After playing through FF 13, I wanted to go back and play through a couple of older RPGs to remind me of the way these games used to be. Suikoden was one of my favorites at the time it came out 15 years ago and several years after. However, after my most recent playthrough, I'm starting to realize that charm and nostalgia carried what is otherwise an average game.
For anyone deciding whether they should give this game a try, I would encourage you to for three reasons. First, unlike most of the boring, drawn-out genre staples that seem to drag for 50 hours without any sense of fun or reward, Suikoden is one of the best paced RPGs ever. My playthrough lasted just under 15 hours, which is almost unheard of in RPG world. The story pulls you in quickly and gets interesting within minutes rather than hours. From there, the game is constantly giving you fun milestones such as getting your base, recruiting new characters in every new location, and building your army for larger scale battles. Second, the music of this game is fantastic, with almost every track in this game being a standout all these years after the game's release. From the battle theme to the theme of Vincent and Milich (my personal favorite song), I found that I remembered almost every track in the game after not playing the game for 5 years. Finally, this game is full of charm, which really seems lacking in other RPGs of the PS1 era. Little details such as getting a bath in your base that you can decorate, finding a mystic sword that talks trash to it's owner, and winning the large scale army battles at the end of the story chapters are constantly popping up. Considering the 15 hour playthrough time, the game throws enough of these bite-sized elements together to keep having fun and wanting to press forward to see what is next.
For all the things I love about this game, there are definitely some things that stood out during my replay. The combat system, for starters, was no fun at all. If ever an RPG battle system could be described as "hit the win button", this might be the poster child. Assuming you carry around some medicine or a Water rune, you will never be in any danger of losing whatsoever. Also, the game gives you tons of recruitable characters to add to your party, but usually sticks you with one or two characters that have stay in your party in addition to the silent protagonist. Considering that most characters lack any distinguishing characteristics in battle, you will end up just picking whatever character looks cool and tossing them in your party. For a game that would seemingly offer endless party customization due to the huge roster, battles end up feeling the same with every party and became boring quickly. Thankfully, the developers likely knew this, and added a feature that lets you instantly run from battles early on in each dungeon.
While I found the core story to be charming, the game never does anything with most of the side characters you recruit. Out of the 108 characters, I would guess that maybe 25 of them have any character development beyond a couple lines of text. I would have liked to see far more characters that play out like Vincent, a hilarious French aristocrat who constantly needs you to bail him out of trouble. While his appearances are short, they really give him a unique personality and endear you to him.
