I really did not like the battle system change. It made boss fights
frustrating at times. I liked how much detail they put into the
character models, and the characters themselves. Almost all the
characters had a rich storyline, and most of them were important to the
story. I loved the story and characters alot, but I think because of
the high emphasis on storyline and characters really made the game
painfully linear. Separating the characters storyline forced each party
to walk a certain path, which made it hard to backtrack if you wanted.
Some characters couldn't visit some towns, and so on. It was another
frustrating for because sometimes, in a Suikoden game, all I want to do
is look for the 108 Stars of Destiny, but this game made it really hard
for me to do that. You couldn't REALLY do that until the end of the
game after you've visited each town, and even then you could trigger a
storyline on accident and be thrusted away from non-linearity.
My rant:
Invisible storyline triggers and why I hate them. Suikoden III has a
habit of showing nice dialog scene, but not giving you a hint on what
to do afterwards. Most of the times it just forces me to run around in
circles within whatever town I'm in just looking for that one spot that
triggers another cutscene. I wouldn't mind this so much if they would
atleast give a HINT why I should go to sleep to advance the storyline,
or to run to the other end of the castle and walk close to the man on
the horse to advance the storyline. It makes no sense and annoys me.
----------Battle System----------
Suikoden III is a turn-based RPG. All turns at placed in rounds, so for
example you have to set all of your turns, and then watch the battle
unfold until the next round. The characters or enemies with the best
speed will go first and so on.
You can have up to 6 characters
in battle. The system is a little different (for the worst I'd say)
from the previous Suikodens. There's three lines of battle, like the
previous games, so you have to set a front and a back for three lines.
When you're in battle and your turn is up, you can only set the moves
of each line. Which means, you have to control two characters at the
same time. If you want to attack Enemy A, then you'll have to select 2
characters to attack them. While this speeds up the process of picking
your moves, it also limits you. Say you want to use magic, well you can
only pick one of those two characters to use them, and if you pick a
front character to use magic, your back character will often just stand
still in battle. Not only that, but some magics take up to 3 turns to
complete. It's a very flawed and mismanaged system and can make some of
the boss fights a little to difficult at times in a frustrating way.
For example, lets say a boss uses an attack that hits all 6 characters
and you want to heal them right away, well you can only use 3 items
since that's all the moves you're allowed to do.
In some ways
the battle system reminds me of recent Grandia games now. All the
characters now run around like chickens with their heads cut off. Some
spells can only work within certain radius, so you can only attack in a
line or big circle, if the enemy isn't in that circle then it won't hit
them. Some spells can actually hit your characters aswell.
Like the previous games, your characters only get 1 weapon through out
the game, but they can be tempered at a blacksmith shop in towns to
make them stronger. You can equip 3 pieces of armor (helmet, armor, and
shield) and three accessories (items, rings, boots, etc). This can be
quite expensive overtime, since you'll often have 6 characters with you
at a time. The Rune system is just like Suikoden II, each character can
equip up to 3 Runes, but they won't be able to equip three right away,
you have to gain a certain amount of levels before you're able to do
that.
Suikoden III has a pretty cool skill system though. Each
character 8 slots they can manage with either Physical or Magical
skills. At the end of each battle, everyone that survived will get
Skill Points. After you've accumulated enough, you can visit a shop and
visit either a physical or magical learning center to boost these
skills. You can learn Damage, Armor Protect, Parry, etc at a Physical
shop, or Fire Magic, Magic Resistance at a Magical shop. There's only 8
slots, so you have to pick which ones you think are best for the
character. Some characters come pre equipped with special skills you
can't learn anywhere else.
Dungeon's are extremely short and
otherwise forgettable. All dungeons just require you to run from point
a to point b with little interference. Sometimes you'll get a second
branch to a different pathway, but most often than not it will just be
a dead end.
Suikoden III brings back the One-on-One and
Strategy gimmick battles. I feel these gimmicks are mostly a waste of
time and once again I'm correct. The one-on-one battles are just so
much easier this time around, which is a good thing but they're so easy
they're almost pointless. It's basically rock paper scissors, but the
character you're dueling will say something, but usually what they say
is obvious what their next attack will be. The strategy battle is
similar to the Suikoden II battles, as they're turn-based strategy at
heart. The board is set like a Chinese checkers board. You can move
across which ever dot is connected and initiate a fight, use magic or
defend. When you get into a fight, you get to choose if you want to
fight, run or defend. Your team is set into a randomized fight, similar
to Ogre Battle 64, where they'll fight each other for a certain amount
of time until there is a winner. You can win or lose early if your
leader is killed, but it's random so you can't just aim for the leader.
This gimmick is another failure because most battles are
pre-determined. You have to follow one path, and that one path is
mostly to sit in one spot while a storyline takes place. Most battle
objectives is to "wait", and I'm not making that up. Both of these
gimmicks are once again a waste of time.
The best thing about
Suikoden games are finding all 108 Stars of Destiny. This means,
there's 108 recruitable characters scattered within the world and it's
your job to find them and convince them to join your castle. Since this
game doesn't really have a main character, you get to run your castle
with a fourth avatar, Thomas. Thomas has 2 chapters all by himself in
the game and it's his job to build a castle from scratch. So he
eventually hires Chris, Geddeo and Hugo to find more people to join his
castle. Not all 108 will join your castle (some are bad guys) and not
all 108 are able to join you in battle, but most are.
This is
probably the easiest Suikoden game, in terms of finding all the side
characters. Most of them join you automatically through the story,
while the rest are really simple as hell to figure out how convince
them to join. Some characters will even join you without a test. It's
weird but to simple. There was only 1 character I just couldn't figure
out, and only a handful of characters I just couldn't find.
----------Characters / Story----------
Suikoden III uses a system they call the "Trinity Sight System", which
means you get to play as three main characters, that go on three
different quests, that intertwine with each other. So you get to see
from their own perspectives. You get to choose between Chris, a noble
knight from Zexen, Hugo a young warrior from the Grasslands, and Geddeo
a neutral mercenary. War is brewing between the noble Zexen army and
the savage Grassland tribes. Each character and their team are on a
quest to find the fabled Flame Champion that holds the strength they
need to defeat their enemies and end the war.
The story was
pretty damn good. I was constantly shocked how much detail they put
into the characters and their personalities. Like in the previous two
Suikodens, after you recruited someone, they usually become background
fodder, but Suikoden III kept a good majority of the characters within
the storyline. I liked the "Trinity Sight System", it was painfully
slow but after you learned more about the characters and the lands and
the people they're interacting with, it turns out to be a fun story.
Suikoden III doesn't have any real connections to the previous two
games, but they do throw in some nods to them. For example, the Star
Dragon Sword makes an appearance, Viki is back as the teleportion mage,
Apple from II is back as a strategist, and a few other minor winks and
nods can be found.
----------Graphics----------
Everything
is in 3D from the towns to the characters to the battles. The character
models are highly detailed, the characters show a ton of emotion and
you won't see alot of reused animations during cutscenes. The
characters mouths even move along to the dialog, despite the fact that
there is no voice overs.
The game opens up with a nice anime
cutscene spliced with CGI effects, showing all the characters. The
spell attacks in this game are very underwhelming, they look like
something straight out of a PS1 game. The dungeons are extremely small
and linear with little to do within them other than to reach Point B.
----------Sound----------
I like the music quite a bit, catchy and rememberable music you should
expect from a Suikoden game by now. I really dislike the lack of voice
acting at all in this game. I know there's like 200 characters in this
game, and you can't voice all of them out, but if they atleast added a
few grunts, emotions, sighs, or most importantly battle cries within
the battle field, then I would of had an easier time with the game. Oh
well.
----------World Map----------
The world map is
a weak connect the dots map, similar to that of a Final Fantasy Tactics
game. Each dot connects to a town, field or dungeon. You can't warp
around the world at an instant, you have to manually walk through each
field (usually about 2-3 screens) until you reach the next dot. This
can be a slow process. I much preferred the overhead world map of the
previous Suikodens.
You'll eventually meet Viki, and she'll
allow you to teleport to previously visited areas, but you don't meet
her until the end of the game.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
47:08:58
The game doesn't save after the final battle, so time doesn't include
that battle or credits. Ok ending I guess. Looooong extended ending
showing all 108 and what happened to them after the game. I missed 14
characters overall.
