A look back at: Suikoden V

Hooray, I finally get done with this one, a game that returns to a form nicely and without too much grease put in. Yeah, I love the series as a whole and it's way too easy to pick on IV, but is V better than its predecessors? I'd say it's about on the level of III in terms of enjoyment, but I and II are forever classics, Tactics is long but somewhat enjoyable, and III works out despite its quirkiness. IV of course was a flop due to several changes, and therefore V needed to improve on that. It most definitely isn't made to eclipse the classic formulas, but did well enough despite bad sales to be a worthwhile, yet long, adventure.

Many say this game is too easy. I mean, you've got Zerase's Star Rune, the Beaver and Dragon Cavalry war units and their advantage over everything in water, Richard's crazy evasion and counter rates plus criticals, Georg's criticals, Viki's Chain Magic skill, Galleon's impenetrable defense, the Creation rune unite magic, and that second rune spell Ernst has just breaking the game wide open. But then again, rude rare encounters, clustered war battles, and worst of all, a distinct lack of money or skill points unless you grind like crazy even out the easiness. To even max out somebody's weapon or so you need about 365000 potch, and then there's the ultimate armors that are available for a whopping 999990 potch each for characters with proper defense. Not to mention the epic skills which will certainly be hard enough to grind up.

The hardest thing about Suikoden V is the way you recruit people. You meet most of the recruits well before you recruit them, which for some characters like Shoon (an automatic recruit though) is bad because you get them too late to be useful. But it's bad that you get to see a recruit very early before he finally joins your army, making them highly obsolete. I tried using a few of the later recruits as much as possible, like Hazuki, just to see how well they are in comparison to earlier recruits, and it's pretty much mixed. Then you have several recruits that are outright pains in the ass to recruit. Genoh? Need to have an old guy like Alhazred at around the same level your main character is, then go all the way through that waterfall basin. Same for Richard although it just means leaving and coming back. Sairoh wants the price of salt to go down, which is based on the trade rumors, if you don't know what you're doing this will take a long time. Byakuren needs either Levi or Genoh to recruit after you beat it in a battle, otherwise you'll have to wait until 20 more recruits show up, which may take a while.

There's some interesting consistency with some recruits, that if one of their friends dies in battle, then they leave your group forever. Isabel and Mathias are examples, if one dies in battle the other leaves to bury them away. The war battle system tried to be interesting but has glaring flaws in that enemy AI is downright absurd, either directly running to your nearest weakest unit or just sitting there until you head close.