Double Post: I finished the game. I’ll write my review later tonight maybe, and paste it into this post; but, I guess it’s not like you guys need to read it. 
I’m holding off on Suikoden 2 until the semester is over, unless someone tells me that it’s somewhere in the realm of 15-25 hours.
EDIT: Review’s up.
After my first encounter with the Suikoden series - Suikoden 3 - I was disappointed because I remember enjoying many things about the game, but the combat eventually led me to put down the game forever. I was told later that the first two games were undoubtedly the best. So, a little over five years after my experience with Suikoden 3, I finally got my grubby hands on the first one and tried it. My verdict: People put on the thick nostalgia glasses when they talk about this game, or they completely ignore small problems, no matter how many of them exist. That’s the only reason I can imagine that it’s so lauded.
That’s not to say that there’s NOTHING good about the game. In fact, there’s quite a bit to be liked, and I can sum it up in one word: Style. Suikoden has quite a lot of it, and you notice it right from the outset. The game is a typical JRPG in the way it’s played, but the non-deformed characters, designs that don’t look so much like anime drawings, and the semi-feudal Chinese setting and musical style all lend to that right from the beginning. Incidentally, I heard that the game was loosely based on a historically significant Chinese novel called Shui Hu Zhuan (It has been translated in English to many different names, so I don’t know exactly which one is accurate), so that would explain that.
Even the combat is not so bad, if a bit simple. Suikoden’s combat is that of a tradition turn-based RPG with attacks, magic, and items. The battlefields are in 3D, while the characters and enemies are in 2D, allowing for a bit of zooming in and out with the camera. Magic is done by equipping Runes (each character can only equip one), which allows them to use a certain set of spells, physical attack techniques, or gives them other innate abilities like gaining twice the amount of experience points or the ability to run while exploring towns and dungeons. There are also “Unite” attacks, which are basically combination attacks. These aren’t learned, but are instead innately available to specific sets of characters, so I didn’t find that many. One of the big gimmicks of Suikoden is that there are 108 recruitable characters; this might make the game sound like a grindfest, but characters who are behind in experience catch up very, very fast, making it possible to start using a character at the end of the game, even if they’re still at level 1!
The only gripes I have about combat are negligible. The worst one is that it’s really easy. Granted, there’s not much to the combat, so it’s kind of expected; but, you really don’t even need magic to beat the game, nor do you really need that many attack Runes or anything. A simple “fight and heal” strategy will work on every enemy right up to the end of the game, which is a bit underwhelming. Other than that, you have the option at the beginning of each turn to either run away or bribe the enemy to leave. The problem with these is that there’s no “Yes/No” confirmation when you select these (while there IS a Yes/No confirmation for attacking), so if you pick one of those two options on accident, it commits you to them. It sucks to bribe an enemy on accident and lose a lot of money.
As you can see, Suikoden has the makings of a good game. It’s got a unique aesthetic, simple fast-paced combat, and a story that perfects an old storyline instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, like other RPGs try - and fail - to do. So, what’s the big deal?
Gameplay. Beyond combat, every other aspect of Suikoden’s gameplay is horrendous. Suikoden, in my opinion, should serve as a textbook example to any aspiring RPG developer: Your game is not assured to be fun just because the combat doesn’t suck. Quite the contrary, in my opinion; I’ve played a lot of games with bland, standard combat that turn out to be a lot of fun. This is because, no matter how much combat sucks, the only dealbreakers for combat are combat that’s too slow or absurdly hard. Still, even the most uninspired battle systems of RPGs are at least to the point. It’s very easy, however, to make other aspects of an RPG’s gameplay be SUCH a total drag, which is what Suikoden does.
The worst aspect of the gameplay is that it basically ensures that every last thing takes as long as possible to do. For example, there’s a way to teleport to any location you’ve visited before, but you can only use this feature if you’re at the good guys’ base. So, you need to use an item (unlimited uses, thank God) that takes you back to the base, so that you can THEN teleport to your next location. Why do that? Just cut out the middle man! I’ll teleport back to the base if I FEEL like going back to the base!
Also, in Suikoden, there is no item bag; characters carry their inventory and have limited space for it. This isn’t bad, but consider the fact that there’s 108 recruitable characters in the game - you’re bound to remove a few from your party (almost certainly, since there are several times throughout the game when characters force their way into your party). When a character is in your party, you can hand individual items of theirs over to another party member. BUT! If they’re NOT in the party? You have to go to the item vault in the good guys’ base, have them drop off ALL their items into the vault, and then manually pick out any items you want. …Why!? The game obviously has been programmed in such a way that handing over individual items is possible, so why not let you do it with ALL of your characters, instead of just the six (out of one-hundred and eight, mind you) that you’re currently using?
And money, good grief. You have to buy a lot of equipment in Suikoden, mainly thanks to the aforementioned ‘having to use characters you don’t want to use’ aspect. Even if you go through the hassle of transfering armor from characters you remove from your party, you can’t switch weapons; each character has their own individual weapon that has to be upgraded, so you’re forced to spend money on any character you use anyhow. This wouldn’t be so annoying, if it weren’t for the fact that buying armor and upgrading weapons costs a TON of money! True story: I was about halfway through the game, and I got super lucky on a dice-rolling mini game that allowed me to get the maximum amount of money that can be carried. After equipping my current party with the best available armor, and upgrading their weapons to be as strong as they could be at the time, I had spent almost ALL of my money.
Let that sink in for a minute: I had the MOST amount of money you could possibly have, and I spent almost ALL of it equipping only SIX characters with the best stuff, only HALF of the way through the game. At the very least, the enemies near the very end of the game drop tons of money, mitigating this somewhat. However, you can expect to do a lot of grinding if you aren’t as patient as I am at playing the dice game (and reloading my save if I lose a lot of money).
This doesn’t even scratch the surface of other minor annoyances. Characters frequently force themselves into your party, and sometimes for frustratingly small amounts of time. If you only needed to accompany me ten steps, why didn’t you just officially join my party AFTER taking the ten steps? That way, I wouldn’t have to make me go all the way back to the base to get my preferred characters back! Why do I have to recruit a specific party member just to have a map? I didn’t find this character until over halfway through the game, and it would have been nice to have earlier; not only does navigating the world map feel claustrophobic, but also, you’re almost never given instructions on how to reach your next destination. For that matter, why do so many of the 108 characters have really obscure methods of recruitment? Who would think to go back to a dungeon you’ve finished a long time ago on the off chance that a recruitable character might be waiting at the very end? The sad thing is, that’s not even the worst example I could come up with!
You could try and make the point that such faults were typical of games back in this era, but I don’t buy that excuse for most of these faults. Lufia and Breath of Fire were already released by this time, and THOSE games allowed you to teleport to any town you wanted to. Final Fantasy 5 and 6 were released at the time, and you didn’t have to recruit a random character just to have access to a MAP. Many good games at this time were doing away with the need to grind endlessly for money.
You could also try to make the point that not any one of these things can singlehandedly ruin the fun of the game. However, that’s exactly why I went into painstaking detail to mention almost every annoying aspect I could think of. None of these problems are too bad on their own; but, when you have six or seven small problems stacked on top of each other - almost all of which are ubiquitous during gameplay - it drags the experience through the dirt. No matter how short a game is (I clocked in at about 18 hours), small annoyances in large number can make any game feel like eternity…in a bad way.
You know the expression, “Don’t sweat the small stuff?” Personally, I’ve always thought that expression was horseshit. If you even began to ‘sweat it’, as it were, it’s because the ‘stuff’ in question warrants some kind of attention, and you undertand that at an instinctual level. If you teach yourself to just laugh these things off, they’ll come back to haunt you eventually. That adequately explains what Suikoden feels like to me: A game that paid the price for ignoring the small things.