It scans.Suikodenis never so striking as when military drums sound up beneath sweet singsong flutes.
They’re about waging wars winnable in proportion to hearts won to your cause.
Sometimes that’s an enemy general spared from execution.
For me, they’re also about returning to childhood.
I played Suikoden when I was perhaps ten.
How do you review memory and expectation?
It’s beyond me, that’s for sure.
There’s plenty to chew on in that title alone.
Actually, you know what?
Let’s do that.
Let’s review the title.
I’ll have to break it up, of course: It’s quite long.
Welcome to the revolution.
It was a different time, man.
A farmer will join you if you don’t trample his saplings on the way to talk to him.
An inventor wants a quiet life.
Miki Higashino’s triumphant instrumentals made my soul soar then and still do now.
Maybe you’ll find all-new reasons to root for tales of working-class kinship and uprising.
Still, Suikoden II is beautiful and powerful and has maybe twice the Kobolds.
The army battles go from turn-based rock, paper, scissors to Fire Emblem-lite grids complete with potential permadeaths.
you could fit three magic runes on each character now.
There’s a fishing minigame.
Innkeepers will do maths for you instead of saying “it’s 120 potch per person”.
The menus are cleaner.
There are many more bespoke pixel animations.
Its environments are gorgeous where Suikoden I’s are sharp and a little crude.
There were many errors in the originals, and there are now just a couple of typos.
They also don’t include an autosave system in any way that’s at all useful.
Theydohave manuals accessible from the in-game menu with very good world maps.
Suikoden II’s portraits are cleaner and somewhat uncanny for it.
Both games run well.
Single button autobattle is a godsend, as are double and triple speed options.
This was one of the OG Playstation’s firsts.
Its speciality is punching above its weight, but when it can’t do that it gets creative.
As does Suikoden II’s simplicity.
When you receive money after a battle, a pop-up will say “received 1873 potch”.
Finally, the unification Dunan deserves.
Wars
Suikoden’s third throw in of battle are one-on-one-duels.
and you’ll whip out the chalkboard to deduce the correct response.
Things will get dark, then sunny again, then dark once more.
The journey will be long and weathering.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Suikoden since childhood.
Play is precious like that.
In Chongqing they play tiles at dusk on the street in summer with tall, cold beers.
This is what adventure feels like, I think.
I would like to do more of this, I later go far away and everywhere find play.
It’s what we do between the wars.
I was half expecting Suikoden to feel childish but it doesn’t.
Instead: a prodigious, precocious sprog.
A genre in its infancy and prime at once.
Sheer fuckin' magic.
Two of the most uplifting, absorbing, tragic and sweet JRPG stories ever penned.
This is what the human soul is best at.
