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« on: December 21, 2007, 07:11:39 AM »
S5:
So I pick up where my first save left off and, lo and behold, the game stops sucking. The entire Barows arc was well written and fairly well done. The gameplay is... eh, but what do you expect from Suikodens not named 3 and to a much lesser extent Tactics?
However, I am not without complaints.
1. Towns are just horribly designed. Random invisible walls you can't walk through for no reason, paths that you need to access being obscured by buildings (I'm looking at you, Estrise), the town music is just dull, etc. etc.
2. The dungeons seem all take a page from the SH2 book of dungeon design. THIS IS NOT GOOD. I'm dreading the phantom forest or whatever that everyone else keeps saying is the worst of them.
3. Okay, okay. I'm sorry, S5. I'm sorry I bitched about your stilted expository dialogue in the intro. Can you at least have NPCs tell me where shit is or... something? Your towns are so unintuitivly designed and the map so... Suikoden mappish that I'd really appreciate it.
4. Recruitment. Fuck off.
5. Silent mains. Fuck off. You know, Konami, if you had just given The Hero Formerly Known as Prince some lines Lyon wouldn't have to play little miss irritating mouthpiece the entire game.
6. What the hell is with the skill system? It's so bloody useless. Not only are the bonuses a fraction of a fraction of what S3 gave you, but you can only equip 2 skills at a time? Great, S5. You fixed my one complaint about S3's skill system (SP gain rate) and broke the rest of the bloody system. Good job.
This is not to say the game's terrible. Quite the contrary, I'm enjoying myself now; when the Barows clan came to the forefront of the plot every bit about it was well executed. The characters were despicable but credible, the mystery was actually interesting, the rate at which information was given to you was perfectly balanced with how much we couldn't know to keep the dramatic tension going (as opposed to the intro, "Oh my god we've been through so much I don't want to talk about it. Oh hey queen yeah Lordlake sucks that's what I was bitching about but not saying anything about it for teh MYSTARY. By the way queen did you know that you brought ur rath down on Lordlake 2 yrz ago? thought ud like to no." Fuck the intro). Just... there are a lot of minor things irritating me. Things that managed to take a step BACK from S4. For all that sailing is shit at least I could navigate the towns reasonably.
Oh well, looks like I'll end up giving the game a high ranking, in the end. Very plot heavy and it proved that it can do plot reasonably well.
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