I always thought that a bit of the heart had gone out of the Final Fantasy games after VI. There were so many great characters, and they all got to play important parts in the story. A few years ago, I realized that the heart had just moved -- into the Suikoden series.

Anyone who feels that FFVI was the last good FF needs to try Suikoden V, Suikoden II, and Suikoden III. FFVI is my favorite RPG of all time, but all of these games come very close behind.

Suikoden I is also good but not nearly as good as II, which is one of the great RPG epics. One nice thing about Suikoden I is that it can be downloaded for 7 bucks on PSN. Suikoden II is a bit harder to get, and usually goes for a couple hundred bucks... good luck. The structure that makes Suikoden great was solidified and perfected in II, but the later games reinvent the formula enough, and introduce different enough characters, that they're equally as great.

Suikoden III is weird because it tries to create a tactical movement based battlesystem in which characters with armor take zero or one damage from peasants with pitchforks (and they fight a lot of them). If you stick with it, you can grow to love the combat -- mountable units like horses and griffons, 6 characters in every combat, an awesome counterattack and weapon skill system. Spells that devastate the battlefield. It's a combat system that is a slave to its story -- sometimes experienced characters join you, and they actually are 20 levels above you.

However, for me Suikoden III is great because of its story. The game is divided into both chapters and separate character perspectives. Imagine Final Fantasy VI when Terra, Sabin, and Locke all get separated on the raft and go their different paths -- except that these different paths make up the first 20-30 hours of the game. Also, while each character path has a main character, they also have 5 or more supporting characters, many of whom end up being just as important to the story. You choose the order in which to play each character -- you could play all four chapters of one story, or switch between them. The stories also intersect, so you get a sort of omniscient perspective after you've played through all the different viewpoints. The game also goes on after that, and gets better and better. I'll stop before I spoil anything.


Suikoden V is probably my favorite of all of them. It doesn't feel as perfect as II, and the combat system is more boring than both of the other games (pretty traditional turn-based), and the environment graphics are disappointingly bland in many areas, but somehow the story makes up for all of it.

It benefits from the improved translations and slightly more detailed writing that marks some PS2 RPGs, but it has the memorable and unusual characters, solid pacing, epic storyline, and real drama of a much older game. There are so many great characters... and you get to have 10 characters in your party at once, with 6 fighting in each battle.

*edit*

Suikoden I and II are for the PS1

Suikoden III and V are for the PS2

A description of some of the things that make the Suikoden series unique among JRPGs can be found a few posts down.

Disclaimer: This thread in no way endorses Suikoden IV. Any side-effects as a result of playing Suikoden IV are not within the liability of this thread.

What is Suikoden about, exactly? What sets it apart?

So what went wrong with Suikoden 4?

And yeah, what are any of these about?

Suikoden is a fantasy RPG series -- there are a few sci-fi hints but I wouldn't call it steampunk like FFVI.


The stories always focus on character drama -- each character in your party has a separate motivation, and the plot pulls people out of your party and throws them into it on a regular basis. In many of the Suikoden games, you will end up at odds with people who start out as your friends, and vice versa. This is magnified by the scale of the game -- every Suikoden game has 108 characters who join you at some point. I know this sounds impossible and weird (why choose an arbitrary number of characters to stuff into every game?) but in actual practice every game has about 70 characters who fight alongside you, the rest of them have other ways that they help you once they join you. Of those 70, the plot focuses on about 20-30 of them and gets heavily into their histories. So, the amount of time the game spends on developing each character's personality is probably more than any other RPG, and similar to a game like FFVI, where a character you haven't thought about in a while will suddenly become the focus of the story.


The combat systems of the Suikoden games are traditional turn based and made to flow pretty quickly, kind of like FFX in pacing -- though they don't have turns dependent on character speed -- instead, fast and skillful characters will get multiple attacks. The combat really isn't innovative, except that you get so many characters, it's fun to figure out what their strengths are. In one game, you get a man rumored to be the greatest swordsman alive about half way through the game, and he's awesome, counter-attacking left and right, critical hitting, dropping two or three people a turn. But you also pick up a kid who lost his parents in a battle over his town, and has some swordfighting talent. If you level the kid way up and give him the right training, he can actually surpass the great swordsman by the end of the game. So a lot of the interest in combat is strategic -- it comes from managing your 70-odd troops, and finding good combinations. Like Chrono Trigger, the game has combination attacks that you discover when you add different people to your party (mostly in the later parts of the game when your party grows bigger than you can bring to bear at once).

At some point later in each game, you start fighting full-scale war battles. These reward you for using a variety of characters early on, because all of the sudden instead of fighting with only 6 characters in traditional RPG combat, you're fighting huge turn-based or real-time strategy battles that use regiments led by scores of your characters.


You also fight one-on-one duels in the games, which are basically cutscenes where you control the action by guessing how your opponent is going to attack based on how they taunt you (it's different every time so you can't just memorize a pattern).



The story in Suikoden is always political and involves the conflicts of nations, but it never gets confusing or too dense. You're always focused on your characters' experience, what they need to do to survive, or what they think is the right thing to do (often they are fighting for survival, which also ties in with parts of FFVI for me, and makes it more interesting than games that jump right to the "save the world" motivation. Each game also gives you some big choices to make, which can affect the plot and even the ending of the game. There's usually some romance though it doesn't usually take center stage. The villians are also usually more human, though there are some total monsters as well. Think conflicts like Princess Mononoke -- people with conflicting viewpoints who are willing to go to different lengths to achieve their goals. Many are ruthless.


I don't want to give away too much from any one game, but I'll describe the beginning of one of the games if anyone wants a better idea... it'll have to wait until tomorrow, though. Right now, I'm going to bed.

Interesting stuff.

The only problem is that I have no particular way to play these, as even if I were into the pirating scene I don'tk now how to work PSX emulators, and ... well, are any of them on the PS2?

Both III and V are on PS2. I would recommend V first -- the games are set in different kingdoms within the same huge world, another unique thing about the Suikoden series.  It doesn't matter what order you play them in, but each game teaches you a little more about the overarching world.

V is great, III is great but quirky. I know a few people who love V and II but were annoyed by the combat system in III, because it's very different. If you end up loving V, then I'd definitely try III.



In V you play as a Prince in a Kingdom where only females can ascend the throne. Your future job is somewhere between messenger and general, but you're young and still training for it. Then everything starts going wrong.


In III you choose one of three characters. Eventually you play all three stories, and then they merge with each other in an interesting way.

A mercenary leading a gang full of younger mercenaries, male and female, who are extremely loyal but a little disgruntled by the jobs they've been getting.

A boy of a small tribe sent to the city on a peace mission. The boy has a pet Griffon he rides into battle... its awesome.

A female knight general from that city, sent to give the boy's village an ultimatum. She's one of the most powerful warriors in the game, and probably a little bit modeled on Cecil from FFIV.



Okay, now I'm going to bed.... I swear...

Sadly I began my Suikoden journey with IV. Haven't touched the series since.

I will try V though, but I'll have to hunt it down somewhere.

Suikoden 2 is a masterpice. The ability system in Suikoden
5 is useless. Suikoden 3 needs an ability points pool.
still fantastic must have games. just minor deffects

Konami : i want suikoden 6. the DS one doesnt count

BTW I'm sorta interested in Suikoden DS. Wonder how good it is ...