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Suikoden IV

The Suikoden series has always been a dark horse favorite of RPG critics and fans alike. That’s because, despite being published by a big-name company like Konami, the series feels a bit like an underdog when compared to comparable titles from Square Enix. For newbies to the RPG world, let me make it simple to understand: going up against Square Enix in RPGs is like going up against EA Sports in football – it’s a one-sided battle you’ll probably lose.

Still, Suikoden has always proven to be “the little RPG series that could,” introducing enough of its own unique features and innovations to distinguish itself from the pack, rather than simply falling in line as a Final Fantasy clone. The series has always maintained its own look and style, and while the graphics are definitely not on par with the best Square Enix has to offer, the depth of the story and characters featured in Suikoden titles has always made up for it. The newest installment, Suikoden IV, is no exception to this rule. Writer-producer Junko Kawano, working with series producer Noritada Matsukawa, has chosen to keep the series fresh this time out by tossing in a dash of Sid Meier’s Pirates and a pinch of Skies of Arcadia to come up with an all-new setting for the series: the open sea. While “air ships” have long been a staple of fantasy RPGs, Junko and the folks at Konami have opted this time to plunk gamers down on actual sea-faring vessels that take you from island to island and nation to nation for an epic adventure that sees the return of nearly every feature that makes the Suikoden series great.

Suikoden IV again offers gamers three types of combat, though with a sea-faring twist this time out; the standard RPG turn-based battle, tactical style ship-to-ship battles, and one-on-one duels. For the first act of the game, the standard RPG battles seem somewhat boring, but as the game progresses and your characters become familiar with each other, you can unleash combo attacks – and this time, even combo magic – to spice up the battle system a bit. There’s really nothing you can do to speed up the revelation of these combos, other than pairing up characters in different combinations and just out-and-out battling a lot; if you speed through this game, you’ll miss half the fun and find yourself woefully underpowered for the final boss confrontations.

The also returns the signature “106 stars of destiny” gameplay element, a system which encourages you to talk to every apparent non-PC in the game, and to do so often, because many of them could end up being one of your eventual army of 106 allies who will take part in the final battles of the game. This strategic system has thrilled gamers for three straight titles and its return is no surprise; what may be a surprise is how long it takes before you begin running across most of these 106 stars. In past outings, you were running across recruits within the first hour of gameplay, at times; in Suikoden IV, the game plays out much more cinematically, with a longer prologue before the first act even begins than any previous Suikoden title. Although about the same length as previous Suikodens, the story is richer than ever in this sequel.

You begin as a knight in the army of the city of Razril, on the island-nation of Gaien. You’re pals with a “favorite son” of the academy, a fellow who ends up displaying cowardice in battle. You step into the leadership vacuum to save your party, but when you return, your ol’ buddy ain’t so buddy-buddy with you anymore and, in true RPG fashion, stabs you in the back the first chance he gets. Not literally, in this case; he merely tells a simple lie (one that I won’t spoil here) that gets you exiled from Razril for all time. And that’s where your adventure as an outcast on a journey of self-discovery – you can’t remember much of your past, another RPG staple – truly begins. Along the way, you’ll begin meeting up with a variety of colorful characters; some are easy to recruit, to the point of being there whether you wanted them or not. Others are nearly impossible to please, and if not pleased and appeased, they will not join. Cajoling all 106 Stars of Destiny into your cause is, of course, the classic gameplay element that defines a Suikoden title.

Aside from the standard combat engine, the ship-to-ship battle system is a mixture of Final Fantasy Tactics and Skies of Arcadia; played out on a grid-map, you maneuver into position to attack, then choose which weapon type – based on five elements of nature – you want to fire. There’s plenty of strategy here; match the attacking vessel’s element with a counterattack using the same element, and the two attacks cancel each other out. Attack with a non-matching element and the consequences are more along the lines of trading damage for damage. Strategic movement on the ocean-map plays a role as well, though the lack of terrain height variance and a variety of terrain types makes these sorts of battles a bit more straightforward and less complex than FFT.

The one-on-one duels, though now more visually appealing, are the least changed and least innovative battle type in the game. As always, using a variant of the rock-paper-scissors dynamic, you can choose Attack, Guard or Special, as does your opponent; if you match, little damage is done; if one guards while the other attacks, damage is blunted; if you choose special on a turn when your opponent chooses attack, the stronger attack overpowers the weaker and massive damage is dealt. It’s the one system in the Suikoden arsenal that seems the least strategic and the most prone to the result being determined by pure luck, rather than wise strategy. Hopefully, one-on-one duels will get a makeover in Suikoden V, which will likely be on the PS3, because they’re overdue for reconsideration and redesign.

The graphics are PS2-standard stuff and nothing to write home about. In fact, the graphics are a bit dated, to be honest, and that’s a shocker. Konami, the company responsible for two of PS2’s best-looking series’ – namely, Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill – has never really poured their best graphical resources into Suikoden; when the series made its debut on PSone, most of the graphics looked little better than SNES-generation games – and not even one of the better SNES games, at that. SII improved a bit but still never boasted true PSone graphics. That changed when the series made the leap to PS2; the first Suikoden on PS2 was Suikoden III, released in 2002, and despite debuting after the graphically impressive FFX from Square Enix, still won many accolades from the critical press, some going so far as to name it PS2 RPG of the year, despite graphics that look like late PSone titles at best. Suikoden IV still doesn’t look like a cutting-edge PS2 title, but it does look like an early PS2 title, or maybe a Dreamcast title, which is as close as the series has ever come to looking like it belongs on the platform it was created for. The character models are bigger than ever, the faces less wooden and more expressive, the camera work solid in nearly every situation, though for RPGs the camera should seldom be a problem.

One much-loved Suikoden series feature, however, is sadly lacking; ever since Suikoden II, if you have a memory card in your machine with a game-save file from the previous Suikoden, you get a handful of different 106 Stars available to you – and some slight storyline changes – than if you play through normally. In Suikoden II, that meant that among your 106 Stars were a few key, memorable characters from the first game, returning for war and remembrance – but only if you had your old save file on a memory card when starting a new game of Suikoden II. It was a feature even Suikoden III maintained, despite the fact that the platform switch from PSone to PS2 meant that getting access to that old PSone Suikoden II save file within a PS2 game was an ordeal in and of itself. But the feature simply isn’t there in this edition, an oversight that, while largely inconsequential to newcomers, is likely to drive Suikoden fanatics into fits of rage that would make the Hulk lend them the name of his anger management therapist.

One huge change for Suikoden IV is the sudden inclusion of voice acting; the previous game could have gone that route but stuck with the silent, read-a-lotta-text approach that has worked well for them on PSone, but tended to alienate some PS2 gamers who got used to some voice acting in their RPGs about a year earlier, thanks to FFX. Most of the actors deliver their lines with appropriate doses of bombast and subtlety, as the situation calls for it. And thanks to a sharply-written script, those voice actors are given more lines than you might expect that offer opportunities to sound brilliant in their performance. Much like the first Suikoden, this one seems to run a bit short for an epic RPG of this proportion. And there is not as much innovation in the title as one would ideally like to see, save for the cool water-effect fade from a story/world screen to the battle screen.

In the end, Suikoden IV, on its own merits, is an above average game sure to satisfy series fans; but it lacks too much on the graphical and innovation fronts to really make the game a classic. Instead, this one will be remembered as, “one of the better PS2 RPG sequels of 2005,” which isn’t a bad epitaph. Until the series gets completely up-to-date in the graphics area and starts innovating more, Suikoden IV can only appeal to genuine RPG lovers. Series fans will find plenty of freshness in the new setting and the return to four-member parties, but for most, this is just a shinier, sharper looking version of previous Suikoden titles. That’s not bad, but it does limit how high the game can be ranked historically. But history isn’t written for another 30 years or so, so in the meantime, I’ll score it based on how I see the game right now.

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Tags: Suikoden IV

Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Mar 10th, 2005 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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