Platform Played On: PlayStation 1
Available On: PlayStation 1
Release Dates: December 23, 1996 / September 29, 1999
Genre: JRPG
I did not play a lot of JRPGs for most of my life. I played Final Fantasy VII because I’m the age where you couldn’t have owned a PlayStation and not played that game. The last few years I have spent a lot of my video game playing time catching up. Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, and other Final Fantasy games now all rank among my favorites of the genre.
Suikoden is a few layers below where my cursory JRPG knowledge lived before this year. I didn’t know anything about it before it fell into my lap in a box of PlayStation 1 games that had a price I couldn’t pass up. Doing some research led to it being the first game out of that box that I would sit down to try. I quickly found out that it checked a lot of boxes for me, so much so that I would, about three months later, be writing up my thoughts not only about that game, but its sequel as well. Life takes turns, sometimes.
I am going to go into some story details below, so consider yourself warned.
Common Threads
The two PlayStation games were released about three years apart and, as you might expect, share a lot of similarities.
Both games put you in the shoes of a lead character who finds themselves eventually leading a resistance group against a nefarious king state. You eventually find yourself with a home base and one of the best parts of the games is recruiting various characters throughout the world to come join your cause (up to 108 of them!) Many of them are simply new options to add to your traveling party of six, but many also add something to your home base. Recruit a blacksmith and a blacksmith shop will open in your base, an innkeeper opens up an inn, the inventor installs an elevator so you don’t have to walk up as many stairs, and so on. There is a wide range of characters to recruit and, especially in the second game, have some unique recruitment requirements. One character, which helps you move faster when walking around towns, requires you to run away from a certain number of fights, for example.
In both games you traverse the globe by walking around a world map with random encounters, entering towns, caves, etc… when you hit them. Standard ‘90s JRPG stuff here.
Basic combat is essentially identical in the two. Attack, magic, item options along with a Unite feature which allows linked characters to combo attack. It’s all fairly basic, but very snappy and fun. There are also one-on-one duels and war battles in each game. The one-on-ones are the same in both and amount to a game of rock-paper-scissor with some dialogue clues helping you out. The war battles differ quite a bit, so I’ll cover those later.
One of my favorite aspects of the game is the XP system. Given the sheer volume of playable characters, the games needed a way to solve the leveling issue. What they did was an absolute stroke of anti-grind genius. Your characters gain XP based on their level and the enemy toughness. Take your main party to the beginning areas and you will gain 5 XP a fight. If you have a low level character you hadn’t used yet, however, you could take them to the same area and watch them level up fairly quickly. This both puts a practical cap on your party’s levels and adds a quick catchup mechanism making it easier to experiment with different characters. It’s perfect.
Suikoden I
The original game clocks in at a tidy 20 hours or so for your first playthrough. Add maybe 50% to that if you want to collect all 108 characters. The story has you breaking from your father, a general in the King’s army, to become the leader of a resistance movement once you realize the king is corrupt. The plot covers a lot of the tropes; father vs son, dramatic deaths, heroes winning against all odds, and so on. It’s fine, maybe even good, but nothing truly extraordinary.
The war battles here, like the one-on-one duels, act out as rock-paper-scissor matches. Infantry, magic, and bow attacks are the main options. Certain characters you recruit will be leaders of your units in war battles, bringing their own abilities and strengths with them. If their unit dies in battle, they also die, becoming unusable for the rest of the game. Unless, of course, they are important and they are saved by the plot. I very much enjoyed these battles. They were pretty quick, straightforward, but with enough thinking to keep them fun.
Suikoden II
Suikoden II starts to increase the length of the series. My first playthrough, where I didn’t get nearly all 108 characters, clocked in at about 35 hours. Suikoden III would nearly double this playtime before IV and V reigned it in a bit, for what it’s worth. The story hits a lot of the same overarching beats but generally does so in more interesting ways. You start the game by getting betrayed by your commanding officer and things slowly escalate from there.
The game features a fantastic bad guy in Luca Blight. A truly evil character, he drives much of the story in the early game as you want to find out what his plans are and how you will be able to stop him. Unfortunately, the game pulls the “he’s not the real bad guy” swap roughly 65-75% of the way through. The new baddie, Jowy, was your friend early on and the two characters are linked by powerful runes they receive early on. Jowy’s plan is, seemingly, to infiltrate the Highland Army and take Blight out from within. This is exactly what happens but then he refuses to give up the fight after Blight dies at The Hero’s hand. They try to explain it but I would argue that attempt falls short and the post-Blight portion of the game is mostly weak, story-wise.
The war battles have been revamped in the sequel and I hate them. Easily the worst part of the game for me, they are set up as military units on a map, each with their own attack/defense rating, movement, and special ability(s). This is very nice on paper but I never had any clue what would happen in a battle because the attack/defense stats seem to be meaningless. To compound my gripes here, almost every battle in the game had some unknown condition where it would end before one side was wiped. It seemed like you were just trying to stay alive for a certain number of turns until something happened and one group would retreat to end the fight. Confusing, long, boring fights with really bad, and hidden, end conditions. Hard pass on these for me.
Who Gets 108 Stars?
As far as I can tell, there is no real debate among the community as to which game is better, the common refrain is something like: Suikoden II improves on the original in every way, it is superior. For me, however, I’m not so sure about that. I think if you cut off the II game where you kill Luca (and revert the war battles to match the first game) you probably have an easy winner for me. As it stands, however, the last little while of II lets me down a bit.
The actual gameplay is so similar it is really hard to pick a clear winner. They both do well with snappy fights against a colorful cast of enemies with an A+ XP system.
I’m not really sure which I prefer, although I suspect I’m in the minority even having second thoughts about this.
To make things very clear; I really enjoyed both games. They were a bit of JRPG history I never knew existed but provided good, fun, unique experience with totally reasonable playtimes. I learned that I was a sucker for home base building, what a great way to incentivize side questing! The stories were strong in each, with more than a few familiar names from the original showing up in II as a bit of a tip of the cap for fans.
So, which game is better? I have no idea, but I highly recommend you try them for yourself to find out.
