There are few things in life that are bigger downers than someone or something you implicitly trusted utterly failing to meet expectations. As a result of of several such disappointments, there are now very few things that I will purchase without reading some sort of a review ahead of time. As time goes on, artists will lose their rapport with me after an absolutely horrid offering (a la Weezer's Maladroit.) to the point that the only things I can buy now without any worry are MechWarrior games, and albums by They Might Be Giants, Fountains of Wayne, Spitz, or Okakita Ayu.
I would put Suikoden games on this list, but I've only ever bought one of them. I didn't like I, bought II, borrowed III from a friend, and IV was a gift. In my defense, had my friend not told me that he would be purchasing me a copy of Suikoden IV, it was certainly a game I would have had on pre-order. (In fact, I was calling game stores up when they had listed incorrect ship dates.) I had my expectations for this game pegged very high, thanks to the previous installment. I enjoyed the innovative visual stylings of the game most of all, and, despite the flawed paired combat and the retreading of the story from 3 points of view. It is, in my opinion, one of the titles that make owning a PS2 worthwhile.
So, despite the news of a change at the helm of the game, it was with very high hopes that I tore into the packing and started changing [Hero]'s name to Alkaiser.
Story
You are [Hero], a blue-eyed, mop-haired trainee of the Gaien Knights. You live in a time well before any of the other Suikoden games happen, so you'll only be seeing a couple familiar faces. The game starts off with you graduating and becoming a full-fledged Knight, along with your pals Snowe, Tal, Keneth, Paula, and Jewel. After a couple basic missions, you get your first real test, escorting a ship safely through pirate-infested waters.
It is here that you meet up with Captain Brandeau, holder of the cursed True Rune of Punishment, a Rune that steals the life of its bearer, should the bearer tap into the Rune's power. (And you thought these things just gave you immortality.) Through a series of slightly believable events, you eventually and predictably come into possession of said Rune, and are exiled from your home island of Razril. You set out to clear your name of the slightly believable happenings, and some friends tag to help.
Gameplay
If you're a Suikoden veteran, the first thing you'll notice is a huge emphasis on sailing and sea battles. You immediately get tossed into one, and it becomes obvious pretty quickly that the game has just basically swapped out the army battles, and replaced them with the naval ones. The duels stay the same, and the lame paired combat of Suikoden III has been replaced with a more streamlined 4-person setup. Aside from that, it's mostly the same as it ever was.
If you haven't played Suikoden before, here are the basics: You control (for the most part) a Hero who will have an amazing pull on people despite his insistence on not really speaking a whole lot. You'll go throughout the land after an event, and go in search of the 108 Stars of Destiny. (107, really, since don't search for yourself...well, not literally.) There are three basic type of combat: Duels, RPG Combat, and Strategy Battles.
Duels
Duels are a one on one fight between Hero and the enemy. It's a game of rock-paper-scissors, except with damage, and the enemy constantly tipping his hand. Guard beats Special, Attack beats Guard, and Special beats Attack. The only twist to this version of the Duel System, is that you can gamble. If you're pretty sure you're onto the enemy, you can choose one move to go "Full Power" with.
RPG Combat
RPG combat appears in the form of random battles, and as I said earlier, involves 4 people. You have a bunch of different commands to start with: Attack, Potch, Retreat, Rush, etc. Potch tries to bribe the enemy, but is essentially useless, because the retreat command seems to always succeed, without costing you any money. Rush becomes active while the Rush Gauge at the bottom of the screen is filled, and can be used provided all 4 party members are capable of making an attack. (i.e. Not unconscious, asleep, or paralyzed.) Hero gets healed for 300+ points of damage, and dishes out about 300 to all enemies on the screen. This is useful for all those annoying low-level random fights you get into while traveling on the World Map.
Aside from that, you'll use your Runes to cast spells. Runes operate the way spells work in Dungeons and Dragons. You can use X number of 1st-4th level Rune spells. After your pool's depleted, you have to rest in order to cast again. Also, certain party members that have a strong affinity to one another will develop Combo Attacks. (You get one right off the bat with Snowe and Hero, but it looks retarded. You'll want to find cooler ones.)
Naval Battles
Naval Battles will generally involve from 2 to 6 ships total. You maneuver to get into range and fire the Rune Cannons. Rune Cannon strength is determined by the cannoneer's level, their Rune affinity, and by whether or not the rune shot gets get cancelled. Two identical Rune shots will negate each other, and two polar opposites will result in the stronger one canceling the weaker, and continuing on to the target. You have to have your broadside facing the enemy in order to fire, and if you are able to pull into an adjacent square, you may attempt to board the enemy, which takes the 4 people you assigned as fighters and pitting them against the 4 fighters on the enemy ship. The winner stays afloat, and the loser swims.
That's it as far as combat goes. There's one other important subsection though, the minigames. Suikoden games have always been replete with minigames, and I think this is more evident in IV than any other of the Suikoden series. You can the top battling action of Beyblades by finding Basil, Rita will challenge you to a scaled back version of Mah Jongg. There's also Noah with her crazy card game, Gunther's games of dice, and Igor's stupid coin toss games. You can also fish, take a dip in the onsen, decorate a room, read the newspaper, and create armor and accessories.
All in all, there's a lot to do. Unfortunately, it appears that someone focused on the minigames, and forgot to make sure the core game was fun.
Graphics
Konami set the bar for RPG graphics with Suikoden III. Then they decided to fix what wasn't broken. There's a more realistic look to the texture this time around. Unfortunately, it looks neither realistic, nor anime-esque anymore. You also don't have the depth of emotion or the expressions that the character models had in Suikoden III. I usually have never raved about a game's graphics, but the innovation Konami showed in Suikoden III (passersby exchanging glances at each other, the shapes of the mouths changing, eyebrows slanting, etc.) blew me away. When you have a winning formula, why would you simply scrap it, especially considering when you offer nothing that could be considered an improvement?
The backgrounds, level designs and landscapes aren't terribly interesting at all, either. Add to that the fact that Suikoden IV has perhaps the fewest number of distinct enemy models in any RPG EVER (seriously, I'm racking my brains to think of distinct non-named enemies, and I'm coming up with less than 15.) Not a whole lot you're going to be oohing and aaahing over.
Audio
I liked the opening theme, but that was about it. Vocal work isn't too bad in terms of getting voice to match the characters. Not many of the characters stand out as either good or bad, except for Elenor, Glen, and Lino En Kuldes who all either seem miscast or misdirected. The ambient effects are rather bland, as is the background music. Not a whole lot of good I can say about the atmosphere, I'm afraid.
Gripes
What is up with the random encounter rates in this game? I would get into fight every 2 seconds! I'm going to do you a favor, if you haven't gone through the manual with a fine-toothed comb (which I didn't as soon as I got to the part where the manual revealed all the final level spells for each basic Rune type.) if you hold the R1 button down, you speed up every form of travel. This is particularly useful for the long "Dream tunnel" sequences, and while sailing. If you don't know about the R1 button's function, you end up with a ton of boring fights that occur every two seconds of sailing time, or so, and it will take you a good 30 minutes. This makes the game take painfully long, but even still, including the fact that I didn't know about the R1 button until 3/4 of the game was completed, leveling all the characters save the final 2 above 40, (not in the Training Hall, either.) and falling asleep at the controls a couple times, the game still only clocked in at under 40 hours. You're going to have to do seriously better than that, Konami.
While there wasn't a whole lot of diversity in the game enemies, usually there are amongst the game's 108 playable characters. Not this time. Somehow, you're following the tale of a bunch of loosely aligned island nations, and yet...there's not a single human in the game with skin tone darker than beige. What's the deal with that? You mean to tell me that nobody gets a tan and there are no Hispanic or Black looking people on ALL the islands? You find a way to stick in 5 useless mermaid characters (they can neither be used in Combat or in the Support role, or even fire the Rune Cannons.) and 3 kobolds, but non-Asians, and non-Whites need not apply for this installment of the series. I'm not even talking player characters though. Not a single shopkeep, fisherman, wandering townsperson or dead body is any ethnicity other that the 2 mentioned. Just fantastic, Konami...
Speaking of useless characters, this is probably the least involved Suikoden ever. Usually I feel bad if I don't upgrade all the characters' weapons and such by the end of the game, but they're crucial in army battles and such. This is completely untrue in Suikoden IV. You need to level 8 characters. That's all. 4 of them don't even have to be leveled that much, as they can retreat from every fight and only need to win a pretty simple boss fight with the alternate group of 4. The naval battles are so few, and so damn simple, that they are all basically formalities. So, you don't need your excess characters at all. Without the Skill System from Suikoden III (which had a couple problems, but is the Mona Lisa compared to what we got in this incarnation.) there's no significant variety to the characters save for their affinity for Rune usage. You couldn't even play up the angle that's unique to this series...whoever Designed/Produced this game did a really, really miserable job.
That comment on the failure of design goes through to all levels, including the Level Designer. The last level dungeon consists of 8 floors and 4 doors you can enter. 1 door has the mini-boss in it, and is on the 4th floor. The second door is adjacent to the door on the 4th floor, and holds the key to the stairwell door (3rd)...back on the 2nd floor. The 4th and final door is atop the stairwell. The stairwell consists of 3 identical rooms (rubble doesn't count as a distinguishing feature, SLACKERS!) with something like 8 flights of stairs apiece, with all kinds of fun random combat, as I mentioned earlier. The other dungeons in the game are also mere tile and texture repetitions, with only the appearance of save points to differentiate between the areas. Inexcusable.
The plot and scripted events are also pathetic. At one point in time, you blow up some ships. But they just catch fire and keep coming for you. So, you have to activate the Rune of Punishment, and vaporize them. Why can't you shoot them with the Rune Cannons, especially given how far away they are in the cutscene? Better yet...move the heck out of the way! At other time, you'll sink a boat, and then find out that they've boarded you somehow! What was the point of sinking their ship, then?! Don't buy into the hype when you hear other people talking about how cool the development of the Snowe character is, either. 1 word: Jowy. The worst part is at the end of the game. A character gets discovered spying and is shot. He twitches and "dies". Then, you fight the mini-boss, who attempts to shoot Elenor, who has accompanied the detachment group. Without the slightest inkling he's alive, and moreover, without a single sign he'd ever been previously wounded, the "previously dead" character jumps out from nowhere and takes the hit AGAIN! To top it off, he doesn't even die at the end of the game.
Ack!!! The end of the game!!! Doesn't anyone know how to end a game sensibly anymore?! I'm twitching, I'm so angry about how this all ended! It's not as awful as say Half-Life 2, or Halo 2...but those are shooters...this is an RPG. It's held to higher standard in the plot department. Apparently nobody told them.
Now we come to the localization, which is, keeping with the overall theme of this game, slapdash and crappy. There are grammar errors, places where the text on the screen doesn't match the vocal track, and stuff that's just plain awkward. I realize they're trying to pay homage to the first and second Suikoden games by not having [Hero] talk much, but over 50% of his dialog options in the game literally consist of: "Please join us!" Then, to have his big dramatic speech to unite the island nations consist of a choice between "Let's go beat the Kooluk!" and "..." is at a level of lameness that only Uwe Boll can hope to surpass.
What really gets under my skin is how all the good bits of Suikoden, they botched, but all the little quirks I thought were dreadfully stupid are still there. Look, it's a lazy guy, we'll give him the Waking Rune, so he's COMPLETELY USLESS. Ha ha! So funny! The thing with the weapons just being sharpened...that’s still there, too. This still makes NO SENSE. Give them different weapons, have the blacksmith forge them a new one. You can't just temper and sharpen a blade 16 times. There won't be any blade left!
I would be doing all gamers a grave disservice if I didn't once again, describe how crappy the sailing in this game is. From the begging of my gaming history, until now, I have yet to play a game that has a worse boat interface than Suikoden IV. Open up the map, choose a Nav Point. Now go...only hope that nothing gets in the way, or the game will swerve wildly off course, and WON'T RIGHT ITSELF! So setting the Nav Points is just a huge waste of time. The boat also requires a HUGE space between it and anything, the ports on the map are not marked, and there is no zoom/spyglass function to tell if you're going to the right side of the island. Even after you get Viki and the blinking mirror, you still, for no apparent reason except to force you to sail again, will still have to manually sail to islands during the plot points. It is unforgivable that the sailing interface is so unthinkably bad for game that requires you to be in said interface for over 50% of the game. If that doesn't stop you from wanting this game, then you aren't reading the paragraph properly.
Overall
This new design team took everything that made the first 3 Suikoden games classics that have retained and exceeded their value on the Ebay market, and failed to recreate the fun of every single aspect that made the Suikoden series unique. Awful, awful showing, guys. I'm hard pressed to think of another existing franchise that has followed up a hit with such an utter mess. The only reason I even bothered playing this through to the end is that it was Suikoden. If it had any other name on it, I would have put this up on Ebay within 2 days. For the love of gamers, Konami, please take everyone who designed this off this series for a good long time and have them make Game Boy Classic or WonderSwan Color games for a while. Or send them to Bandai or someplace similar where they can't cause too much damage.
