Suikoden Character Fighting Stances

Yeah, this one will be quite short. But hey, it's one thing that bothered me for quite a bit. You're probably aware of "fighting stances" in RPGs, where their idle animations show what they're gonna look like when not actually battling. I'm gonna talk mostly about Suikoden's battle stances, since other games seem to have okay ones or pretty lame ones overall. Even Chrono Cross, a game with half the amount of characters a Suikoden has somehow manages to make character fighting stances alright.

So Suikoden characters tend to have a lot of different fighting stances. The first game lacks them entirely, as the characters in battle are actually static, no movement until battle actually commences. But take a look at some of the characters and notice some similarities. Take the five blacksmiths for example, who all look very identical. Keep this in mind.

Suikoden 2 did a fantastic job with its fighting stances by making just about every character seem unique. The exception being the five squirrels, but who uses them? Look at Riou, Nanami, and Viktor and they are poised for combat, while Flik and Jowy are a bit more relaxed. It shows how energetic or how patient some characters are when in battle, and usually the younger characters show just how energetic they are in their fighting stances, how they are itching to fight. Likewise, older and wiser characters like Flik, Sierra, and Humphrey are pretty much veterans, remaining calm and rarely moving.

Suikoden III is a little harder to parse, since characters actually only get ready on the first turn. Not much to say, there are a few similarities, but most of the characters at least try to be unique. Though the Tinto characters and the Zexen knights clearly needed more work, given the majority of them are one-handed swordsmen.

Which leads to the meat of this post, Suikoden 4's battle stances. They really didn't do good on them at all in this game as there are only a few unique ones. Lazlo, Kika, Snowe, Akaghi, and Mizuki are some of the ones with unique stances, but more than four-fifths of the cast just so happens to have all the same combat stances. Male and female great sword-wielders have the same stances. Male knife throwers have the same stance. The spear users all have similar stances (except Rachel I think). Male and female mages tend to have the same stance (except Jeane). And my oh my, there are way too many one-handed sword users. And unless it's Snowe, then there are only one of two fighting stances, the straight upright one or the leaning back and ready one. It's really lame and one of the reasons why Suikoden IV is honestly so boring.

After having played Suikoden V and its loads of battle-ready characters, they all have unique stances. All of them. Except for throwaway characters like the elves and maybe the beavers too, but I'm not counting those. So Suikoden IV really blew the pooch.

Bottom line is, fighting stances for characters ought to be unique. It really does depend on how many characters there are, which is why I focus on Suikoden games due to their high amounts of characters. The more there are, the more unique the fighting stances ought to be.