Suikoden V

So I'm a little bit late to the party when it comes to the most recent chapter of the Suikoden series, but I finally managed to get up to speed.

Suikoden V was released in 2006, and now, 4 years later I managed to finish the game. Ironically this is a game I bought when it first came out, but didn't really play until December 2009 simply because I took about 5 years off from gaming, and had to finish playthroughs of Final Fantasy 12 and Suikoden 4 first.

Now, I guess the question becomes was the 4 year wait between purchase and playthrough worth it? I have mixed feelings on that. While I certainly enjoyed the game, I can't help but feel a bit let down by it. Part of that goes back to the hype and build up that I had going into this game. I browse a few gaming message boards, and based on the opinions of people I respect and long-time series fans, I thought this game was going to end up as the be all to end all in terms of RPG's. With hype like that, it's easy to see why I ended up disappointed.

So where does my disappointment stem from? Ultimately it's in the gameplay, however I feel I should discuss the aesthetics of the game first. I am not the type of person who often looks at a games graphics and makes judgment based on the that alone. I didn't do that with Suikoden V, but I can honestly say that the graphics of this game certainly hurt the game. The graphics look like something out of the late PSone early PS2 era, and do a poor job of conveying emotion from the characters as well atmosphere from the locales in Falena. In the modern era of gaming aesthetics matter and are important to a game developer's ability to tell their story and help the gamer connect to the characters, events and locales in the game world. Suikoden V does a good job considering what they had to work with, but it should have been better.

Then there's the gameplay, which is again, a mixed bag. I can't fault the gameplay as a whole because there are some really great elements to it. For example, the combat system is deep and allows fairly substantial depth for turn based battles. There are multiple formations that the player can choose from and each one provides different stat bonuses, and favors different types of weapons. With nearly 60 playable characters, there's a lot of different formations, parties, and battle techniques to test out. The other phenomenal thing about the battle system is the skills assigned to each character. Each character can develop competency in a set of skills they can equip in battle and raise certain stats. This also adds to the depth and flexibility of the different battle teams the player can put together. For a turn based system these are all good things.

Now onto the bad, and what in my opinion prevents Suikoden V from being a great game - the pacing. For one, at my age I have no tolerance for RPG's that take 15-20 hours to develop the main story. Suikoden V takes at least 15-20 hours to develop the main story, and it's almost that long before you are even going into a dungeon. In today's world that's unacceptable. The only way I can tolerate that sort of build up is if the game world is massively explorable, engrossing, and there's some sort of nostalgic charm to it. Dragon Quest VIII is an example of this as the game is slow, plodding, and old school, but it has a massively explorable overworld, lots of charm, and drew me in. A great deal of that though was based on the aesthetic presentation of Dragon Quest VIII, something Suikoden V suffers from. Aside from the slow build up to the story, I also was disappointed in how the game played. The random encounter rate was a bit too high for my liking, and traveling through Falena took much longer than it should have, even when players gained the freedom to teleport to different locales in the game. The characters just moved slow, and that is something that made recruiting the Stars of Destiny as much a test of patience as it was a test of skill. My big issue here is that when I sit down to play a game, I sometimes only have 30-45 minutes to play. I couldn't sit down and play Suikoden V for only 30-45 minutes because I either wouldn't be able to accomplish anything because of the slow pacing of the game, or the slow movement of my characters, or there was a significantly high probability I wouldn't come across a save point during my session. That's another one of those things that in today's gaming world just simply is not tolerable. Kudos to Square-Enix because the one thing they tend to do in their games anymore is oversaturate them with save points. I am appreciate of that as a gamer who can sometime only devote 30-45 minutes at a time to a game.

As a whole I found the game to be around a 7.5/10. The storyline is compelling and engaging. The battle system is fun, and I love the Stars of Destiny system in the Suikoden games. But the slow pacing, and just slow movement of the game in general detract enough from the game for me as a whole. I'd recommend the game to anyone who wants to play an old school JRPG, but if you're new to JRPG's, or the RPG genre as a whole, try Mass Effect or some of the PSOne Final Fantasy games to get a flavor for the genre. You'll be far more satisfied than if you stick with Suikoden V