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The main heroes from the first three games of the franchise, the hands actually belong to a recurring character.
Suikoden is a series of games (released on various consoles, starting with the original Playstation) that are loosely based on a classical Chinese novel, The Water Margin (aka Outlaws of the Marsh and All Men are Brothers). These games are notable in that they all take place in the same world, although at different periods and locations throughout its history. Some games are chronologically close enough to each other that they feature many of the same characters —although the main hero — or heroes — of the game are always new characters. They tend, as a rule, to be Kid Heroes, but not always...
Certain major themes which run throughout the series are:
- A hero who finds himself running afoul of an evil force, be it a foreign empire, a dark conspiracy, or his own government turning against him. Said hero is usually then forced to go into exile.
- The main hero having to set up an army by locating and collecting 108 special people (known as "the Stars of Destiny") who are scattered throughout the world. Some of the "Stars of Destiny" are fighters who accompany the hero into random and plot-based war battles, while others are support characters, who can aid with healing, navigation, etc.
- Sometime during the course of the hero's adventures, he acquires a Home Base in which his highly specialized army lives and works. This Home Base starts out small but grows and develops throughout the course of the game.
- The game has a plot which centers heavily on politics, overcoming corruption through strategy and/or revolution, and dealing with the betrayal of a close friend or ally.
- The plot of the game is heavily influenced by one or more of the True Runes, 27 at least semi-sentient elemental symbols which contain the power of the universe and which grant their owners special abilities (immortality being chief among them). The ending battle of the game is usually fought against a villain carrying a True Rune themselves, their goals often intertwined with said True Rune's nature in some way.
Combat occurs in the game via Random Encounters, strategic war campaigns against enemy armies and one-on-one duels, each with its own graphics and battle system.
Suikoden III is a notable deviation from the other games, in that it is about a trio of heroes, each of whom has an equal chance of possessing the game's main MacGuffin, the True Fire Rune. At one point in the game, the player gets to choose who acquires the Rune, a choice which will affect the plot for the rest of the game.
The Suikoden universe is encompassed by 6 console games, Suikoden I, Suikoden II, Suikoden III, Suikoden IV, Suikoden V and a spinoff called either Suikoden Tactics or Suikoden Rhapsodia depending on which country you hail from. There are also two canon spin off text games called Genso Suikogaiden 1 and 2, featuring the adventures of Nash Latkje which provide background to Suikoden 2 and foreshadowing for 3, a GBA adaptation of the card game shoehorned into a retelling of Suikoden II's plot, and a Nintendo DS spin-off called Suikoden Tierkreis, which is set in an alternate universe unconnected to the main Suikoden world, none of which save Tierkreis have seen an English language release.
Suikoden 2 is generally considered to be the strongest of the series, while 4 is widely considered to be the weakest, but Your Mileage May Vary. While not as graphically flashy as other video game series like Final Fantasy, this series has a lot to offer for gamers who like long and involved plots filled with intrigue and interesting characters.
This game provides examples of:
- Action Girl (Too many to list)
- All There In The Manual (Some of the games' plot points — like certain characters' true relationships to each other — are contained only in supplemental media, like text games or manga.)
- Arson Murder And Jaywalking (Viktor's last taunt to Neclord in II...)
- Artifact Of Doom (The Soul Eater from Suikoden I
- Ax Crazy / Bad Ass (Luca Blight from Suikoden II loves to slaughter and destroy - soldiers, villages, small children - and he does it with a smile. As well as his Expy in Suikoden V, Childerich.)
- Big Screwed Up Family (Possibly the Silverburgs)
- Black Knight (Pesmerga and Yuber)
- Blessed With Suck (If anyone offers you a True Rune, run far, far away.)
- You (and your Nakama) just became Destiny's Chew Toy. Sure, you get powerful magics (which might be enough to fulfill your destiny) and stop aging (but Who Wants To Live Forever?). That's not even getting into the runes with the big penalties.
- Blind Seer (Leknaat)
- Bodyguard Crush (Lyon with the hero in V; also, Lelei and Lucretia for the Les Yay version. There's also a possible Ho Yay version in the first game between the hero and Gremio.)
- Don't forget Millay toward the hero in Suikoden IV
- Boisterous Bruiser (Viktor, Ace, Lino En Kuldes, Boz Wilde)
- But Thou Must (Only rarely do any of the speech choices a player is given have any effect the flow of the plot. Suikoden V has a few notable exceptions, as does one or two parts of II.)
- The Caligula (Luca Blight, period)
- Ironically however, he never got around to the murdering his father and taking the throne part of this trope before the heroes did away with him. Then Jowy fills in that blank by marrying the princess, killing the king, and taking over the country himself in a misguided attempt to stop the war.
- But he does manage to get around to murdering his father. As part of an elaborate plot, during Jowy and Jillia's wedding ceremony, Luca's father the king and Jowy drink from a ceremonial wine goblet. Knowing this, Luca has Jowy build up an immunity to a poison he places in the wine; the king isn't similarly immune, and ends up dying. Luca then becoms King, if only for a brief period.
- Actually Jowy's blood, not the wine, was poisoned. Luca had to taste the wine before his father would touch it, so the only way to poison the king is to poison Jowy's blood, which is put fresh into the cup just before the king drinks it.
- Captain Ersatz (Lucretia Merces may be just about a female Zhuge Liang, Shu from II is a more straight example however. Additionally, throughout the series, many characters are expies of characters from earlier games; this is possibly justified by the fact that your characters are represented by named 'stars', and frequently characters who join under the name of a particular star in different games share several characteristics — when it isn't the exact same character, of course. Richmond from II is also an obvious ersatz of Columbo and Stallion just might be a subtle one to Sonic The Hedgehog, since he has spiky blue hair and is considered the fastest creature on land. Maximilian & Sancho from Suikoden I are pretty much Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.)
- Celibate Hero (Flik, after the death of his lover Odessa Silverberg)
- Chain Of Deals
- Character Development (Notably Flik, who starts out as a Clingy Jealous Boyfriend of Odessa, and got struck HARD with her death, but eventually matures up, accomplishes much more things and eventually becomes a fan favorite)
- Chef Of Iron: Many throughout the series, Hai Yo of Suikoden II being a more notable example.
- Chekhovs Gun (The Fire Spears in I)
- Chick Magnet (Flik)
- Cold Sniper (Clive in 1 and 2, subverted with Cathari in 5)
- Combination Attack (Certain characters can be paired with others to use special attacks against the enemy.)
- Complete Monster: Luca Blight (and how!), Gorudo, Neclord.
- Contemptible Cover (Suikoden 1's box art looks like the cover of a bad fantasy novel.)
- Actually only the American cover suffers from this. The European release of the game uses the same cover that the original Japanese version had.
- Continuity Nod (Lots and lots)
- Crowning Music Of Awesome Every game has at least one track which is just plain awesome either due to the music itself or the scene in which it's played.
- Cute Mute - Pilika, a little girl in Suikoden II whose guardianship jumps from Joey, to Nanami and the Hero, to Joey again. She didn't start out mute, though, and there was nothing cute about how she became so.
- Defeat Means Friendship (Especially in the first game, though it crops up in some of the others, too. Almost every game has one or two enemy generals who join you after you beat them militarily, and several other characters who will only join after a one-on-one duel.)
- Dirty Coward (Snowe from Suikoden 4 who among other things, abandons his subordinates in a battle that he instigated because he slightly injured his arm! Euram Barows in V, though he does get better.)
- Dojikko (Viki is so clumsy, she sneezes herself through time and space. It's a running gag that at the victory banquet at the end of each game, she sneezes herself straight into the middle of the next one, despite the games being centuries apart, and not in chronological order.)
- Duel Boss (Several of them at regular intervals.)
- Dragon Rider (The aptly named Dragon Knights.)
- Earn Your Happy Ending (Carried out both in the story and in the gameplay. The characters will suffer through all the tragedies and losses of war and then some, but if you can recruit all 108 Stars of Destiny, the ending makes it all worthwhile.)
- Elemental Rock Paper Scissors (Played straight, but also used sans elements during One-on-One Duels)
- Empathic Weapon (Although not weapons in the traditional sence, all 27 True Runes are sapient for the most part, one of them takes the form of the Zodiac/Star Dragon Sword)
- Interestingly, the sword is an absolute Jerkass to everyone. Even it's 'prefered' wielders.
- Ensemble Darkhorse (Viktor and Flik)
- Estrogen Brigade Bait (Flik. It's hard to tell in the original, what with the low quality graphics, but he DOES get one character to join the group by drinking tea with her all night (at her request). It's far more prevailent in Suikoden 2, where women regularly hit on him, and is constantly being pestered by Nina. Most of the heroes are this as well, with the possible exception of Lazlo.)
- Lazlo might even qualify too, since he technically has 3 girls (Rita, Rene, and Noah) that are interested in him instead of the usual 1 that the rest of the characters get. There's just not that many scenes where you see it. Just an optional bath scene where they discuss getting him a gift (Rene even suggests "a girlfriend"), plus the three of them give him a wooden amulet as a good-luck charm on the night before the final battle, acting like schoolgirls the entire time (giggling and everything).
- Four if you count Millay, his self-proclaimed bodyguard.
- The heroes' tendency to be this is humorously lampshaded in the unlockable sidequest in 2. During Riou's conversation with Cleo, you can choose to hit on her, causing her to remark that "you're a lot like the Young Master in many ways."
- The Evil Prince (Prince Luca Blight, though Bat Shit Insane Prince would be more appropriate.)
- Eyepatch of Power (Worn by Georg, arguably one of the most physically powerful human characters in the game series, and by Geddoe, the most bad-assed of the three main heroes in Suikoden III.)
- Fake Difficulty (Some of the easily lose-able one-on-one duels occur right after a long and involved tactical battle campaign, with no opportunity to save in between the two events — this seems to occur for no other reason than to heighten the player's tension.)
- False Flag Operation: Suikoden 2 opens with Riou and Jowy almost falling victim to one of these.
- Final Death
- Freudian Excuse: Luca Blight became a rampaging monster because his mother was raped by Muse bandits and his father did nothing to help.
- Furo Scene - A series tradition. Taking the right people into the baths triggers Subtext-laden scenes, for all your Ho Yay / Les Yay / Hilarity Ensuing needs.
- Game Breaker (Viki in Suikoden V, whose powerful Chain Magic ability- once trained up- lets her cast incredibly powerful spells twice in a row at no additional MP cost, letting you wipe out enemies with astounding ease. Not to mention Zerase's completely overpowered star rune, and Richard's godly stats.)
- Viki isn't quite so broken as she seems; her non-removable Blinking Rune isn't that great, and the position it's stuck in means that she can never equip a Magic Absorb Rune. Meanwhile, the Magic Absorb Rune itself is even more of a game-breaker in that game — in earlier games, it recovered a single spell of the lowest level only, 15% of the time when your attacks hit. In V, for some reason it recovers a spell of any level, 100% of the time, every single attack — including high-level spells that, for most of the game, you would otherwise only be able to cast a handful of times over the course of a level, boss fight, or whatever. With a Magic Absorb Rune, you can cast them every other round and never run out.
- In Suikoden IV, the team of the hero, Kika, Ted, and Snowe is also considered a Game Breaker, because of the astounding ease at which they can take down any opponent. In fact, Kika alone could be considered a Game Breaker, since her Falcon Rune does about 3x her normal damage, never misses, can be used infinitely, and has no apparent drawbacks. Slap a Fury Rune on her and you've got a character capable of one-shotting almost any non-boss.
- Sheena can be turned into a Game Breaker at higher levels in II.
- The more powerful unite attacks in the series can become this as well.
- Georg in V can be a Game Breaker in the right hands. Although slapping a Double-Edged Rune on him is risky, since his magic defense is poor, he can pretty much rip a huge hole in almost anything with one on. For that matter, Isabel, Mathias and Miakis have devastating setups too.
- Gameplay And Story Segregation - Having a teleporter who can instantly warp lone fighters, small groups, whole squads and even entire fleets at will would be immensely useful (And pretty game breaking) in any war, but in spite of this (Or rather, because of this), Viki's skills are completely ignored story-wise.
- Gotta Catch Em All (Have fun recruiting all the Stars of Destiny! Sadly, Suikoden II forces you to choose between characters a couple of times, and you don't have enough Listening Crystals to recruit all the available monsters.)
- Guide Dang It (Many of the "Stars of Destiny" you must recruit can only be acquired through obscure or non-intuitive means, or during very narrow windows of opportunity between certain Event Flags.)
- Guns Are Worthless (In a world of swords and magic, The Howling Voice Guild uses assault rifles. Lampshaded in Suikoden V when a member of the Guild explains that rifles are inferior to the bow-and-arrow because of the cost, difficulty to manufacture and reduced accuracy: however, they are useful as an intimidation tactic.)
- (In game however the gun users are actually quite powerful. Both Cathari and Clive are some of the best damage dealers of the games they appear in and both rarely ever miss)
- The Gunslinger (Elza)
- Heroic BSOD (Poor Pilika watches as Luca Blight stabs Pohl to death right before her eyes, and after recovering from her BSOD she and her current guardians discover she's been rendered mute - for the rest of the game. Talk about Unlucky Childhood Friend...)
- Which, for the record, happens after her parents are brutally murdered while her home town is being comepletely razed. All things considered, it'll be a miracle if the poor girl isn't emotionally scarred for life.
- Hello Insert Name Here (You name the main character in each game except 3, however their 'canon' names are given in supplementary material. Tir Mc Dohl in Suikoden 1. Riou in Suikoden 2. Lazlo in Suikoden 4 and Freyjadour Falenas in Suikoden 5. Most players abbreviate Freyjadour to Frey however.)
- Hero Antagonist - Jowy in Suikoden II
- Heroic Bastard (Hugo in 3)
- The High Queen (Queen Arshtat of the Queendom of Falena fits this trope rather well, at least while at court, and especially while being influenced by the Sun Rune)
- Highly Visible Ninja (Kasumi wears bright red and no pants in 1, and many of the others are just as bad. The only ninja that seems to avert this trope is Kage)
- Suikoden 2's Mondo and Sasuke, as well as 3's Watari and Ayame, mostly avert it as well (only "mostly" because Mondo is wearing white and Ayame bright purple, but they're at least dressed like ninjas, color aside). The ninjas of 4 and 5 are also debatable, as they seem to make an effort to dress more like normal people. In fact, 5's duo of Shigure and Sagiri are never outright called ninjas at all, many just think of them as such because they're former assassins for Nether Gate and they wield ninja weapons (Shigure uses a ninja-to while Sagiri throws kunai).
- Hopeless Boss Fight
- Ho Yay / Les Yay
- Its easy to read Gremio being this towards The Hero in the first game. Almost every sentence he speaks relates in some way to the "young master". Though he claims he thinks of Tir as more of a son or brother.
- Lucretia from V, with both Cathari and Lelei. Lelei has a decidedly suggestive scene where she suggests that Lucretia not go to bed just yet on the night before the big battle, while Cathari notes that she and Lucretia were "more than just friends" when she joins.
- This troper will always be firmly convinced that Jowy and Riou from the second game were crushing on each other.Not to mention Nanami. Which makes the best ending even better.
- And then there's Ted and Aldo's bath scene.
- I Call It Vera (It's a tradition for the men from Warriors' Village to name their weapon after what is most important to them, a tradition followed by Flik, Hix, and Mathias)
- I Am Dying Please Take My Mac Guffin (Ted does this to Tir in 1, and the rest is history.)
- Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain (Euram Barrows in 5, until his optional Heel Face Turn.)
- Jerk Ass (This is Luc's entire personality for the first two games. He's one of the most powerful characters in the setting, and at least until his Character Derailment in the third, he uses that power exclusively to be petty and irritating.)
- Jerk With A Heart Of Gold - Chris is a fairly decent person, but her personality can be kind of grating. She comes off as a bitch to practically everyone. She's a lot better in the manga adaptation, though.
- Your Mileage May Vary. This troper appreciated the attempt to humanize Chris in the manga, but felt they went completely the opposite way, instead turning a strong knight into a weepy girl who spends more time crying than actually doing anything until near the end. A balance between the two would've been nice.
- Katanas Are Just Better - (The setting is a fantasy world where Eastern and Western weapons and armor exist side by side. Except for Suikodens III and IV, the main heroes in all the games have a tendency to favor Asian style weapons — like bo staffs, tonfa and nunchaku — over Western style swords.)
- It should be noted however that most of the best fighters use western swords ie. Sheena in 2, Pesmerga in 1 and 2, Belcoot and Richard in 5.
- Many of the heroes are healers or magic users over warriors, so these less lethal weapons suit their nature. The Hero in Suikoden II's rune is the Bright Shield, and his weapons are tonfa; both are meant for defense and protection.
- And then there's Georg, who seems to like both, using a western sword in 2, but wielding a katana (actually an Iai blade, which may or may not be the same thing, depending on who you ask) in 5.
- It's actually even more confusing than that. Georg's sword in 2 is a two-handed sword with a side-grip where the hand guard would normally be. (Like the Cypher sword from Strider) His sword in 5 is a short, double-edged sword that resembles a Chinese jian, but he uses it iai/battoujutsu style.
- Kick The Dog (Every single thing Luca Blight does.)
- And quite often Shu, the protagonist's strategist in Suikoden 2, albeit because it was the most effective or only proper way to achieve a goal. Chucking little Pilika across a room full of crossbowmen ( who are on the brink of firing ) as a distraction to prevent them executing his army's leader, then abandoning her there, for instance.
- Kid Hero
- However, in Suikoden, your Kid Hero is often aided by a cabinet of highly capable adult strategists. He's sometimes almost an inspiring figurehead, or simply their strongest warrior.
- Killed Off For Real (In tactical battles when a unit is wiped out there is a chance the characters in that unit can be killed off permanently unless you have the appropriate skill user with that group. Also, in 2, Ridley can be killed, depending on the choices you make at one point, and Kiba dies during a mission)
- Roy in 5, if you stubbornly choose to defend your castle instead of abandoning it. This is not recommended, as unlike Ridley, Roy has no replacement in the 108 stars, preventing you from getting the best ending.
- In the first game, it's possible to kill two of Barbarossa's generals rather than recruit them. Which is bad, since both of them are stars. It doesn't help that killing the second general is extremely tempting, since he killed Gremio.
- Kill It With Fire:
- In the first game, Yuber burns down the Village of the Hidden Rune because... he was bored. Damn pyromaniac Black Knights. And hey! Those fire spears look mighty useful, don't they?
- In Suikoden II, Luca Blight practices a 'Scorched Earth' policy of his own: burning down two of the City-State's border villages. Viktor does something similar when he 'accidentally' leaves a bunch of the Fire Spears in the Mercenary Fort's forge. Oopsie!
- Leave Him To Me: Usually done in the heroic inversion, with the heroes insisting or agreeing to a one-on-one duel despite outnumbering the enemy, as an excuse to use the game's dueling system.
- When you finally get to fight Childerich in Suikoden V, several people on your party (if you have them with you) can step forward and demand the right to duel him alone (since he beat or disqualified them in an earlier fight through trickery); if you have all of them, it results in a comical extended argument over who gets the duel.
- Pesmerga and Yuber only join (in their respective games) because the other person is on the other side, and only to get a chance to fight their counterpart personally; in the first game, Pesmerga specifically demands that you Leave Him To Me as part of his condition for joining.
- Played straight with the duel between Teo and Pahn in Suikoden I.
- Lady Of War (Lots and lots, but Chris Lightfellow, one of the main characters from Suikoden III stands out above all of them.)
- Lethal Chef (Nanami. Her cooking makes Nash pass out in Suikogaiden Vol. 1)
- Riou is so used to eating it that he's developed an immunity to it. Seriously. When the only reason someone can eat your cooking is because they're immune to it, then you know something is wrong.
- Lets Split Up Gang
- Loads And Loads Of Characters (Just counting the 108 stars gives you 540 characters in the main five games alone.)
- Not quite, since that counts recurring characters multiple times. Viki, and Jeane, as noted below, appear in every game; and several others appear many times, like Lorelei in I, II, and V.
- Load Bearing Boss: Happens without fail every time, usually attributed to a big discharge of energy during the battle. Even in Suikoden III, where the fight takes place in a faily big open-air area that still manages to fall on the boss and kill it, while your characters flee to safety... through the underground tunnels.
- Oddly subverted in Suikoden II, where the L'Renouille castle begins to rumble immediately after the battle prompting everyone to flee... until then the rumbling ceases and the castle appears to be just fine.
- Lost Forever (Every one of the Stars of Destiny save the plot-relevant main characters. If you fail to recruit even one of the Stars or allow one of them to die permanently in battle, you can kiss the Best Ending goodbye.)
- Bizarrely, though, while several Stars of Destiny are absurdly easy to miss — several in each game can usually be missed simply by proceeding in the logical fashion through the plot without revisiting old areas — this trope is generally subverted with nearly everything unique other than Stars of Destiny. Frequently, minor unique items like music or voice sets that you miss the first time around will appear in shops elsewhere as rare finds... this sort of thing does not (generally) happen with the far-more-important missable characters, for some reason, although there's a few exceptions.
- Lost Technology (All games reference the mysterious and ancient Sindar race, whose technology-filled ruins and artifacts litter the landscape.)
- Magic Antidote (Averted in Suikoden V. The Hero's Rune has the power to keep Lyon from dying when she gets poisoned, but she still has to spend a long time in bed recovering from the poison.)
- Magnificent Bastard (The evil inclined Silverbergs tend to turn into these. Strangely enough, so does Jowy.)
- Why not include Shu (from II) in there while you're at it? I mean, look at his strategies: Using poorly-armed members of the North Window Base as a diversion, as well as throwing poor Pilika out as crossbow shield too.
- Memetic Badass: Georg Prime, the Chuck Norris of Suikoden universe.
- Moral Event Horizon: Many of the villains indulge in this, but it is Luca Blight who takes it to an art form.
- Multiple Endings
- Nightmare Fuel All of the games have this in one form or another and in varying intensities
- I set the bar with Gremio's horrible death by being dissolved alive by flesh-eating spores. This is all the more nightmare-inducing by the fact that Tir is right on the other side of the door within earshot of any and all death wails Gremio may have made.
- II has Luca Blight - period. Of course, what happens to Muse is bad too, but Luca still takes the cake.
- Though Your Mileage May Vary, Luc's motives and claims at the end of III could be potentially traumatizing. It definitely caused a few bad dreams for this troper.
- The fact that the Rune of Punishment slowly kills its user every time he uses it could count as one of IV's.
- V - Childerich and Nether Gate in general.
- Non Action Guy (Thomas in Suikoden III, despite beig the Tenkai Star of the game, generally lets the others in Budehuc Castle do the fightng for him. He still manages to help out all three of the main characters by letting them use the castle as a base, though.
- Hix from 1 and 2 also counts a little, as though he can fight he's mediocre at best, not to mention preferring not to fight whenever possible. Unfortunately the poor guy is engaged to Champion Tsundere Tengaar, who is determined to make him a man and forces him into your party on two different quests to prove his worth.
- Nonstandard Game Over: Can occur in many of the games if you make the "wrong" decision (e.g., decide to join up with a villain, or run off and desert your army, etc...)
- Nurse Jenny (Jeane, Viki and Leknaat show up in every Suikoden game, even though they take place across different time periods. Leknaat is immortal, Viki has been implied to be doing a bit of accidental Time Travel, and the developers have stated that Jeane has a literal Nurse Jenny family. All three are the subject of huge epileptic trees, which the creators lovingly cultivate. Jeane in particular gains three different Word Of God explanations a game, just for chuckles.)
- Not Compensating For Anything Averted in games I, II, and V where the main hero doesn't use a sword, but affirmed in Suikoden III where two of the three main heroes wield European-style swords, as well as Suikoden IV, where the main hero wields two short swords.
- Not Quite Dead (In Suikoden 2, Nanami is seemingly killed when she is hit by an arrow. However, if certain conditions are met by the end of the game, it's revealed that she merely faked her own death so she could go home, no longer able to bear the war her adoptive brother was fighting in. If said conditions are not met, however, she stays dead)
- Obfuscating Stupidity - Lord Barrows in Suikoden V
- Old Save Bonus: For the 2nd and 3rd game, if you upload old data from the game previous to the one you're currently playing, you get some extra goodies. (Some of the library books you collect will have your old character's names and exploits in them, for instance.)
- One Hundred And Eight (108 Stars of Destiny. 108 divided by four is 27, the number of True Runes.)
- Official Couple (According to Genso Suikogaiden 2, Kasumi and Tir hook up)
- The Only One Allowed To Defeat You appears frequently:
- Valeria and Belcoot, both Falcon-style swordfighters, come with somewhat friendly rivals who join up with the player characters just to keep an eye on their competition.
- Subverted with Luc in II, who reveals that he has had the True Wind Rune since he was introduced at the beginning of the first game, and uses it — for the only time it is used in the entire first two games — solely to annoy his counterpart... who doesn't even seem to know who he is, beyond 'that horrible guy who keeps coming after me.'
- On finding Elza's grave in Suikoden I, Clive refuses to believe that she could have died before he caught up to her and killed her himself (he was right, but This Troper preferred the original game's implication that she could really be dead and he simply refused to accept it.)
- Player Punch (Nearly every game in the series contains at at least one star's death in the storyline and one important character's betrayal; generally, the main death is reversible or avertable if you collect all 108 stars of destiny, while the betrayal is not. These all tend to be player punches to some degree... At least one person went into deep mourning after Sialeeds' betrayal in Suikoden V. A much, much worse Player Punch is Lyon's sudden death, though this can be averted with Hundred Percent Completion.)
- Almost any scene involving Pilika in Suikoden II. Also Nanami's "death" scene in Rockaxe.
- Quickly Demoted Woman (Odessa Silverberg, certainly. It also counts as an earlier Player Punch (Though not as hard as Gremio's later...). Also Apple in II, who demotes herself because she says outright that she's no good as a strategist because she's a woman, and has the player go find someone better. The strategists of IV and V are female, though, so it was likely more Apple's own lack of confidence than a statement by the authors.
- Petting Zoo People (Kobolds (dog people),Ney-Kobolds (neko=cat), Beavers)
- Plotline Death
- Psycho For Hire (Yuber, Childerich)
- Rain Of Arrows
- Random Encounters (Present throughout the series. Especially bad in IV, which is actually a good game with a good story, but is plagued by FAR too many random battles.)
- Rant Inducing Slight (Egbert Aethlebald, who will always quickly descend to ranting about FILTHY GODWIN DEVILS!!!! in mere seconds)
- Rasputinian Death (Luca Blight. It takes tons of efforts to finally do him in.)
- Rebellious Princess: Odessa, with regards of her backstory with her first lover
- Flare from IV and Lymsleia from V are fairly rebellious as well, though not against their parents, but rather against the enemy forces that invade their homelands. Considering who their fathers are, it's not that hard to believe.
- Redundant Researcher: Zweig, Lorelai and the other scholars
- Really Seven Hundred Years Old (True Rune wielders are effectively ageless and immortal. Then there's Eresh, who doubles as a Waif Prophet)
- Running Gag (Schtoltenheim Reinbach III and onward, Viki's habit of accidentally teleporting herself to another game moments before a victory feast.)
- The Scrappy (We may as well rename the second to last Star as 'The Star of Scrappies' since it mostly produces hatedom-generating characters, such as Krin, Hoi, Guillaume... (Roy is debatable due to his story importance). There's also Kenji (not of the same Star), who is disliked due to his ridiculous fighting style. I mean... using aerobics and jogging to fight!? Can't forget Snowe either.)
- It’s worth noting that Guillaume is a French, overweight, cheating, dog kicking, lying paedophile. It’s safe to say he at least was intentional.
- Self Made Orphan (Strangely enough, the hero Tir in 1)
- Potentially subverted when it's implied that Sonya Shulen, who was in a relationship with Tir's father, might be Tir's biological mother. This was never confirmed, though.
- The manual says that Sonya is 27 years old, Tir must be around 15-17,so I really doubt she's his mother .
- Shock And Awe (Flik always come with a Lightning Rune (and gets affiliated with lightning), and is even called 'Blue Lightning')
- Shout Out: Word Of God confirms that Yuber's eight-fold-rune is a reference to the "Melnibonean Saga" by Michael Moorcock, the eight pointed star of the Chaos God Arioch.
- This troper believes that Kidd of Suikoden 3 is somewhat of an Expy of Detective Conan.
- Suikoden 2 examples off the top of my head:
- Genshu (Suikoden 2) has similarities to Tachibana Ukyo: they both fight using Iai techniques, their stances both don't face their enemy directly, and both have techniques related Swallows (Genshu's rune, Tachibana's Tsubame Gaeshi) and their most powerful techniques are a series of very fast sword draws.
- Wakaba's Tiger Rune animation looks an awful lot like King's Double Strike. Sometimes the animation for that attack instead ends with a Hurricane Kick.
- Oulan's attack animations look like Vanessa's.
- There's at least 2 charactes with Shoryukens in the games.
- In Suikoden 3, the martial-artist only rune, the Lion Rune, causes the wielder to shoot a beam out of their hands that looks suspiciously like a HADOKEN!
- Sibling Yin Yang (Mathiu Silverberg is a strategist who was formerly a pacifistic teacher, whereas his sister Odessa is a rebellious girl, leads the Liberation Army, and at one point calls out Mathiu as a coward. This also gets carried over in a non-sibling relations on Mathiu's students: Shu is arrogant, doesn't have the sense of justice (At first, eventually he got better), but brilliant, whereas Apple is more humble, willing to help people, but... not-quite-so-brilliant)
- So Long And Thanks For All The Gear - Happens horribly often, because the games tend to have Loads And Loads Of Characters, and they are frequently called away by the plot; on top of this, the best characters and most plot-critical characters (who you're likely to give much of your best swag to, partially because you're often forced to bring them along) are also often some of the ones who disappear the most often.
- Sorting Algorithm Of Evil (Some exceptions to this occasionally pop up on the overworld, with superpowered monsters at a much-higher-than-hero level turning up during Random Encounters.)
- The Stoic (Humphrey Mintz is an early example, but later on Suikoden 3 and 5, you get a bath scene with 3 Stoic characters just being silent almost all the time in bath)
- The Strategist: Each game has one whom you must find and recruit (and their last name is usually Silverberg.)
- Stripperific: (Jeane, especially in V
 ◊; but what she wore in all the other games wasn't exactly modest.)
- Subtext: This is one of those series that practically runs on it. Pick a character, and I guarantee that you will find subtext in their interactions with at least one other character. See also: Ho Yay / Les Yay, above.
- Surprisingly Easy Mini Quest: The castellan's bit in Suikoden 3. Also subverted later.
- This Is Unforgivable (Suikoden I:"You're the one person I can't forgive.")
- Thou Shalt Not Kill (You're given the chance to execute the Empire's generals in Suikoden 1. Spare them, and they become Stars in your army. You're totally allowed to kill Kraze, though, as nothing is lost or gained either way with him.)
- Treachery Cover Up (near the end of Suikoden I).
- Tsundere (Tengaar, whose tsun-tsun side would make Hix's life like hell to shape him up as a 'warrior', but her dere-dere side would always get her to depend on Hix's help, in a honest, sometimes gushy, way)
- Two Guys And A Girl (Hero (Riou), Jowy, and Nanami from Suikoden 2.)
- Warrior Prince (Freyjadour Falenas, Luca Blight, etc.)
- Who Wants To Live Forever (Dealt with in III when a true rune bearer gave it, and its granted immortality, up so he could get old and die with the woman he loved. And so much Suikoden Fan Fiction deals with the main characters getting all wangsty because of this.)
- White Haired Pretty Boy: The Prince in Suikoden V. He even gets called a pretty boy in-game.
- White Haired Pretty Girl: Jeanne (though it's recolored pink in Suikoden V).
- The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask - Arshtat
- Xanatos Gambit (Any character with the last name "Silverberg" is assumed to be at least capable of this; Leon Silverberg is supposed to be the best, but this feels a little stretched at times. Lucretia Merces, The Strategist of Suikoden V, reaches Xanatos Roulette status at times.)
- The strategists aren't that bad, really. The villains are often worse, with stupidly elaborate plots to get the heroes to fight some final-boss or another.
- The fifth installment was especially bad, as the villain's plotting almost caused Arshtat to go insane and destroy the entire country. The father of one bad guy even calls him on his plotting, as he leaves too much to chance and doesn't do anything to stop unintended effects of his plotting.
- You Cant Thwart Stage One (especially obvious in V, though almost every installment has a doomed battle or two before you recruit your strategist.)
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