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Suikoden Tactics
Walter and his son Kyril are searching the Island Nations for the secret of the Rune Cannons that turned out to be so instrumental in the Island Nations-Kooluk War. Finding the answer costs Kyril dearly and eventually entangles their party in the politics of the Imperial family of Kooluk.
Set as a prequel/interquel/sequel to the story in Suikoden 4, it takes place in the same area of the world, and many of the characters overlap. Lazlo and Snowe appear as children in the very first sequence (and return later as optional party members, if you imported Suikoden 4 data). Lady Kika and the pirates appear shortly thereafter, and we get some extra backstory to some of her peripheral characters.
Battles are similarly set up to Final Fantasy Tactics (or any game of this style, really) with each battle having a grid-based map, and moving your characters around in a turn-based fashion to try to hit enemies from the sides or back. Character development and equipment is all standard Suikoden-style, with blacksmithing to improve each character’s unique weapon, equipable runes for magical effects, 1000 XP per level-up, etc. This game also sees the return of the skill point system from Suikoden 3, though here you have a pool of skill points for the entire party, rather than them being character-specific. Also, while characters are limited in which skills they can use and how much they cost, the rank you can raise them to is limited by how far you’ve advanced in the game—eventually, everyone could have S rank in all of their skills.
There are 2 and 3-character combo attacks, many of which are very powerful, but you need to use the “talk” command first to build up “goodwill” between characters before you can use them, and they seem to be restricted to one use per battle. The game is nice enough to highlight squares where you could use a combo attack when characters are moving.
Some characters can ride kangacorns or giant owls, which restricts their use of certain skills but increases their movement and their stats. The owls are critical for getting treasures in certain battles, because no characters can naturally fly and there doesn’t seem to be any jump-increasing magic or equipment.
The really noteworthy gimmick is the elemental terrain system: If you cast a spell on a square, or an elemental monster moves over a square, it changes color to match that element. Characters regenerate HP while standing on squares of their own element, and take damage from squares of the dominating element. This means, among other things, you need to be careful about casting fire spells on fire enemies, because the healing from changing the square color may undo the damage the spell does. The first-level spell for every elemental rune was replaced with a “Force” spell that changes a 5-block cross; and the elemental sword runes (which are the only ones many of your characters can use) have a large burst as their 2nd-level spell.
As it’s a Suikoden game, there are many, many characters who join your party. Most battles only allow you a party of six to eight members, but you can use the Switch command to swap in reserve party members in their places. (Which is also useful for switching in low-level characters you want to level or the defenseless treasure hunter character after the main danger of the battle has passed.) As with every other game, you can’t really use everyone unless you want to spent an absurd amount of time grinding, as there’s never enough gold or XP to go around.
A particularly annoying feature: Perma-death for any non-plot-critical character. If a plot-critical character dies in battle, they retreat. If anyone else dies, there’s a good chance that they’ll just die and they’re gone forever. And one unlucky hit can take out pretty much anyone. In practice, this means that while there are 60+ characters, you only really want to use around 20 of them. Characters can even permanently die in the “Hunt Monsters” grinding battles!
There’s a Quest Guild in Middleport, where you can sign up for fetch quests (fight a battle, play a minigame, retrieve X number of rare items) or send individual characters on dispatch missions. This system is unique in that there are missions you don’t want to do: The unsavory traders of X & Co. are trying to drive your pal Chiepoo out of business, so you need to leave their quests unfinished. Not that you’d necessarily cotton on to that fact without reading an FAQ, mind you.
There’s also a bonus dungeon (Remember the Ruins of Obel, the only real dungeon in Suikoden 4? It’s there.) where you can go for marathon sessions of battles to hunt down rare items and grind levels.
Graphics: This game switches to cell-shaded artwork. With a couple of exceptions for games that do it really well, I’m not sure I like the style. I think it was the Fullmetal Alchemist games that I commented on preferring polygon artwork in general. (I find it interested that they switched art styles and redrew all of the locations and many characters from Suikoden 4, rather than re-using assets.)
Voice Acting: In general, it’s pretty decent—it seems like they got actual actors and they generally knew what was going on when they read the lines. Though there’s a weird quirk to the voice acting that had to be deliberate: Whenever someone refers to rune cannons, they emphasize it as “rune CAH-nons”, which sounds really weird to me.
I think this is the only Suikoden game where the main character doesn’t have a True Rune or fragment thereof. Also, there’s no Tablet of the Stars and I’m pretty sure there are nowhere near 108 characters (even if you count non-fighters like Yohn and Heinz). I suppose that’s because it’s a side-story game. Honestly, I think they had some trouble deciding on the scope they were aiming for—despite the system being better able to support the idea of a major military action (and you having enough characters to justify that), the plot generally acts as if you only have half a dozen characters there at any time, and your group is a small warband sneaking around an empire. This ends up tying up the loose ends from Suikoden 4 (particularly the final boss, which gets a proper explanation) and involves a major political upheaval, but it isn’t a story of a Tenkai Star or the True Runes.
You can only recruit Lazlo if you use a save file with all 108 stars with Suikoden 4. This is a very worthwhile thing to do: You can get Lazlo fairly early, he has a unique and powerful rune, he’s a combat machine, and he has solid combo attacks with a number of also-useful characters.
Overall: It’s a decent tactical-style rpg; it’s a decent side-story in the world of Suikoden. But it’s nothing ground-breaking in either category and probably only of interest to big fans of one or the other.
(On a related note: It occurs to me that what I’d want from Suikoden 6 would be a game set a few centuries after the events of Suikoden 3, probably revolving around Harmonia, and featuring as many of the extant True Runes and returning runebearers as possible.)
Set as a prequel/interquel/sequel to the story in Suikoden 4, it takes place in the same area of the world, and many of the characters overlap. Lazlo and Snowe appear as children in the very first sequence (and return later as optional party members, if you imported Suikoden 4 data). Lady Kika and the pirates appear shortly thereafter, and we get some extra backstory to some of her peripheral characters.
Battles are similarly set up to Final Fantasy Tactics (or any game of this style, really) with each battle having a grid-based map, and moving your characters around in a turn-based fashion to try to hit enemies from the sides or back. Character development and equipment is all standard Suikoden-style, with blacksmithing to improve each character’s unique weapon, equipable runes for magical effects, 1000 XP per level-up, etc. This game also sees the return of the skill point system from Suikoden 3, though here you have a pool of skill points for the entire party, rather than them being character-specific. Also, while characters are limited in which skills they can use and how much they cost, the rank you can raise them to is limited by how far you’ve advanced in the game—eventually, everyone could have S rank in all of their skills.
There are 2 and 3-character combo attacks, many of which are very powerful, but you need to use the “talk” command first to build up “goodwill” between characters before you can use them, and they seem to be restricted to one use per battle. The game is nice enough to highlight squares where you could use a combo attack when characters are moving.
Some characters can ride kangacorns or giant owls, which restricts their use of certain skills but increases their movement and their stats. The owls are critical for getting treasures in certain battles, because no characters can naturally fly and there doesn’t seem to be any jump-increasing magic or equipment.
The really noteworthy gimmick is the elemental terrain system: If you cast a spell on a square, or an elemental monster moves over a square, it changes color to match that element. Characters regenerate HP while standing on squares of their own element, and take damage from squares of the dominating element. This means, among other things, you need to be careful about casting fire spells on fire enemies, because the healing from changing the square color may undo the damage the spell does. The first-level spell for every elemental rune was replaced with a “Force” spell that changes a 5-block cross; and the elemental sword runes (which are the only ones many of your characters can use) have a large burst as their 2nd-level spell.
As it’s a Suikoden game, there are many, many characters who join your party. Most battles only allow you a party of six to eight members, but you can use the Switch command to swap in reserve party members in their places. (Which is also useful for switching in low-level characters you want to level or the defenseless treasure hunter character after the main danger of the battle has passed.) As with every other game, you can’t really use everyone unless you want to spent an absurd amount of time grinding, as there’s never enough gold or XP to go around.
A particularly annoying feature: Perma-death for any non-plot-critical character. If a plot-critical character dies in battle, they retreat. If anyone else dies, there’s a good chance that they’ll just die and they’re gone forever. And one unlucky hit can take out pretty much anyone. In practice, this means that while there are 60+ characters, you only really want to use around 20 of them. Characters can even permanently die in the “Hunt Monsters” grinding battles!
There’s a Quest Guild in Middleport, where you can sign up for fetch quests (fight a battle, play a minigame, retrieve X number of rare items) or send individual characters on dispatch missions. This system is unique in that there are missions you don’t want to do: The unsavory traders of X & Co. are trying to drive your pal Chiepoo out of business, so you need to leave their quests unfinished. Not that you’d necessarily cotton on to that fact without reading an FAQ, mind you.
There’s also a bonus dungeon (Remember the Ruins of Obel, the only real dungeon in Suikoden 4? It’s there.) where you can go for marathon sessions of battles to hunt down rare items and grind levels.
Graphics: This game switches to cell-shaded artwork. With a couple of exceptions for games that do it really well, I’m not sure I like the style. I think it was the Fullmetal Alchemist games that I commented on preferring polygon artwork in general. (I find it interested that they switched art styles and redrew all of the locations and many characters from Suikoden 4, rather than re-using assets.)
Voice Acting: In general, it’s pretty decent—it seems like they got actual actors and they generally knew what was going on when they read the lines. Though there’s a weird quirk to the voice acting that had to be deliberate: Whenever someone refers to rune cannons, they emphasize it as “rune CAH-nons”, which sounds really weird to me.
I think this is the only Suikoden game where the main character doesn’t have a True Rune or fragment thereof. Also, there’s no Tablet of the Stars and I’m pretty sure there are nowhere near 108 characters (even if you count non-fighters like Yohn and Heinz). I suppose that’s because it’s a side-story game. Honestly, I think they had some trouble deciding on the scope they were aiming for—despite the system being better able to support the idea of a major military action (and you having enough characters to justify that), the plot generally acts as if you only have half a dozen characters there at any time, and your group is a small warband sneaking around an empire. This ends up tying up the loose ends from Suikoden 4 (particularly the final boss, which gets a proper explanation) and involves a major political upheaval, but it isn’t a story of a Tenkai Star or the True Runes.
You can only recruit Lazlo if you use a save file with all 108 stars with Suikoden 4. This is a very worthwhile thing to do: You can get Lazlo fairly early, he has a unique and powerful rune, he’s a combat machine, and he has solid combo attacks with a number of also-useful characters.
Overall: It’s a decent tactical-style rpg; it’s a decent side-story in the world of Suikoden. But it’s nothing ground-breaking in either category and probably only of interest to big fans of one or the other.
(On a related note: It occurs to me that what I’d want from Suikoden 6 would be a game set a few centuries after the events of Suikoden 3, probably revolving around Harmonia, and featuring as many of the extant True Runes and returning runebearers as possible.)