Suikoden Tierkreis thoughts: What an odd game. Finished it ~10 days ago as noted, but writeup time. It has got some really strong elements and some really awful elements. Luckily I'm the type of person who's happy to enjoy the good elements and gloss over the bad parts, but sheesh. The bad parts are REALLY bad. So I'm going to whine about that first. Spoilers, of course.
The dungeon crawling is just... horrible. As is the combat. This is a game where there's a person who's the Viki-esque person with the oft-noted plot power to teleport anywhere she's been before, and you *still cannot teleport on your own*. (Outside of a few very specific points which she isn't even related to.) And the game doesn't plot-accelerate you out of several dungeons, so you have to trudge back the exact same way you came. And this all wouldn't be so bad if the dungeons were, y'know, interesting experiences, but they're incredibly bland. Not too many doodads, just empty corridors that are zoomed in too close such that it happened more than once that I got turned around unknowingly after a battle. I'm a person with a decent memory for such things, too. The combat is wholly uninteresting autobattle nonsense, but I've accepted that for other games (other Suikodens!) so this isn't necessarily a killer. I will say that if you're going to have easy randoms, make them like FF6 randoms which are at least very fast to fight. Speed this up, darn it.
So... a brief aside. I have a friend who didn't like Silent Hill because he felt it was insufficiently difficult. You know, you need to be scared in survival horror, so therefore he wasn't scared because he could hit nurses with a pipe all day or whatever. This is... silly. Silent Hill is scary for other reasons. Still, there's a limit to this.
Effortlessly OHKOing Ganon in a Zelda game would be a huge anticlimax. So there clearly does come a point where gameplay can be so easy that it dulls the desired feel of the game.
Okay, back to Tierkreis. We all know, elite gamers here, that your average turn-based RPG is secretly rather easy. You can give fancy moves to the enemy, but if you simply revive dead party members ASAP and perhaps occasionally heal, you're going to win eventually. But you can still at least give the illusion of challenge. Let it
feel like an epic confrontation, even if you aren't really going to lose short of catastrophic errors of judgment. Grandia II bosses are not particularly powerful, but dang if they aren't fun & rewarding to fight. In the same way, I can appreciate a Suikoden boss fight that's supposed to be an epic struggle against a mighty foe that isn't ACTUALLY hard, but feels rewarding to defeat anyway. And the plot sure does hype a lot of fights as difficult, complete with the party members panting afterward, that didn't threaten at all (or, in one case, that I literally one-rounded!). But whatever! It can work. So... a mostly good example: the HQ attack 3/4 of the way through the game. If you look at the boss stats I posted, objectively speaking, these guys suck. And... it makes little sense from a plot perspective, too. Why aren't they sending an army to support these guys? Aren't they concerned about losing the precious Chronicles? Why are they attacking from 3 directions at once? And yet, who cares. As a set piece - an excuse for a bunch of big fights, a chance for it to feel like recruiting all these dudes
meant something - it's great. ('sup, Mass Effect 2.) You get to split up into 4 groups and take on 5 boss battles in a row. Bring it on! This is cool. Sure, I'd rather they upped the difficulty on the bosses some, but I get what the game was going for here, and I like it. It's like FF6's Narshe defense or XG's Shevat defense sequence. You don't even WANT it to be super-super difficult if you have someone who really neglected their party members too much.
But... I was ranting about the bad parts. The game never replicates this again, despite having room for up to 5 (!) parties. You have to make some other parties for an assault later on Cynas, and the fights are just... awful. I suppose the logic is you might have screwed up and only deployed one person, or be horribly underlevel, or something, but then just allow these other parties to be modified / grind after the fact. Instead, if you bring a real force, your other parties get 1 battle each which are all *insanely* easy. I'm talking "oh 2 enemies, you OHKO both with 2 actions while the other 2 party members twiddle their thumbs." Kefka's Tower this is not. Like... rip off Kefka's Tower entirely. Have 3-5 groups you can switch between and gear up / grind with all of them, and give them all *real* boss fights, and have them be right after save points. This isn't even a break with series tradition, both Suiko3 & Suiko5 make you deploy 3 parties in the final dungeon (if for a much shorter period of time). Look, I just want to have my other parties have something to do so that this is the 108 Stars of Destiny, not the 5 Stars of Destiny. Letting me purchase from the Stars who are cooks / smiths / salesmen / etc. would be nice, too! Ugh.
Now, after all this asking for more difficulty, or at least more fake difficulty (triple all endgame boss HP!), a complaint about something being
too difficult. The frue final is very fast and, late in his sequence, has a strong MT 2HKO. And initiative is fairly random. So even if you spam an MT healing spell every round, it's possible via luck of the draw to have your healing spell uselessly go first one round, boss uses MT doom, boss uses MT doom at start of next round, rekt. This would be... fine! If you had a save point right before the boss. You don't, so there's basically old Dragon Quest difficulty of "I hope the AI RNG doesn't screw me." Granted, blitzing is not that hard and means that the number of chances for the boss to do this won't be very many, but it is possible, and if I'd run across it it'd have been frustrating, not fun. As is, I didn't run into that, so it was a cakewalk, because if you don't get unlucky it's the usual "do you know that healing is a useful thing, if y win." Still not a particularly rewarding win, and yet can still randomly wipe you if you're unlucky. Ugh.
I'll add that while there's some joy in figuring out optimal setups, I think the Pokemon-esque 4 move limit was a mistake with a cast this large. It just means there's a huge amount of bookkeepping to do every time you grab a new skill as you check what it is for every person and what you should take out for it. Just manage this for me and auto-upgrade skills. Every character gets a passive and 3 moves, and sometimes the passive / moves upgrade based on grabbing Chronicles. There you go. Would probably make characters *more* unique by forcing some more tough choices, too.
Moving on to plot whines... hmm. I don't think they really sold some of the heel/face turns well, or more generally "get" what the Order was up to in a proper sympathetic way. I think it's perfectly fine to play with a point you want to criticize to make its bad implications more stark - the "futile acceptance" part of a world which is predestined, here. And everybody knows religions can be hypocritical and inconsistent, so it's weird how The Order simultaneously crows about its predictions (Which are only useful if used to save lives - e.g. Macoute crowing about knowing about snowslides in the mountains) but also preaches that attempting to avoid disasters is pointless, but it's plausible, sure. But that isn't the angle the PCs use; for some reason they seem to think that a predestined world clearly has no joy or happiness, which is weird. For example, Chrodechild's argument to Fredegund (who, for being introduced as an OMG big time problem villain, ends up barely doing anything) is something along the lines of "I love you, how could that be true in a predestined world". Pish posh, especially from what we see of Valfred's eternal day later on. She could plausible have answered back that love exists BECAUSE the One King has predestined everything to be awesome, and it's perfectly compatible and why can't you see that. I mean, come on, you can actually check what real-life Calvinists believe / believed, and at its strongest form you ended up with Candide-esque "God has ordained the BEST POSSIBLE WORLD which is AWESOME".
But hey, at least they tried to explain Fredegund. Sophia, on the other hand, was apparently beat her up -> suddenly she is on our side because. I guess maybe getting beaten up washes off vague nonsensical brainwashing? It's still a bit of a clash, as it's implied that Dirk survives having a Chronicle implanted in him via some ubermenschen Triumph Of The Will type deal. So it stands to reason that somebody else who survives this for a long time would also be a zealot. But oh well, I guess this vague unexplained brainwashing that falls off after fighting is a bit of a staple in bad RPG tropes, so whatever.
While ST handled a multidimensions plot better than many, I think it was a poor choice to have the others called "The Infinity", though. Worlds are getting munched in The Infinity? By definition, they're probably getting munched then created all the time. The game tries to hype this as a big thing, too, but this is really a bit too abstract... are you willing to fight so that there will be invisible other dimensions maybe in the many-dimensions version of quantum mechanics?! No? You want me to care, do what Bravely Default did - there are 108 dimensions, and now there are only 5 left, better act now before they're all connected into one or something.
This is going to be general and vague complaint, and it isn't uncommon, but some of the plotlines didn't really seem to cohere. For example, there's this bizarre incident in the home village of the Furious Roar where the bad guys attack, and you fight them, and win, then Dirk comes by and says "lol thanks for the distraction we win!!1!" and Diluf is all "clearly you are the real demons." Okay, so I guess Dirk stole the Chronicle while we weren't looking and then Diluf has horrible judgment about who to trust. Except... the Chronicle isn't actually stolen? So... what did Dirk do he was bragging about then and why would Diluf even be mad? (Incidentally, that Chronicle DOES get stolen... later... and it goes to Dirk, who was crowing about stealing it here... so I have to wonder if they stuck in two different spots for it to be stolen, and then half undid one spot after they realized they didn't want to have the same Chronicle stolen then recovered twice in a row.)
Some of the characters were pretty lame, but I guess that's to be expected with 108 stars. I'll call out a few in particular:
* Zenoa. Ugh. Zerase was terrible too and they decided to recreate her. "lolol you suck and I disrespect you and I know the plot but I'm not going to tell you but will help you anyway." Don't get me wrong, you can't tell the plot to the player too early, and I'm fine with having characters inexplicably delay on telling you key details, but don't draw attention to this fact unless you ACTUALLY have a narrative reason to do so (e.g. Citan). Especially weird since she knows the true nature of the One King yet doesn't warn you off the bad end, because... because. They never explain WTF is going on with Ordovic & her's "resurrection" either, although I suppose that's okay.
* Icas & Morrin. Okay, token womanizer, even cartoonishly played up, fine. But Morrin wants Our Heroes to... what... kidnap her lost love who very openly is not the type to settle down with one person? This is... pathetic. And for whatever reason these idiots get tons of scenes and never have any character development, or at least other characters commenting on the lack of ability to grow up. Could have been okay as a side joke, was expanded into something lame instead.
* Buchse. What, you say? The random silent gunner with no lines? How can he be lame, he's just there to show Geschutz has some reports! Well he gets one scene in the final castle bit, and it's really dumb. He takes a shot at whoever was coming through the door, and somehow misses. (This is Our Hero, and he's apparently aiming at Tsaubern because he was annoyed at him or something.) Wat. Talk about failed humor. Lol I tried to murder someone but I suck so lucky, I'll apologize for not trying to murder the right person for no reason?
There was some plot wonkiness with the final showdown, too, aside from the poor life decision to have it only be 1 party. So... the last Chronicle attacking us really was just a rando-test? And... no final plot twist with respect to the final boss? Obviously referring to my earlier speculation that it'd be Atrie or alternate-dimension hero or the hero's father or something. Definitely missing some plot there, I think it was a bad call to just make it the equivalent of a giant space monster. Even worse is that it's apparently involuntary mind control space monster, since he's all thankful after you beat him up. This is a horrible choice in a Suikoden game: the villain needs to choose their path voluntarily, even if for some crazypants reason. It's not very much of a clash of beliefs or ideologies to face off against a guy who can't even defend why having 1 star was needed. It's not that hard: some horrible threat arose and the only way to stop it was to CONTROL FATE BY EATING STARS or something, I dunno, this wouldn't be great but it'd be something. It's especially weird since normally you can at least transfer "blame" for a mind control plotline to whoever's doing the mind control, but there's no entity that ever explains why some random Tenkai Star got forced into doing this, or why Our Hero would too in the Bad End. Like, control fate, fine, but what *for*? I'd assume it'd be the priorities of that Tenkai Star, not a new mission of "evangelize controlling fate and eat worlds." Bah. Some real missed opportunities. Not that it would necessarily have made tons of sense for Atrie to be the villain, but crazy melodramatic twists are worth something if it puts some personal stakes on the table for that final fight.
Okay, this was long and ranty, so let me talk about the good parts. ST gets across the implications of these "world-combination" plotlines WAY better than the vast majority of media that dips their toe here (e.g. the likes of FF5). I really like how they try and figure out the implications, and how lots of them are not good! e.g. the mountain expert who becomes a senile crazy old man when his mountains mostly disappear, Maybelle going totally crazy, everybody knowing to avoid the weird wasteland to the northwest of Pharamond (but hey, the monsters are passive, they've never attacked us in the past! ...true...) It's a little weird how some worlds are blatantly "exactly the same people as ours" while others are apparently radically different, but whatevs. Anyway, I liked that massive adjustments of reality actually got noticed and had implications. I also think that The Order was all in all an interesting villain; nobody else seems to have a religion, which as we all know from both Civ5 and real-life, makes it hard to resist prostletyization. Much easier when you can say "nope, we already found God and you're really servants of a demon" than "uh, sure, you offer eternal happiness, but YOU'RE WRONG" or something. Mentioned this already, but I liked the Hero / Dirk plotline as well. The final castle scene pretty good, along with more generally all the interaction you could do - I whined about some characters above, but the others were memorable / amusing enough in their own way, even if they often had too little to do.
So. In conclusion, the combat is bad. Alas. But I liked some of the plot, so yay.
Next up: Another old RPG. In fact, an RPG that I used to vote on in the old DL despite not really playing the game. We'll see if it lives up to the hype.
