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YMMV / Suikoden III

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  • Adorkable: Thomas is meek, cowardly, and easily flustered, but both lovable and admirable nonetheless.
  • Alas, Poor Scrappy: Lulu may have been annoying, but his death at the hands of Chris was one of the saddest moments in the game, especially when you consider he was best friends with the main character and now his mother was childless.
  • Awesome Art: The opening cinematic is a lovingly drawn and rendered bit of anime.
  • Awesome Music: See the series page.
  • Complete Monster: See here.
  • Contested Sequel: Despite getting excellent reviews from most markets, the fanbase was broken, largely over changes to the battle system. Worth noting is that it was a very dramatic breaking: most fans either thought it was ruined or it wasn't at all. Comes up more often than any game besides II in most "Best Suikoden" threads in forums.
  • Critical Dissonance: Critics love this game, evidenced by IGN and GameSpot giving the game RPG of the Year of 2002, not to mention a spot on IGN's Top 25 PS2 Games of All Time and Top 100 PlayStation 2 Games. Yet this game falls into divides the fanbase because of the Trinity Sight system and most of the change, including the battle system.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Landis is some who's recruited by wandering throughout certain areas with no warnings whatsoever. And he has very minimal dialogues (you actually got him to talk if you talk him in HQ AFTER recruiting him, but it's typical recruitment talk which happened after the process). But, he's basically Sid taken up to eleven, armed with a Sinister Scythe, his creepy giggle is memetic in its own way ("Yuh huh huh...") and he's an absolute golden mine of humor in theatrical play, making him a fan-favorite amongst the cast of this game.
    • Nadir and the Theatre feature he brought. It's a one-at-a-time feature that was never featured in any other Suikoden games, or even any other JRPG (helps that Suikoden will have you gather at least 100 characters for varying roles) and due to the unforeseen effect it brought, it's more known as a gold mine for funny stuffs in the game and basically made the feature, as well as Nadir, a more remembered character in the game when he's basically just there to provide the feature instead of being involved in plot.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple:
    • Almost the ENTIRE fanbase pairs Cecile with Thomas.
    • Out of all her knights, Chris is shipped most often with Percieval.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Getting all of the Stars of Destiny results not in the typical alternate ending but only in a scenario in which you get to see events from the antagonists' point of view. This isn't just to be annoying: the last four Stars are the antagonists themselves, who never actually join the main characters.
  • Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
  • Good Bad Bugs: The Stat Stone exploit from the first two games returns to the this one. All this requires is getting the stone for whichever stat you want to boost, saving the game, using the stone on the character in question, dying in battle, and choosing "Don't give up!" You'll be back at your save point with the boosted stat points *and* the stat stone in your inventory - save again, use the stone, repeat the process until you have the stat where you need/want it. This is a popular workaround to make Chris's usually bad magic stat into something that allows her access to fourth level magic.
  • Ho Yay:
    • Caesar quite a bit with Hugo in the manga.
    • Nicholas with Duke's father.
    • Les Yay: There's a bath scene between just Ayame and Chris, in which Chris basically just stares at her for the entire duration of it.
  • Magnificent Bastard: The Masked Bishop of Harmonia, in truth Lady Leknaat's former apprentice Luc, discovered the truth that he was a clone meant to bear a True Rune. Receiving a vision of a dead future thanks to the True Runes, Luc decides to change this fate, assembling a small conspiracy and proceeding to manipulate the Grassland tribes and the knights of Zexen into war with assassinations, attacks and clever political maneuvering before also sending the Kingdom of Harmonia into the fray. Playing the sides against each other, Luc reveals his intention is to sacrifice himself to destroy his own True Wind Rune, which will annihilate the entire continent, to change the course of fate for the rest of the world.
  • Moe: Cecile, Sanae, Sharon, Belle, and Shabon.
  • Narm: There was one scene where Apple was supposed to look worried... but her animation looked like she's doing The Monkey.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
  • Player Punch:
    • Earliest example would be the result of the cease-fire: Karaya Village gets torched, Borus leads the slaughter of civilians, and Chris strikes down Hugo's best friend Lulu. Tto say nothing of Luce's reaction.
    • Alma Kinan brings us Yun's sacrifice — which is later turned into a Senseless Sacrifice when the villains nearly find the True Water Rune anyway.
    • And that last part leads to Chris finding her father Wyatt just in time for him to die after a failed attempt to claim said Rune.
    • The chain of events in the late-game where the heroes are painfully stripped of their True Runes isn't all that fun, either.
  • The Scrappy: From his status as a Millstone to the shit-eating grin in his character portrait, Lulu annoys many fans. Also, like Scrappy Doo himself, Lulu has the bad habit of picking fights with opponents far more powerful than him, despite his small size.
  • Sequel Difficulty Spike: In a series not known for their dificulty, Suikoden III stands out as the hardest mainline game due to the changes in the battle system and several cases of Boss in Mook Clothing roaming the fields.
  • That One Boss: The Water Dragon, which comes after another boss in the same dungeon. It consists of the dragon, plus nine ice crystals. Both the dragon and the crystals can attack each turn and have very powerful magic attacks, and the crystals are in front of the dragon, meaning you can't use standard attacks on it until you deal with at least some of those. Also, the dragon itself has a lot of HP. The more powerful magic attacks help a lot, but you need to save them during the previous boss and the dungeon itself, which doesn't have a straightforward layout.
  • Too Cool to Live: Jimba, aka Wyatt Lightfellow, who you learn was the wielder of the True Water Rune and father of Chris Lightfellow, and he dies shortly after these revelations.
  • Toy Ship: Cecile x Thomas, as the result of her adorable Bodyguard Crush.
  • Underused Game Mechanic: Teleportation. Viki only joins in the penultimate chapter, when most of the stuff is already done. Also, during a certain mission, she can't teleport Geddoe from Budehuc Castle to Le Buque (not even to nearly place, as a shortcut) note , meaning you have to walk all the way there.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: Rico. Exactly how many players recognized her as a girl?

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