My friend Joe and I beat the game Suikoden III, part of a somewhat lesser known series of Japanese turn-based role-playing games (JRPG). I might say Suikoden and its ilk are in the same vein as Final Fantasy but I can already hear the legions of Suikoden fans knocking on my door, Internet torches and pitchforks at the ready, for daring to compare this beloved series to anything short of solid gold sex. So before I go enraging all five of you, let me put this out there:
I love Suikoden III, and I think it’s the best in the series, probably one of the best of its genre.
Now that the legions of Suikoden fans have proof I don’t know what I’m talking about, let’s break down how Suikoden III fits, and how it averts, the best and worst of JRPGs as a genre.
Most JRPGs have the same core plot, and Suikoden III is no exception: the world is in the process of being overrun by evil, and you and your friends are tasked with routing said evil. Some tart up The JRPG Plot concept by giving you more friends, or customization options, or funny hats for the overrunning evil. Suikoden III takes the ‘more friends’ option with its one hundred and eight playable characters; the vast majority of these exist simply to add variety to the many – and I cannot stress ‘many’ enough – random encounters you must fight between the opening cut scene and the final boss. Still, you are always a group of bad enough dudes trying to stop evil from overrunning everything. I’ll give Suikoden III credit, though, by giving you some dudes who are simply not bad dudes, or at least aren’t bad enough dudes, until you go through many random encounters (and you will go through many random encounters, whether you like it or not).
This brings me to another core JRPG element that Suikoden III keeps: the needlessly overcomplicated combat and character mechanics engine. Now, that isn’t to say that what you see on screen is needlessly complex. Each character has basic attacks to deal damage and runes which grant abilities of varying value, effects like damage reduction, healing, magic damage over an area, and so forth. Simple enough, right?
Then you add in equipment; each character’s weapon has a linear stat progression that must be upgraded using loads of in-game currency, and each character has a load-out of armor and other items which must be maintained (and did I mention there are one hundred and eight of these buggers you have to maintain?).
And random elements; not only are there the usual misses and critical hits, but each character’s inherent stats – of which there are over a dozen – go up by a random amount upon leveling.
And four to eight skills, which modify the values of all the above; plus, each character has different maximum values of each skill, if they’re allowed to access the skill at all. The math behind all the moving parts gets unwieldy very fast. Also, there are many random encounters.
So where does the game start averting the JRPG standards, if the combat is a giant mess of calculus and the plot is Save The World?
Uh…
Still figuring that out.
At the same time, even though the main differences between Suikoden III and its brethren are almost entirely aesthetic, I will say they did a bang-up job with their artistic design choices. The music is amazing and evocative of the setting and scenes. The character art, both the in-game models and the concepts, is consistent and high quality for the time it was new, though I imagine there are people who love Suikoden I and II’s now-retro 2D graphics and simultaneously hate the cel-shaded designs used in III. As silly as the dialogue is in parts (and I’m being generous here by confining that criticism to ‘in parts’), the characters are largely endearing and, if nothing else, imaginative in theme.
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