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REVIEW: Suikoden III

Turns out, 2002 is a pretty good year of RPG lovers who own PS2.

It could have been a great year … even the best year ever … but titles like Enix’s forthcoming Star Ocean: Till the End of Time and Namco’s XenoSaga slipped past the holidays and into 2003.

That’s fine, though, since this year’s crop contained some gems. Square’s groundbreaking Disney team-up, Kingdom Hearts. Eidos’ flashback tree-hugging classic, Legaia 2: Duel Saga. Sony’s graphically innovative Wild Arms 3. The battle-heavy Grandia Xtreme. Even Onimusha 2, which arguably evolved from a ninja-influenced survival horror title into an action RPG this time around.

But the best of them all comes from Konami: Suikoden III.

No one’s gonna love Suikoden III for its graphics. Sure, they’re okay; but it’s nothing the Dreamcast couldn’t have pulled off. Today’s PS2 gamers expect more.

Does this mean the game’s ugly? Not by any means!

Sporting the manga look, if Suikoden III had appeared on Dreamcast as a launch title, it would have been one of 1999’s best-looking games. But that was three years ago and while time has gone by, Suikoden III still looks no better than a 1999 Dreamcast launch title.

Charming, cute and yet a bit simplistic and rough.

Of course, that’s light years ahead of the first Suikoden title. When Suikoden appeared on PSone in 1996, fully one year before Final Fantasy VII made RPGs more than a niche market genre, it looked retro; way retro.

Instead of looking anything like a 32-bit game, the first Suikoden looked like an SNES title, and a really early one at that. The look of the game improved with Suikoden II, but never was in the same league as a Square title.

But top-level graphics aren’t what make a Suikoden fan’s heart go pitter-pat anyway…

No voice acting.

Very little music.

Just enough atmospheric sound effects to get by.

Sound was pretty much overlooked by Konami on this title. I guess if you’re not going to play at Square’s level, there’s no point in trying, eh, Konami?

To be fair, Suikoden isn’t the cash cow for Konami that Metal Gear Solid or even Zone of the Enders or Silent Hill is.

So there’s not much sound here to judge.

’Nuff said?

Here, at last, is the strength of the Suikoden series. Here’s where the game takes its competitors and puts a boot up their arse.

The essential appeal of Suikoden as a series is the variety of gameplay; it boasts three types of battle environments!

The most common is a turn-based encounter system that most RPG fans should be familiar with.

The next is a strategy-RPG element that plays a bit more like RISK than Final Fantasy Tactics, but is fun nonetheless.

And finally, there are one-on-one duels that play somewhat like a game of rock-paper-scissors.

Just when you think the game is getting a little standard, it tosses you a strategy RPG battle or duel, just to keep you on your toes.

There’s a lot of strategy involved in whose weapons to sharpen, how to spend skill points and grow your character, who to buy the best items for if your party is on a budget.

Plus, with the 108 Stars system, Suikoden III encourages you to talk to every NPC in the game because if you don’t, you may not recruit all 108 stars and without all of them, the best victory and best ending to the game won’t be yours.

Some of these stars are easy to recuit, like that “popular” member of the cheerleading squad that eventually dated everyone in school. Others, you have to impress first by accomplishing certain tasks … kinda like the moral girls who want a ring and a wedding date before the first kiss.

The star system aside, the innovation here is how the story unfolds; there are three major characters, three minor ones and you can play through the game in any order you want to, playing all the characters sequentially so that you do all the “chapter 1” adventures, then all the “chapter 2” adventures and so on; or you can play one character from start to just about finish, then start all over again with another character until they all come together for the denouement.

This “separate stories coming together” is a structure Wild Arms 3 used as a prolog but then abandoned; in Suikoden III, the group fragments are kept apart much longer, allowing Konami to tell its story from many perspectives, kind of like an episode of NBC’s Boomtown or like Sega’s classic strategy RPG, Shining Force 3, which came out in Japan in three separate carts, each telling the same story from a different, opposing viewpoint. That’s what you find here and a simple action like a character striking out to defend herself, resulting in a fatal blow, can be seen from viewpoints that are sympathetic to both the attacker and the attackee. Interesting stuff and bold storytelling.

I could bore you with tons of details on the leveling-up systems and battle systems and all the usual crap reviewers of RPGs focus on; but none of that would tell you what you need to know most in order to decide whether this game is worth buying: Suikoden III tells a great story with great characters, offers a lot of variety and, despite its graphical and audio deficiencies, is still the best RPG of 2002.

Anyone who doesn’t appreciate Suikoden III probably is too concerned with the trivial stuff and not concerned enough with what matters. Suikoden III is fun, has a substantial story to tell and tells it well.

’Nuff said.

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Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Aug 3rd, 2003 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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