It's got a weird name, it used to be very hard to find and it's one of the best Japanese role-playing games---finally re-released.
I know, I know, I was just telling you this about Earthbound for the Wii U. But Nintendo's not the only one who's recently resurrected a long-lost RPG masterpiece. Konami released Suikoden II in 1999 on the original Sony PlayStation; the US version had a very low print run and quickly became a hard-to-find collectible that now commands triple-digit prices. Much like Earthbound, much of that demand stemmed from the fact it was an excellent game that had never been re-released, so the only way to play it (legally) was to track down an original.
No longer! Late last year, Sony announced that Suikoden II would become available on the PlayStation digital store, playable on PlayStation 3, PSP and Vita (though not PlayStation 4, as is the case with all its classic games). If you're like me and you've enjoyed pixelated RPGs but missed this one when it first came out, you've got to play it now.
Never did I imagine I was missing out on something this good. Suikoden II has one of the best storylines of any Japanese RPG of the era, if not ever. It's epic, following the tale of the main character from boyhood to becoming the leader of a nation. It's personal, focused far more on the complex, evolving relationships between its main characters than it is on the grand mystic theories of the universe that turn too many RPG stories into word salad. And it just feels huge, creating a whole world full of memorable people, places and events.
The unique hook of the Suikoden series in general is that you can recruit 108 characters into your party, and as you recruit them you'll build out a whole castle where they'll live and work, adding all sorts of events, mini-games and interaction to the castle that you can revisit whenever you want some downtime between battling.
It's not a difficult game, if you're just trying to play through the story and defeat the end boss. Suikoden II doesn't require grinding at all. Just as long as you don't run away from battles, you'll be leveled up significantly, and if you want to level up other characters that aren't in your party, it doesn't take much time to get them up to speed. Winning the big battles is less about levels and more about careful selection of party members and special abilities.
Now, there is certainly a challenge in tracking down all 108 party members. You want to do this because this is a requirement to getting the games' "good" ending sequences. But the problem is that you can actually miss out on some characters, and not be able to go back and get them, unless you take some occasionally obscured, esoteric actions at certain points in the game. Suikoden II's good ending also is dependent on taking a certain series of, again, not entirely obvious actions in the final 5 hours of the game.
If you're like me, you're already carving out 40 precious hours to devote to this game in the first place and you want to see everything the first time. So I felt zero shame following a FAQ that told me what to do and when to do it. The only problem: The game's best FAQ guides all recount the game's storyline in far more depth than is necessary to guide you through the game. So you end up reading what's going to happen a few minutes before it happens. I haven't seen a guide that doesn't spoil the story, so I can't offer a perfect solution to this problem.
The only real issue I had with Suikoden II is that Konami's translation for the US market was a total botch job---not only is it poorly edited, it introduced bugs that were never caught---and this version is identical to the original, warts and all.
What About Suikoden I?
Now, at this point, you may be wondering: Suikoden II is a sequel, and the original Suikoden is only six bucks on the PlayStation Store. Is that also a masterpiece, and should I play it? The answers are "no" and "yes," in that order.
You can see, playing the first Suikoden, the passion and ideas that would make Suikoden II so great, four years later. It's another well-written, *Game of Thrones-*ian tale of feudal political machinations and intrigue. But the rest of the design just can't carry the weight of the story. The graphics are plain and repetitive, the characters inexpressive, the cities and dungeons boring to look at and explore.
Both games commit their share of Stupid RPG Tricks, but Suikoden is worse---the character that dies while holding rare items you then lose permanently, the inordinate amount of time and energy you must spend organizing your too-small inventory.
In short, there's a disconnect between the grandness of the concept of the first Suikoden and the end product the development team produced. Not so with Suikoden II.
But you should still play the first game first. It's fairly easy to breeze through, and at 20 hours it's short for an RPG. More than that, there are many characters and events in the first game that appear in the second, and many of the things that happen won't have the same emotional resonance if you missed the events of the first game.
Additionally, you can import your Suikoden saved game into the sequel for bonuses, the best of which is a whole sidequest that gives you a very powerful extra character to take into battle.
So, yes, I am telling you that you have to devote 60 hours of your life to playing two Japanese RPGs that only really get rolling around hour 21. Yep. I've become that guy. But I wouldn't be saying it if it weren't true.
