Yesterday my friend and I played Suikoden 2 for 12 straight hours. Actually that’s not true we stopped to eat a kebab and watch day 5 of the January Hatsu Basho Sumo Tournament. But otherwise it was suikoden all day baby.
The music is absolutely terrible. Just, disgusting annoying horrible preschool versions of jrpg music, which is often already a racist preschool version of real life music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U07jmG0p_GQ
Here is the theme for one of the most significant towns in the early stretch of the game. This music plays over countless dialogues between important war leaders as they discuss strategies and partnerships and politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duAZw5dHlhk
Here is the theme for a town that looks extremely Chinese. This song sounds like someone else’s child screaming into your ear. The clap playing on every beat is funny though in a post-trap world cause it just makes me think of twerking. Imagine someone twerking to this song in Magic City.
Suikoden 2 is pretty cool though.
I like the 3 different battle systems for various scales of warfare. The regular JRPG battles for when you’re adventuring. The fire emblem battles for when there’s a proper war going on. The 1v1 turn based fighting game thing for important fights against important people (not to be mistaken for boss fights, which are against unimportant but large monsters or people). I think it’s literally impossible to lose the fire emblem and 1v1 fights though, which kinda sucks. Or maybe it’s fine idk. Who cares. They are narratively effective.
I like that the 108 characters thing is actually used well. Those people are all real characters and you can use them and if you don’t use them it’s okay. They’re doing their own thing, and they don’t feel like they’re just waiting in a menu somewhere to be chosen for your party. They are all contributing to the war effort. It really starts to feel like you have an army. I like how rarely you have full control of who is in your party. At one point your best friend who is obviously going to betray you ends up betraying you. He was, up until that point, a mandatory character in your party. He has a combo move with the main character called Buddy Attack that hits every enemy in the field. It is the best attack in the early game. When he leaves, you don’t have this attack anymore, and the battles start to become properly tough. That’s a good narrative technique! People are dropping in and out your party constantly, people are becoming mandatory and unmandatory constantly, people are going off on their own things and becoming unavailable constantly. We missed so many opportunities to get so many characters, and for most of them that means they’re just gone now. But not because they’ve been blinked out of existence by the game. Usually when you miss a chance to get someone it’s because their town got destroyed and now everyone in that town is dead!
Yeah! The towns get blown up constantly. There’s a god damn war going on here! The enemy army is extremely powerful! They are one step behind us at any moment! Their wave of control is spreading over the map all the time! Areas get locked off all of a sudden and if you didn’t do everything in them, that’s probably it! It’s all gone! Everything is dead and the area belongs to the baddies now. It’s genuinely impressive how naturally and believably this all happens. It feels much less like a static world that only moves when you hit the obvious trigger point for the next story event than most jrpgs. There are so many trigger points and they are relatively subtle. You don’t know which one caused which world state to change.