Niahak's Place

Over this weekend, I finally beat Suikoden Tactics, the Strategy RPG semi-sequel to Suikoden IV.  As a long-time fan of the series, I had intended to beat the game for some time, held off by two things.  First, Suikoden IV wasn’t very good and the story never resonated with me.  Second, Suikoden Tactics has the much-maligned feature of permanent death for non-story characters.  When combined with the grid elemental system and a massive set of things enemies can do, it’s extremely difficult at times to predict whether a character will die in any given situation.

Since I beat Suikoden IV for the second full time just a few months ago, the time was right.  I didn’t start the game with much gusto, but at about the 15-hour mark (~25 hours total in the game), suddenly everything clicked and I finished Tactics in two days.  There were two successive epiphanies I had:

1. Suikoden Tactics is totally unlike any other Suikoden game in that it is about 5:1 game:exposition ratio.  If you play it hoping for more plot, expect to be disappointed.
2. Tactics has an arguably better implementation of many Suikoden mechanics than the core Suikoden games do, for three primary reasons: complexity, variety, and difficulty.

In the vein of games like Arcana and 7th Saga, I picked up a copy of Paladin’s Quest.  Unlike the former two, I find Paladin’s Quest to be quite tolerable in difficulty, if unintuitive.  All three have their strong points, but PQ is by far the most playable.

I’m not sure I can call this a “review”, but I do want to write down a few things about the much-maligned (and rightly so!) 7th Saga.

First off – it is a difficult game, but only in its form as The 7th Saga.  The 7th Saga is a cruel, unforgiving grind-fest of a game which will offer only a few lines of dialogue for every hour of wasting time fighting the same enemies over and over.  I spent 16 hours trying to play this game in its “original” US format, and I got perhaps a third of the way through.  More than ten hours were spent not trying to progress – not even exploring, or side-questing, or talking to villagers – merely trying to survive in the new area where suddenly I was once again in grave danger of dying in every single battle.

I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about The Last Remnant.  On the one hand, its Akitoshi Kawazu pedigree shines through, with an incredibly nuanced battle system that never fully makes up for its terrible plot.  On the other hand, that battle system is really very good and worth playing the game for on its own, it’s just that the plot was made even worse – seemingly deliberately – to balance things out.

Kawazu has a long history of working on the SaGa games, and it is entirely reasonable to call TLR a stealth entry in the series, since it has many of the hallmarks.  Aside from standard battle system/plot dichotomy, there’s a wonderfully imaginative world that very little is actually done with, entertaining side characters that never really break into the third dimension, incredibly good music that has only bits and pieces of substance to go with, and enough sidequests to deliberately avoid the main story for hour on end.  Atmosphere is fed in small spoonfuls for completing hour-long quests, while stat increases are passed out like candy on Halloween after every single battle.

I’ve heard many a tale of the popularity of Sora no Kiseki in Japan, but I had pretty much given up hope of seeing it in English barring a fan translation.  Given the sheer size of the series, fan translation itself would have been highly unlikely as well.  Luckily, XSeed has got our collective RPG-loving backs.  Despite the PSP’s near-dead status, they’ve committed to bringing over all three of the games in the series.  Now that I’ve finished the first one, I can confirm that it’s not just an impressive game, it’ll be an impressive series.