"An Old Story": Retro Review, Suikoden II

Overall Score: 5.4/5

S 

(Yup, some games are just so good they go beyond the A rank)

Gameplay: 5
The cockpit instrument panel of the Mitsubishi Zero has been described as a "marvel of simplicity ... with no superfluities to distract the pilot." That pretty much sums up the gameplay of Suikoden II. It is simple and straight forward in the best way possible. There is nothing extra to over complicate things or otherwise distract the player.

"RinRin", "RanRan", and "TenTen", these chicks Filipinas or something?

Gameplay consists of a world map when travelling between towns and dungeons and said towns and dungeons. The towns are your usual fare for an RPG, you'll find various shops and inns where you can restock, upgrade your equipment and rest/heal up. As with RPGs of the era combat happens in the form of random encounters on the world map and the dungeon, and are menu based. Unlike Final Fantasy VII's Active Time, you issue your commands all in one session, rather than real time. You have the option for physical attacks, magic, use of items, defending, or if you have the right characters in your party, special Unite attacks.

Along with the typical party battles, are large scale, turn based strategy style army battles. Here you have cavalry and infantry, with the only difference being movement range. Though some units can increase movement range in special areas like forests. There are three classes, troopers, archers and mage. Troopers are your strong close combat units, while archers and mages can attack from a distance. Mage units are also capable of casting area of effect spells. The outcome of battles depends on your ATT and DEF stats and the stats of your target. Fights between units is demonstrated though an animated clip with units either charging at each other, firing arrows, or casting spells.

Lastly there are the one-on-one duels. While they might look like a fighting game style fight, they are still essentially glorified menu battles. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since several key plot elements and character recruitment hinge on duel outcomes, I could see it being infuriating to lose because a player isn't any good at fighting games, and this isn't supposed to be a fighting game. Instead these duels work by giving you three options. "Attack", "Defend" and "Wild Attack", where each one is weak against one and strong against another. While it might seem random which option to choose, the enemy's dialog drops hints as to what they're going to do, helping you decide which option to chose.

Sprinkled in between are various minigames and sub-quests. One sub-quest involving a recruitable character is a series of Iron Chef style cook off minigames where the player gathers recipes and ingredients to prepare a 3 course meal for various judges. The judges being the characters you've currently recruited. Other minigames are fishing and rock climbing, while another is a gambling game played with three dice called "Chinchirorin", the game is also known as "cee lo" and has been rapped about by Biggy and the Wu Tang Clan. When you see guys in 'da hood playing a game with three dice, or those gangsta movies where you see some guys crouching around a piece of cardboard on the floor in some alley that they're tossing dice on? Same game. 

Chinchirorin in real life. Sucks to be that guy, his hand is only a 2. At least he didn't roll 1-2-3. 

In fact, Chinchirorin is one of main ways to farm money in the game (which is funny because it's probably one of the main ways some guys farm money in real life). You save your game, bet a huge amount of money and save again if you win, and reload the last save if you lose. Another minigame and way of making money is though trade. This is pretty straight forward and has you travelling around the region and even into the neighboring Toran Republic, to buy goods cheaply at low prices in one area, then gouge people for it and sell high in another area. But be careful, flood the market in one area and you'll drop the price of what is selling high.

Given that, like other RPGs of the era, the menu based gameplay lends itself well to playing on a touchscreen smartphone interface.


Graphics and visuals: 5
In an era where other developers like SquareSoft were moving towards making use of pre-rendered backgrounds, polygon characters, and 3D environments, Konami stuck with using 2D sprites for Suikoden II. Despite being sprites, there is a fair amount of detail included, there is even animated boob jiggle with the large breasted bodyguard Oulan (who can be a veritable wreaking ball), and wind rustling animation for hair and clothing in some instances. In addition to the sprites, the menus and dialog boxes make use of hand drawn character profiles.

The vast majority of the storytelling is  done though in-game graphics rather than Full Motion Video cutscenes, though there are a handful of FMV cutscenes. While those FMVs in Final Fantasy and Parasite Eve are beautiful and helped to showcase what the PS1 could do, the use of in-game graphics in Suikoden II lends to seamless story telling. Which in it's own way is just as effective.

The game also doesn't suffer from any weird kind of texture tearing or warping. Since the game is all 2D, there isn't a problem like draw distance or texture popups. By and large everything runs very smoothly, there are no arbitrary one second pauses here and there for the game to catch up and load.


Stability: 5
Aside from one very bizarre glitch that only happened to me on one occasion where I could not leave a building due to the game failing to load the next area and instead had me running out the black margins of the screen, I haven't had any stability issues with this game. Played on both the North American PS1 and the PSP, I have not encountered any crashes, freezes or other show stoppers in the game. Even that single strange glitch that happened on a PS1 (fat) system, I haven't been able to reproduce. For all I know it could have been a hardware hiccup that had nothing to do with the game itself.


Plot: 6
The plot is noting short of amazing. Easily a masterpiece among the genre, nay, video gaming in general. It blends human drama, with political intrigue, within the frame work of a massive and brutal war. It does so in a way with may shades of grey that add depth to the plot, and at the same time, successfully avoids beating particular themes over the player's head. Hell I'll go as far to say that it would make a great translation into a novel, tv series, or OVA.

The plot focuses on the mainly silent protagonist, whom you get to name at the start (though in canon his name is Riou), and his childhood friend Jowy, and their respective journeys though a winner-take-all war between the regional powers of their homeland.

The war raging is between the Kingdom of Highland, and the neighboring Jowston Alliance, a loose confederation of city-states allied in response to the common threat of Highland, somewhat like NATO. Two long time antagonistic neighbors residing in the Dunan Region of the continent (to the south is the Lake Toran region where the first Suikoden took place, and to the west is the Grasslands where Suikoden III takes place). The telling of this war story is part of where the plot shines like 108 stars. Neither the Kingdom nor the Alliance has clean hands, with both sides having legitimate grievances against the other and having done dirty to the other. This shades of grey allows the plot to show both sides as human, as opposed to a cartoon like distinct good and bad. You'll find yourself sympathizing with characters on both sides, even people who are the primary antagonists. One of these antagonists even goes on to become one of the protagonists in Suikoden III.

Highland's Royal Family and the leaders of the Alliance

Within the larger plot of the main Jowston-Highland war, are various sub plots that involve the player travelling around the region, reuniting the various Allied city-states. Each of these "business trips" involves resolving some matter facing the particular city-state and either hampering their war effort or driving them to bide their time. You'll encounter everything from city-state leaders who feel the war needs to be continued at all costs and Highland be defeated, to defeatists who think it's best to make peace and accept Highland tyranny, to the shady opportunist looking to play both sides against each other and size the land for themselves.

As this war rages, there are 108 recruitable/playable characters, and most of these characters have their own story. They're not just faceless bodies to recruit for their abilities. You have Alliance loyalist and Highland defectors that join. You have people who join out of their own personal reasons that range from paying a debt owed to the player, to literally having nothing else better to do (one character fights in your army literally because his dad was tired of him bumming around and conscripted him into the player's army). You even have returning characters from the first Suikoden playing critical roles in the plot. Former Liberation Army leaders Flik and Victor play key roles in Suikoden II's plot. In fact, the former Scarlet Moon Empire of the first game, now called the Toran Republic, makes a cameo appearance in SII. The game also makes efforts for the player to learn more about each of these 108 characters. Aside from side quests, there is one recruitable character who works as a private investigator. You can actually hire him to get you information on the other characters. In one of the minigames, the characters serve as judges for a cook off, and the announcer will give a little bit of background information on them as he introduces them. 

Not all the 108 recrutable characters, but gives you the idea of each character. Each has their own distinct design. 

Along with the 108 characters, there are also large numbers of generic characters that start to fill your Headquarters castle (that you get to name) and give the fortress the feeling of a bustling city as well as a military command center. Even the generic characters all have their own dialog that changes from time to time.

While largely silent, the protagonist also doesn't appear to be one-dimensional. He's not a super man who can do anything and everything. In fact, he actually has something of a support staff behind him, with the Army's chief strategist and tactician Shu, handling all the military and political planning from behind the scenes, and his sister Nanami always covering his back. This also goes to show the complexities of war, and that it isn't all a one man show. When asked why Shu doesn't just lead the army, he open admits that he lacks the ability to inspire and leadership qualities, and that his place is behind the scenes. On the same token, adding to the human element, in another scene Viktor reminds the protagonist that he's his own person and not just the grandson of a war hero, to carry on the fight because he believes it, not because people pinned their hopes on him because of linage. While the protagonist is the leader of the Allied Army, the entire war effort is one big group effort, with even the civilians living at the HQ castle donning uniforms to form a phantom army to distract the Highland forces in one instance. On the surface it seems like a bad idea to draw some of the player's attention from the main character, it also leads the player to care about the other characters as well.

You'll always find Viktor and Flik at the front in the thick of it.

Riou (forground) always has Nanami watching his back and  Shu planning the Allied war effort.

The plot is also long, but not so long as to drag. Taking the time to level up and recruit all 108 characters takes around 30 hours. The pacing of the plot is done very well, and the plays like a well written novel reads.

One aspect that impressed me was the portrayal of the Jowston Alliance. It reminded me very much of the United States under the original Articles of Confederation. Hobbled by political infighting and at each other's throats every bit as much as at Highland's throat. It was this kind of infighting that eventually lead to the US's current constitution. But in the case of the Alliance, a war broke out before a constitutional convention could be called. In some sense the game is like a "what if" if the US was under the Articles of Confederation when the War of 1812 happened, as opposed to being a unified federation. Instead we have a paralyzed alliance of 5 sovereign states that can't decide on anything. Part of the plot centers around reuniting the scattered members of the Alliance, utterly demoralized by initial defeats. The way they went about it, they were able to integrate the complexities of politics into the plot, without being dry and boring about it.

I found this interesting that they would go this route in terms of plot. Sure these days, political intrigue in games are a dime a dozen as plot elements *cough*Metal Gear saga*cough* but at the time when this game came out in the late '90s, video game story telling was rapidly maturing beyond "kill the invaders!" This is also the time period where video game stories started taking on a human drama element, and Suikoden II does this very well.


Music and art style: 6
In terms of setting the atmosphere the music is perfect. The game has a wide range of mood and has an appropriate track to go with each. In fact, the Suikoden II soundtrack comprises four disks. Though it isn't just mood setting, the music also has a wide range of styles. From the European style
"Prideful Sarabande" that conjures up images of medieval castles and knights to the Asian style "Nahala Yam Koong" which conjures up images of an exotic Asian market, the kind that one would see Indiana Jones wading though. The battle music is also appropriately fitting with tracks ranging from military marches to more heroic and rousing themes, to more dreading and foreboding tones.

The art style is also as varied as the music.

The Dunan Region where the game takes place has both European (in the north), Asian (to the south and east), and American Mid-West (to the west) influences. In the northern parts of the region you'll find the European medieval style castles and cities. In the central part of the region where the Muse city-state is located has architecture more influenced Roman and Greek architecture. Then to the east and to the south you'll find cities and towns that have a kind of Edo period Japanese style architecture, while the main city-state in the area has a sort of Chinese Forbidden City feel to it. An interesting note, is the leaders in these cities have a Caucasian character design, which brings up an image of early 20th century colonialism in Asia. Going further west, you'll encounter a desert region and the architecture style here is influenced by American southwest pueblos, with adobe buildings. 

The character designs are also as unique and varies as the settings and the music in the game. You have everything from armored knights to exotic sorceresses to hooded snipers. Even the races vary from Humans, to Kobolds, to Elves, to even a Unicorn, a sleepy vampire and a werewolf.

If they say variety is the spice of life, then in terms of art and music, Suikoden II is a full spice rack. Actually it's more like the spice section at Costco.

Probably the only styling I would change would be the uniforms of the Allied Army. The uniforms seem to consist of a tunic, shorts and a scarf. I would have gone with Roman style lorica segmentata armor to match the Roman style architecture of the Alliance capital.

Final Verdict: Must Buy

Suikoden II is literally one of the best games ever made. A masterpiece of story telling melded with a sleek and uncomplicated gaming interface. You will find new disks going for $400 on Amazon (thank God I got my copy in 1998 when the game came out for $50) with used copies going for $165. I literally cannot say enough about how great this game is. Konami literally does not make them like this anymore.

While the cost for a physical disk has rocketed up to something insane, thankfully Sony has woken up to this and they do have it available digitally on the PlayStation Store for $9.99. At that price (come on, I'm sure you have some cans and bottles you can take to the recycling center, or change in your couch) anyone with a PlayStation system should have this game, it's only 315MB.