Suikoden IV
Jul. 2nd, 2012 06:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroLazlo was a rising star in the Knights of Gaian; he and his best friend Snowe were going to take the world by storm. But then they ran afoul of the Rune of Punishment just as political machinations were engineering an invasion of the island nations. Will the 108 Stars of Destiny come together once more?
The first thing I noticed was the graphics: They apparently looked at Final Fantasy X and said, “Oh, Square-Enix can do water now, hunh? Well, so can we!” No, you can’t; certainly not as well as they can. Besides that, they’ve improved the 3D engine from Suikoden III, given the player camera control, and kept the beautiful but incredibly repetitive scenery.
My second observation is that the game is oddly balanced in terms of tutorials: There’ a step-by-step battle tutorial that’s more detailed than I recall from any other Suikoden game. But barely any sea battle tutorial (which would have been useful) and nothing for steering your ship (which is unintuitive).
There are a number of reasons why this gets consistently ranked as the worst Suikoden game, and the long and pointless sailing is probably chief among them. Really, they tried hard to mitigate the pain of the sailing process by letting you easily set a course on the map screen, giving you Viki (the teleporter) relatively early (if you know where to look for her), letting you go belowdecks to rest and save fairly freely, and eventually giving you two extra four-person “ship parties” you can swap in. The thing is, really, these were all attempts to save an ultimately flawed system. Really, they should have scrapped it entirely for a different sort of world-map implementation, or failing that, increased the speed and maneuverability of the ship (and reduced the encounter rate) significantly. (Though this would have made the world seem as small as it actually is—there appears to be fewer locations and less non-world-map area than in previous games.)
I think they tried to make the world seem big by making you move frustratingly slowly across it. (The game never tells you this, but you can hold R1 to dash in both the walking screen and on the ship. It makes things much more pleasant when walking and makes the sailing tolerable.) The encounter rate also tends to be annoyingly high, and this is aggravated when you realize that 90% of the “dungeons” are effectively just straight lines. There is, as far as I can tell, exactly one area where mapping might be necessary.
The 108 stars of destiny aren’t incredibly hidden—there aren’t really that many places to hide them, it’s mostly a matter of re-visiting every location after every plot point—though a few of them are permanently missable and, like in most of the other games, a dozen or so are frighteningly unintuitive. I used a walkthrough because although there aren’t very many locations, getting between them can be very time-consuming and frustrating.
The skills system from III was removed from this, which creates an interesting situation where characters have an affiliation with certain elemental runes, but you have no way to tell (besides testing) what they are.
This is the only Suikoden game that has a New Game + feature that I can recall, which is probably connected to the fact that it’s the shortest of them since the original.
A lot of the problem seems to be that they disregarded a lot of Suikoden series conventions (it feels like this was made by a different development team trying to “go in a different direction”). It feels like change for change’s sake: Four-person parties instead of the series’ standard six. Sailing minigame instead of world map. Items that restore magic. Different translations of a bunch of random terms (like “rare items” in stores being “bargains”). When they changed all of that back for Suikoden V, the fandom rejoiced—that had the combined advantages of being a better-made game overall, and fitting into the series much, much better.
Among the saving graces: Elenor Silverberg, the brilliant drunken curmudgeon, is probably my favorite Silverberg of all. The voice acting is overall decent; not amazing, but pretty solid and makes for some cute bits. The fact that you can choose which two of the starting four party members become your core party for the first third of the game, yet they still get personalities and things to do, is nicely done.
There are a bunch of callbacks (call-forwards? This is a prequel, taking place over a century before the first game) to the rest of the series. Mysterious Runemistress Jeane and kutzy teleporter Viki make appearances. Ted, the previous bearer of the Soul Eater Rune (the protagonist’s rune in the first game, and probably the most powerful player-controlled rune in the series) is the subject of a sidequest and joins the group. Schtolteheim Reinbach III, whose name appears in several other games as an alias you can give when going “incognito”, actually exists and also joins the party in this game. I loved the moment when he showed up.
The ship battle system for major battles is fine; I kinda like the aspects of maneuvering and elemental rock-paper-scissors in strategy. (Which bodes well for when I finally play Suikoden Tactics.) Honestly, I think it might be more fun than the major battles in III, which mostly consisted of computer-controlled normal battles.
Snowe is no Jowy, in that he doesn’t really manage to pull off a rivalry with Lazlo, but you can’t help but feel so bad for him by the end. He manages to rise in power several times, but every time screws himself over by being a remarkable combination of bull-headed and cowardly. But the second time you kick his ass and offer to let him join you, it already felt like it was entirely out of pity.
Overall: Yes, this is the weakest of the Suikoden games, but it doesn’t deserve the same level of hate that other weak installments in long-running series do. This is more like Final Fantasy 8 (gimmicky and trying to do something different, but ultimately fun) than Unlimited SaGa (frustrating rather than fun because of a problematic core system). If you like the rest of the series, it’s worth playing to complete the set.
The first thing I noticed was the graphics: They apparently looked at Final Fantasy X and said, “Oh, Square-Enix can do water now, hunh? Well, so can we!” No, you can’t; certainly not as well as they can. Besides that, they’ve improved the 3D engine from Suikoden III, given the player camera control, and kept the beautiful but incredibly repetitive scenery.
My second observation is that the game is oddly balanced in terms of tutorials: There’ a step-by-step battle tutorial that’s more detailed than I recall from any other Suikoden game. But barely any sea battle tutorial (which would have been useful) and nothing for steering your ship (which is unintuitive).
There are a number of reasons why this gets consistently ranked as the worst Suikoden game, and the long and pointless sailing is probably chief among them. Really, they tried hard to mitigate the pain of the sailing process by letting you easily set a course on the map screen, giving you Viki (the teleporter) relatively early (if you know where to look for her), letting you go belowdecks to rest and save fairly freely, and eventually giving you two extra four-person “ship parties” you can swap in. The thing is, really, these were all attempts to save an ultimately flawed system. Really, they should have scrapped it entirely for a different sort of world-map implementation, or failing that, increased the speed and maneuverability of the ship (and reduced the encounter rate) significantly. (Though this would have made the world seem as small as it actually is—there appears to be fewer locations and less non-world-map area than in previous games.)
I think they tried to make the world seem big by making you move frustratingly slowly across it. (The game never tells you this, but you can hold R1 to dash in both the walking screen and on the ship. It makes things much more pleasant when walking and makes the sailing tolerable.) The encounter rate also tends to be annoyingly high, and this is aggravated when you realize that 90% of the “dungeons” are effectively just straight lines. There is, as far as I can tell, exactly one area where mapping might be necessary.
The 108 stars of destiny aren’t incredibly hidden—there aren’t really that many places to hide them, it’s mostly a matter of re-visiting every location after every plot point—though a few of them are permanently missable and, like in most of the other games, a dozen or so are frighteningly unintuitive. I used a walkthrough because although there aren’t very many locations, getting between them can be very time-consuming and frustrating.
The skills system from III was removed from this, which creates an interesting situation where characters have an affiliation with certain elemental runes, but you have no way to tell (besides testing) what they are.
This is the only Suikoden game that has a New Game + feature that I can recall, which is probably connected to the fact that it’s the shortest of them since the original.
A lot of the problem seems to be that they disregarded a lot of Suikoden series conventions (it feels like this was made by a different development team trying to “go in a different direction”). It feels like change for change’s sake: Four-person parties instead of the series’ standard six. Sailing minigame instead of world map. Items that restore magic. Different translations of a bunch of random terms (like “rare items” in stores being “bargains”). When they changed all of that back for Suikoden V, the fandom rejoiced—that had the combined advantages of being a better-made game overall, and fitting into the series much, much better.
Among the saving graces: Elenor Silverberg, the brilliant drunken curmudgeon, is probably my favorite Silverberg of all. The voice acting is overall decent; not amazing, but pretty solid and makes for some cute bits. The fact that you can choose which two of the starting four party members become your core party for the first third of the game, yet they still get personalities and things to do, is nicely done.
There are a bunch of callbacks (call-forwards? This is a prequel, taking place over a century before the first game) to the rest of the series. Mysterious Runemistress Jeane and kutzy teleporter Viki make appearances. Ted, the previous bearer of the Soul Eater Rune (the protagonist’s rune in the first game, and probably the most powerful player-controlled rune in the series) is the subject of a sidequest and joins the group. Schtolteheim Reinbach III, whose name appears in several other games as an alias you can give when going “incognito”, actually exists and also joins the party in this game. I loved the moment when he showed up.
The ship battle system for major battles is fine; I kinda like the aspects of maneuvering and elemental rock-paper-scissors in strategy. (Which bodes well for when I finally play Suikoden Tactics.) Honestly, I think it might be more fun than the major battles in III, which mostly consisted of computer-controlled normal battles.
Snowe is no Jowy, in that he doesn’t really manage to pull off a rivalry with Lazlo, but you can’t help but feel so bad for him by the end. He manages to rise in power several times, but every time screws himself over by being a remarkable combination of bull-headed and cowardly. But the second time you kick his ass and offer to let him join you, it already felt like it was entirely out of pity.
Overall: Yes, this is the weakest of the Suikoden games, but it doesn’t deserve the same level of hate that other weak installments in long-running series do. This is more like Final Fantasy 8 (gimmicky and trying to do something different, but ultimately fun) than Unlimited SaGa (frustrating rather than fun because of a problematic core system). If you like the rest of the series, it’s worth playing to complete the set.
