I can always be fairly certain that I am going to love a Final Fantasy game, and I always find that strategy guides help my enjoyment

I hate strategy guides. Ever since I was about eleven or twelve years old playing Lunar: the Silver Star on Sega CD and I accidentally opened the little orange guide to the wrong place and saw a full-page sized picture with a big caption that was one of the biggest spoilers you could possibly have provided for the game.

Also, I actually did get the Brady strategy guide for Dragon Age, just because it was available before the game came out and I was impatient, and that thing is awful. I can't believe how random and bad strat guides can be nowadays.

There was 4 main character, but when you get Budehuc castle and select the flame champion you can gather up to 108 characters.

I actually really like suikoden 3 because it manages to do so many things not just different from other suikoden games, but different from any other rpg I've ever played, and it does a lot of them well.

The stat system was really good. I loved having a weapon skill stat that made you do counter attacks and parries, so you could be a really skillfull fighter rather than just a really muscular one. (I know all suikoden games have this stat, but it made a bigger difference in 3 due to the counterattacks and the fact that you actually moved around during combat and could get surrounded.) Also, armor was incredibly powerful, which made certain parts of the game really easy (like when you're a knight leading a party of knights) but because you're constantly switching parties from knights to nomads to civillians, it really made being a knight in full armor feel different from anything else -- like you could walk around and dominate the battlefield. I thought that was interesting.

The plot and characters were really amazing when I first played it, though it was my first Suikoden (I then went back and played 1 and 2.) The underlying progression of the Suikoden games also doesn't change very much between games. The best games in the series are all pretty similar in that way. Suikoden 3, even if the story isn't as emotional or wide in scope as 2 or 5, does a good job of making the formula feel really different up until the final part of the game, when everything comes together. That was pretty cool. Also, you get to ride a griffon.

Agreed!

Strategy guides are meh.. gamefaqs.com FTW.  My TV is my TV for my PC as well as my gaming systems, so it's easy to flip back and forth, last strategy guide I bought was probably for FFXI since when you are playing that - you couldn't alt-tab out (well before windower)

Anyway, I'm glad to say that Final Fantasy XIII might not be as big a disappointment as I thought.