Series Retrospective: Suikoden

Behind the obvious Final Fantasy series, my favorite role playing game series is most likely Suikoden. It's a series that few have discovered, but those that have are very devoted to. Just look at ebay auctions for the limited released Suikoden 2 for evidence of fan devotion. There are so many reasons to love these games though.

Suikoden did many things different from other Japanese RPG's when it came out. Instead of a party of characters 1-10 or so in size, it brought 108 to the table. It was based on a classical Chinese novel involving 108 stars of destiny that gather together at a moment in time. You are usually the first star, the Tenkai Star, and the one with whom all the other stars gather. As it works in all the games, you're the leader of an army essentially, and you're gathering troops.

This leads to another of the features that stand out in the series, combat. While primarily combat is the normal RPG type, there are many skirmishes between your army and other armies. In the first game these worked out as rock-paper-scissors type battles where you would attack with a charge, a bow attack or magic. In later installments however, military encounters played out like a grid based strategy game. You'd move your units around a map and have them attack enemy units. Thrown on top of all of this, is one on one duels.

Its these things that drew me into the game, and its the characters and their stories that kept me coming back. Unfortunately, after the third game, the main story writer left. He had supposedly been building to something for the fourth game, but that was never fully realized. Instead, others have continued the games in his absence, and in my eyes, the series has fallen significantly in greatness. While all the normal features were technically there in Suikoden 4, the story was set more then 100 years before the first game, probably to help hide the fact that they had no idea where to take the characters we had already been introduced to, and it lacks a lot of polish. The fifth game did a lot to make up for the fourth, but it just doesn't seem to be on par with the first three games.

If you are out of the loop on these amazing games, a new way to catch up seems to be here. Recently, the first game was released on the Playstation Network, so those with a PS3 or PSP can purchase it for the measly amount of $5.99. With the amount of sequels to games previously released on PSN, there's a good chance that the second will come out there too. Meaning you will no longer have to shell out more then $100 to get it on ebay. I couldn't reccommend these games highly enough to those looking for a new series to familairize themselves with. Whether you want to move on from those and find copies of 3, 4, and 5 on PS2 is up to you, but picking up the first and hopefully the second on PSN is a no brainer.