust her. Sialeeds hates her. Even Frey has a pretty good reason to hate her and not trust her. So, how do you know that she’s not trying to screw you at any point? You’re damn right I want an explanation right then and there!

I found her nowhere near less open about her thinking than Mr. “Here, pull a card. Oh goodie, we’re going with arson then, see you tomorrow”.

That’s a bit fallacious, don’t you think? That particular scene has nothing to do with how Shu reveals his strategies; that sounds like nothing more than a particular event that upset you. That’s fine, but that doesn’t weaken my argument.

That’s because there, he doesn’t. You are just left wondering what he meant until you see the actual fire.

I can tell what Shu is doing sometimes, and later what he did, but he’s about as informative with his plans as Lucretia, his are just less roundabout and more obvious. The difference is, you are never given the choice to disobey Shu, the only chance for a real deviation is trying to flee the army, but that has barely anything to do with his strategies. It’s not that he’s far more open about his strategies, he just has far less convoluted and often non-decisive tricks, and when he does, you are given as little information as possible. Take Luca: You are told to form three teams and have a go at him. The firefly trick is something you never find out until he pulls it in the middle of the battle, and it’s rather hard to see how vital it is to the plan since that whole damn sequence was like trying to kill Rasputin. Was it the battle, the arrows or the duel that killed him? You don’t know these things, but since you aren’t sure of how vital they are, you don’t stop to question it as much. Since Lucretia’s tactics are usually clearly imprescindible, you just pay more attention.

We seem to disagree in that you feel Lucretia being vague is a bad thing. Yes, it’s generally a bad thing for a strategist not to be open to her commander, but the fully practical aspect takes a backseat for me because of a single detail: This is a drama, not a real account of a war. Some dramatization in the part of a character is understandable, particularly when the context, though not overtly, reinforces her authority. Again, she’s meant to be Zhuge Liang, she’s eccentric and not easy to deal with, someone who grants you victory so long as you go through with your vow of trust. As soon as I saw the fan, I knew I had to think of her as more of a guiding fairy than a person, which is also how Raja and most of the rest behave around her, often expressing bewilderment but simply waiting and see what she pulls.

That, and she pretty much outright says that the whole theatrics of an unracheable, infallible, perfect planner is part of the job. See the scene with Lelei after Lelcar.

And Sialeeds was a dumb bitch. She’s the one, major inexcusable flaw I see in the game. If I have trouble with Jowy, whom I see as having done shit for reasons that weren’t very logical, Sialeeds just tops all that. Her “logic” for doing what she does makes no bloody sense in context and is largely fueled by the fact that she doesn’t think Frey has the strength to clean up (Thanks aunty, it’s not like he spends the WHOLE FUCKING CAMPAIGN proving that he’s got both the balls and resources), and the reason she dislikes Lucretia is a childish need to hate someone for what happened to Arshtat. Lucretia is upfront about the whole thing with Frey and the few insights you get on his vaporous character (Or at least what the best choices consistently show) suggest he’d be above holding a grudge over that. If he can so easily forgive the guy who shoved a sword through his mother because he had to, he can forgive the woman who suggested what I still think was an imperfect, but still best choice at one time because she had to.

I dunno, I feel like everything Shu did made sense, but you’ve brought up a good point. In that last scene where Shu starts the fire, he doesn’t tell Riou exactly what he’s up to. The reason I can excuse this is because the game clearly demonstrates what he sought out to accomplish and his reasoning behind it. As you mention in your next paragraph, that’s okay to me because this is a drama. But to me, the dramatic effect is weakened, not strengthened, by the fact that you don’t know what’s going on. After all, how can you be intrigued by that sort of mystery? You don’t really have enough information to be intrigued. That’s the whole point of mystery in my opinion: you give the audience just enough to make them want to know more. A lot of game stories that try to add some sort of mystery element just don’t give you shit. If I don’t have something to entice me, why should I be enticed?

That, and she pretty much outright says that the whole theatrics of an unracheable, infallible, perfect planner is part of the job. See the scene with Lelei after Lelcar.

She didn’t say exactly that. She said that you can’t publicly apologize for mistakes, because admitting to mistakes casts doubt on your ability to get the job done, and hampers the troops’ ability to trust in your strategies. That still has nothing to do with explaining the reasoning behind the strategies (although I think that scene was really cool).

And Sialeeds was a dumb bitch. She’s the one, major inexcusable flaw I see in the game. If I have trouble with Jowy, whom I see as having done shit for reasons that weren’t very logical, Sialeeds just tops all that. Her “logic” for doing what she does makes no bloody sense in context and is largely fueled by the fact that she doesn’t think Frey has the strength to clean up (Thanks aunty, it’s not like he spends the WHOLE FUCKING CAMPAIGN proving that he’s got both the balls and resources), and the reason she dislikes Lucretia is a childish need to hate someone for what happened to Arshtat. Lucretia is upfront about the whole thing with Frey and the few insights you get on his vaporous character (Or at least what the best choices consistently show) suggest he’d be above holding a grudge over that. If he can so easily forgive the guy who shoved a sword through his mother because he had to, he can forgive the woman who suggested what I still think was an imperfect, but still best choice at one time because she had to.

I think you misunderstand her. Sialeeds didn’t think that Freyjadour didn’t have the ability to end the war. What her fear was is that even after winning the war, the political climate of the nation would go back to being the same as it was before. Even then, her betrayal was not really to screw you over. If anything, she helped you, because the real goal of her betrayal was to destroy the houses of Godwin and Barows.

As for her feelings toward Lucretia, I think it’s pretty fallacious to just say “Frey forgave her, why can’t Sialeeds forgive her?” You can’t just evaluate someone’s emotional responses and thought processes relative to your own. Otherwise, yeah, I’d say it was petty. But, I’m also not Sialeeds, so how can I say that? If there was absolutely no rational reason, or even a very easy reason to disravel it, then okay. But, saying that her feelings are invalid because someone else’s feelings are different is kinda flimsy.

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.

When I was doing the Defense of Lordlake battle (I forget the exact name, it’s been a while), after beating an approaching enemy almost to elimination, it random retreated right past the defending unit into Lordlake, causing me to lose. I’ve never been so mad at one of these army battles than I was then. (Except maybe the one in Suiko3 I almost lost when Fred missed every single attack.)

No, I understood what her reasoning was. The problem is that it had holes everywhere.

[SPOILER]The only house she actually did anything to was Barows, since the Godwin issue would and did sort itself out with the whole “winning the war and killing everyone” deal. Still, the point was that after the war, Barows and its attached noble houses would again rise to power creating the same political tug-o-war and that Frey wouldn’t be able to take them out without seeming like a tyrant, right?

Teeeeeensy bit of issue there: Barows was already thoroughly fucked. There are two big details Sialeeds overlooked:

  1. He was publically known to be the cause for the Lordlake fiasco, which would make half the nation loathe him. Then he tried to sell out Falena to Armes, which would infuriate the other half. He stole the Dawn rune, which alone would more than warrant severe punishment. When even big-profile allies like Boz and Raulbel gave him the finger, you can probably tell how much support he had left. And there would be nobody complaining if, having liberated Rainwall from Godwin, Frey would just bump him off his seat in favor of, say…

  2. Luserina. The only member of the Barows house with any amount of credibility left and the best administrative skills, who just so happens to obey Frey to the letter. Putting her in charge of the Barows estate pretty much guarantees at least a generation of faithful vassals while the new congress is settled, which just so happens to be exactly what happens in the end anyway. The only difference is that Salum ended up dead instead of imprisoned.

Honestly, I’m half willing to believe Sialeeds just did that to have a shot at killing Salum. She’d have plenty of reasons to want him dead real bad and she is impulsive, but what she did only ended up lengthening the war, increasing the amount of casualties, almost give enough to time for Masrcal to learn how to nuke shit with the Sun Rune, jeopardize the retrieval of the Twilight Rune and overal made things far more complicated than they needed be, so fuck what she meant to do.[/SPOILER]

I may have expressed myself wrong. She has every right to privately feel bad about it, but it turns into an issue when it affects her logical judgement. Fortunately, since she doesn’t have a say in anything, this never actually affects anything, but what I meant was that once I realized why she hated Lucretia, I stopped paying attention to her dislike of her as a way to judge her character, the same way I stopped paying attention to Marscal once I realized he thought of her as untrustworthy because she screws people over out of moral reasons and he was just bitter about being on the receiving side.

I have trouble imagining any battle in any Suikoden that is more of a sheer kick in the balls than Save Ridley in Suikoden II.

[QUOTE=Seraphim Ephyon;6345642) A shabby, badly armed collection of fishermen they already had a bone to pick with[/QUOTE]

That’s the perfect synopsis of so much of the book the games are inspired from.

wow, good review SG… i’m still finishing up suikoden iv (not too bad) but i was planning on playing this one too.

already read some stuff i’m not gonna enjoy very much though. like the small timeframes, and unintuitive ways to get certain characters… i hate being mid-game and having to constantly return to the first dungeons or whatnot just to check if some new character popped up in there for no apparent reason :s