![]() I also appreciated how they made further use of the recruited characters, giving you the option to empower your army units by assigning characters to them. They don’t play as well as the tactical battles in something like Fire Emblem, but they still do a good job injecting some variety into the gameplay while also putting the player in the middle of battles that they otherwise would have been forced to watch as a spectator. Even with being visually inferior, however, I’d say they have their own special charm. The same can’t be said for the army battles, which don’t look better than your average SNES game. The end results are fast-paced fights that look leagues more dynamic than the simple, turn-based battle they actually are. All of this is followed by a camera that moves about the battlefield perfectly, zooming in on characters as they fight and moving to change perspective and give you a better view of spells as they fire off. ![]() Player and enemy sprites are alive with motion they move and sway in place, lunge forward to attack and grimace when hit themselves. Suikoden II ignored the advent of polygonal graphics and instead used the PS1 to make its 2D, pixilated battles look a lot better than they have any right to. Unfortunately, looking good often also meant moving at a snail’s pace, something I’ve lost a lot of patience for as I’ve gotten older. The emergence of 3D consoles allowed for games to be much more cinematic, which was obviously a good thing. One of the biggest problems I have with going back to some of the PlayStation-era JRPGs is how slow they can be. I was also surprised to find out how much I loved the way the game’s battles flowed. And when you add in things like fighting rows, magic Runes, and team-up “Unite” attacks, it leaves a lot of room for experimentation. The sheer number of character combinations you can pursue are staggering. While I might have not fully appreciated Suikoden II‘s large cast in the story, I adored the freedom it afforded me to select my own party members. The random encounters were an especial high point because of how well they utilize the game’s gigantic range of characters. Far more entertaining for me were the random encounters and turn-based army bouts. The duels are probably the weakest of the three, basically just delivering rock-paper-scissors battles that don’t require an extravagant amount of thought. The game has three distinct combat types: random overworld encounters, turn-based strategy battle, and one-on-one duels. Whatever issues I had with Suikoden II‘s story, however, its combat definitely made up for it. In my experience though, there were characters the game clearly favored and the rest were different degrees of bland. Different characters brought to the same plot event will, for instance, usually have unique pieces of dialogue written specifically for them. The game certainly makes some admirable efforts to combat this problem. Unfortunately, when you have that many characters, it’s hard to make all of them memorable. It adds a nice collection element and helps to establish a tangible measurement of your army’s growth. Now, to be fair, the whole recruiting shtick is, legitimately, one of the game’s bright spots. A lot of this owes to the fact that Suikoden II, famously, includes more than 100 recruit-able NPCs. There are times when the game definitely drags things out too long (infiltrating the Greenhill academy) and its cast of heroes struck me as being largely less interesting than its fantastic villains. ![]() He’s an unrepentant embodiment of human evil who is absolutely intimidating and steals the show whenever he’s on screen. He destroys villages, conquers cities and proudly murders people for the sheer fun of it. And don’t even get me started on the scenes involving Luca Blight. I personally couldn’t get enough of the twists, turns and backstabbing that make up some of the best parts of the plot. To be sure, when it focuses in on the war and the surrounding political intrigue it’s exhilarating. Unfortunately, I felt that the story’s execution was, at times, uneven. The big bad guys are people just like you and your goals are tangible things like securing political alliances and bolstering your army. Suikoden II sounded splendidly different from that focusing on a bloody but localized conflict between two nations. I can only stomach so many games about plucky teenagers defying the odds to save the world from some supreme, world shattering evil. Some of my favorite games are JRPGs, but the subgenre, on the whole, is one that I could often take or leave. Reading up on Suikoden II in the past, that sounded awesome to me.
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