Suikoden - worrying news

It's been about five years since Suikoden 5, and over two years since Tierkris. Unfortunately, the future for the Suikoden franchise is looking kind of bleak. Here's what is stated on the Suikosource forums (and currently the top of their main page): "While conducting an interview on 4gamer for their new upcoming RPG Frontier Gate a couple Konami employees stated that they were designing Frontier Gate from scratch as they had previously disbanded their Suikoden team and had therefore lost all their RPG-creation know-how." (from http://www.suikosource.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=9000 )

Are the best days of this series over? Do you believe there is a good chance that another full, canonical Suikoden game will be made? Can Konami currently justify the cost of creating another game for current platforms? If the company chose to farm it out to another development team, could another game be made that would be on par with Suikoden 2 or 3?

Does this series have anything that sets it apart from "typical" jRPGs? Where should I start (I have a PS 2, though I also have a PS 1 memory card and place that has PS 1 games nearby)

edited 7th Aug '11 5:54:28 AM by deuxhero

Boatloads and boatloads of characters, storylines that - while wide in scope - don't involve saving the world (barring the goal of the antagonists in 3), three distinct battle systems per game, notably better writing than most JRPGs, and usually some interesting but not excessively Guide Dang It! hidden plot-variation goodies.

Except Tierkris, which was bog standard, and 2, which was very Guide Dang It! about its hidden goodies.

But seriously, go play Suikoden 3. It has one of the most creative plot-framing setups I've ever seen, even if the most common battle system is set up in a somewhat irritating fashion.

Sadly Suikoden is a casualty of the decline of the JRPG. And Konami seems to only want to milk the hell out of Metal Gear Solid

And Castlevania.

Even that is changing radically.

Suikoden III's my favorite JRPG of all time.

It's a shame to see the series go, but there's no way Konami's going to invest in what has always been a cult classic. It's only real hope is if someone else develops it for them, ala the most recent Castlevania and Silent Hill games.

The Suikoden games have never been my all time favorites, but they've always had a lot of stuff that I liked that wasn't being done anywhere else. I remember that in an old video game ideas thread (which may have been Archived to Elsewhere by now,) I noticed that many of the ideas I was suggesting had already appeared in some form in Suikoden III, and only in Suikoden III.

If the Suikoden team has been disbanded, I hope that someone at least will make good use of its members, because most RPG design teams could learn a lot from them.

edited 7th Aug '11 10:44:18 AM by Desertopa

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

My favorite part of the Suikoden has always been the scale of the world. Each game tends to take place within a single country, yet still have a full-sized world map by video game standards. And then the next game takes place in a another country with different culture and politics although you can still see a bit of influence from other countries in the form of foreign mercenaries and such. Practically the only RPG ever that has plausible and to-scale worldbuilding.

Suikoden is one of a very few series that gradually unveils the world, and not just a few small locations, as the series goes on. The only other series that does that that I can think of is the Elder Scrolls series. It lent the series a very interesting feel, especially as some of the locations were referenced beforehand, like Falena was mentioned early on, but we didn't see it until number 5.

Not Three Laws compliant.

I had played a bit of the first Suikoden. It had some interesting, if not overwhelming, ideas, like having a huge amount of people to select for your party.

There were a lot of aesthetic things that bugged me about the game. Why would the main character wear such bright clothes when he's supposed to be in disguise? And... why do one of the dragons sound like elephants?

SPEED UP | MISSILE | DOUBLE | LASER | MULTIPLE | ?

The two Suikoden games I played (i.e. the first two) are the least ambitious ambitious games I've ever seen. They have three battle systems, but one of them is your basic turn-based menu combat and the other two are either terrible (Suikoden 2's army battles) or variations on rock-paper-scissors. There are 108 characters to recruit, and perhaps twelve with personalities. The world is expansive, gradually revealed and bog-standard medieval fantasy, albeit with more detail in the politics of the various nations and city-states. The plot focuses heavily on the military-strategy side of things, and boils down to "brilliant" strategies that work because the plot says so.

edited 9th Aug '11 11:41:13 AM by Shale

YMMV, I guess. You've described all the aspects that the series' fans love about the games, except in negative terms.

Play the third one.

The game uses 5 cast herds that are better developed than the dozen or so plot relevant characters from the first two games, even if they number closer to 50 characters altogether *

. Even the redundant ones get their moments thanks to the bath scenes.

The gameplay's hit and miss, the presentation's mediocre, the music's painful and the plot isn't that much better than the competition, but the characters are strong enough to make Suikoden III a little more than the sum of its part for me.

edited 9th Aug '11 7:04:09 PM by Hashil

1 was kind of a translation disaster at times, but a decent story nonetheless. 2 and 3 were excellent. 5 was pretty good.

4 didn't happen. It was just Viki having an acid trip.

edited 9th Aug '11 9:57:26 PM by Pykrete

i dont know...i played 4 all the way through, and while the combat was horribly broken with the higher tier rune spells, the game was mostly just boring than actually bad, and the final boss was awesome, there were a few good character designs and snowe had a nice character development arc, although a little rushed. and maybe the range of weapons was boring in this game, with most of them being more or less the same type of sword.

interestingly enough, while 5 acknowledges the events of the game, it seems to completely ignore lazlo's existance, which...was jarring for me.

anyway, id say 1 was worse than 4 just by virtue of having aged horribly and barely being playable for me. but then, maybe the only reason i stick up for 4 is because it gave me the name "Isle Navi" for every guild/army/party for every game with that kinda thing.

id say 5 is the best, albeit a little on the slow side, with it taking around 12 hours to get into the proper meat of the game, but with wonderful character designs, cutscenes, and duels, no mindnumbing sailing, and relatively descent voice acting.

but then i have yet to get into the meat of 2, and havent given 3 the time of day yet (primarily because of the battlesystem)

edited 10th Aug '11 12:26:49 AM by Tarsen

I haven't played 1 or 2, but I'd definitely rate 3 above 5. The voice acting in 5 is not up to my standards, and the obvious lack of motion capture for the characters in cutscenes makes them at times painful to watch. The skill system doesn't add as much diversity to the characters' abilities as in the third game, and while the third game's battle system was somewhat unpolished, it definitely grew on me, and I would have much preferred to see a more refined attempt at the dynamic battlefield system rather than the 'dash across and then run back to the starting line' system. Also, the cutscenes with closeups and voice acting are a terrible mix with the silent protagonist (they hired Johnny Yong Bosch for his English voice actor just to do battle yells!) and more than once I found myself shouting at the screen, "Say something! Say some fucking words!"

Aside from the gameplay and aesthetics, I felt like the antagonists seriously suffered in comparison to the third game. V goes out of its way to make the villains completely unlikeable, and in the case of some characters such as the Barows, impossible to take seriously. They're not just playing the opposition, they're unrelatable and unsympathetic, whereas in the third game, everyone behaves in sensible and understandable ways, nobody is gratuitously malicious, and you can relate to the motives of the characters on every side, including the villains.

V also had an extremely weak start; I read reviews saying it had a slow start before the game starts to open up, but beyond that it took a fair amount of time before the game started to throw anything interesting or unexpected at you. For several hours I really wasn't getting any enjoyment out of it at all.

Nevertheless, for all my complaints, I did end up enjoying V more than I had any new game for some time, and I was looking forward to seeing how Konami learned from it and built that experience into a stronger next title, so it's a big letdown hearing that there isn't going to be one.

edited 31st Dec '11 9:31:54 AM by Desertopa

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

oh yeah, now that you mention it, i did forget about the villains

they really are horrible.

none of their actions make a lick of sense when you consider their supposed goals and they do nothing to help themselves either, instead forcing neutral factions into action against them to work with a group they were already having significant trouble with.

also, the normal ending (the one i got when i played for the first time) ruined itself by cutting from the tearjerker moment maybe a second or 2 too early, resulting in some severe whiplash

and yeah, im kinda confused as to why they made him a heroic mime despite all the expressive faces and body movement during cutscenes, especially after 3. in 4 is was fine since lazlo is basically keanu reeves, but in 5 theres really no excuse after all the trouble they went through when animating frey.

I kind of expected this. Tierkreis didn't sell very well and they've been doing everything in their power to avoid the main plot since III.

V was actually my favorite of the series (and, probably not coincidentally, the first I played). I concede that the villains were mediocre (except Bahram Luger) but I feel that the Prince's wide range of facial expressions makes having a voice unnecessary.

For those who miss this series, I recommend Exit Fate. It's tough and requires some tweaking to get it to work on modern OS's, but its very good.

why have they been trying to avoid the main plot after 3 anyway?

I think either the Suikoden team leader or the lead writer left after III.