This. game. sucks.
Now here me out, please, because everywhere else it seems like this game is heaped with praises. It might have been a problem with the disc, but the loading times were atrocious. It would load when a battle was coming up. It would take more than 3 minutes to load a scene.
Even without those load times, it just seemd like a huge step backward to me. Is it just me or did Suikoden III have better graphics? Like, notably better. See, I could have looked past the lack of style if it weren’t for the horrid, horrid pacing of the game.
Suikoden III had an exposition phase but geez. I spent the first four or five hours of the game running around a castle, going through two very, very, drab and mundane looking dungeons, and of course, staring at the Prince running through a grassy knoll endlessly as the game loads. Maybe he’s running away from his own game.
The really sad part? I actually like the story, and the characters are actually interesting. I was really digging the political factions and how each of them were portrayed as having opposite, but reasonable views on how to run the government.
…But the game has some of the worst pacing I have ever experienced. It built itself for five hours or more without a payoff - I wouldn’t invest another second in it.