A look back at: Suikoden

The very first Suikoden, an outright classic in my eyes and one that got me into a fantastic franchise that ended up being my favorite. And as linear as this game is, it's another one that ends up being the best of its series for me.

The idea of six characters on the battlefield. The idea of generals being thrown into a war, potentially dying or forced to switch sides upon defeat. The idea of runes for magic and the idea that True Runes are the special powerful runes that basically grant immortality. The amazing idea that Suikoden II had in which the game basically allowed several characters from this game to be imported into that one. The different ranges of short, medium, and long. The uniqueness of everyone having their own weapons instead of having to buy newer ones. The ability to flat-out cheese the RNG in a lame dice game that ends up leaving you with loads of cash. Suikoden was a classic RPG of goodness. Of course, nothing's perfect, especially for emulator users who have to tweak the settings so the game doesn't crash. There are some minigames that are annoying (the spinner one!). The forced character selection is most blatant in this game, with some characters like Viktor and Gremio always being forced for plot reasons.

But all in all, I still remember the first Suikoden as that linear RPG that started the trend of having LOADS of characters in it, and managing to build a nice story about overthrowing a corrupt empire through war means and rebellion, with all the side paths taken to ensure more allies are grabbed. I love it for what it does to the Five Great Generals, where you can spare their lives and have them join your cause (except your father though). I love how sly Mathiu is as a strategist, whether it is tricking your enemy or tricking you. The deaths in this game were wonderfully done, tying in to the rune that the main character has, the Soul Eater, which to this day still remains my favorite Suikoden rune in the series. I absolutely love how the settings are laid out and what their problems were, the racism involving elves, kobolds, and dwarves; Grady being generally greedy with money in his town, Milich apparently being all narcissistic in naming of the towns in his region, and basically all the ways to fix these issues. I like Barbarossa as a character, not a villain of course, because of that one scene he has with Futch, showing that Barbarossa isn't entirely that corrupt, but a certain someone has made him that way. There were obviously a few loose ends left loose, and example being the entire Kalekka incident which naturally didn't get a whole lot of mention, but ends up being part of the past.

And even if someone sees the weak points in a Suikoden game I'm gonna say that the game has a lot of strong points to counter it. Sure, not every character is amazing, many are boring, like here's your armor dealer who does nothing else, oh, what about this guy with a turban on his head who actually IS useless? I look past characters like this and look at better characters. I mentioned Viktor and Gremio, two characters that LOVE to force themselves into the party, but neither are technically bad, both gameplay-wise and storyline-wise, these characters provide a lot. And despite his silence and his lack of romance, I look at this game's main character and think he's easily the coolest out of all the Suikoden protagonists. That silent demeanor may just have won him the wars here.