9.
So yeah... totally cheating with this one but technically there was a release of the game that packaged both of them together, but not counting that excuse, my reasoning really has to do with the fact the two entries really flow well into each other. Suikoden II at times feels like an extension of where Suikoden left off and one of the games highlights for me is seeing all of the returning cast members and conclusions to some of their character arcs in the sequel. Only Suikogaiden really has a similar vibe from what little I've played, whereas the later entries have legacy style callbacks to the other entries but never quite got it like these first two did.
Suikoden is based on a Chinese Novel of the same name and means Water Margin roughly. The novel is the story of a 108 men and women who band together in the water marshes to become bandits and fight the corrupt government institutes that led them all to forsake the system. I have actually read a decent chunk of the book and it's pretty good as it tells each characters individual story of their fall from grace in society and having to start a life of crime to get by. From these elements, Suikoden the series is largely about a person who bands together 108 like minded individuals to help them either fight a corrupt regime, or save their homeland from an outside invader. One of the major framing devices for this series are the 27 True Runes which are physical and sentient embodiment of the power that runs the world. All magic is derivative of the true runes, and the true runes grant immortality and agelessness to the bearer, but the runes power comes at a cost as the runes usually place a heavy burden of destiny on those who use them.
Quick plot rundown for those who haven't played the series, and then I'll get into the nitty gritty. Suikoden is the story of Tir McDohl, the son of the Great General Teo McDohl of the Scarlet Moon Empire. The empire has finally gotten back on it's feet after a devastating civil war caused by a succession crisis when the former emperor chose his younger son to succeed him over his eldest. The scars of war still linger in some parts of the land but Emperor Barbarossa has largely returned the empire to one of prosperity along with his Six Great Generals. The story begins when Tir officially joins the imperial army and is put under the care of the corrupt Bureaucrat Kraze. As Tir and his entourage complete tasks for the empire, they slowly come to realize that while the capital is rather content, the surrounding towns and regions are suffering from over taxation and corrupt officials abusing their power. A Liberation Army has formed to counter these grievances but is much too small to do anything about it. On one mission, the group encounters a terrible beast they can't possibly stop until Tir's best friend, the mysterious Ted reveals that he is in possession of the Soul Eater, the True Rune of Life and Death. When Ted is ratted out to the upper members of the imperials, it turns out that the Court Magician Windy is actually looking for the rune and she has Ted nearly killed in order to get it. Knowing he can't escape her grasp, Ted transfers the Rune to Tir and asks him to leave the capital. Now a fugitive, Tir allies himself with the small Liberation Army. He quickly becomes friends with their leader who is trying to get Tir to join their cause when she is finally killed in a raid. Her dying wish is for Tir to continue the cause. Recruiting her brother, Mathiu, the famous Tactician (comically mistranslated as Surgeon in the game for some reason) Tir begins to build the Liberation Army from a rag tag group of misfits into a major force for reform.
Suikoden II takes place a years after the first game in the western countries of the City States of Jowstown and the Highland Kingdom. Highland had been fighting an unsuccessful war against their southern rivals of the City States for a number of years and both sides grew tired of the conflict and had finally decided to sign a peace treaty to end the war. Riou and his best friend Jowy are members of the Unicorn Brigade, a youth military unit created by Highland to boost morale but never really fought in the main conflict. Jowy comes from a prestigious family in their hometown whom he secretly hates, whereas Riou is an orphan raised with another orphan named Nanami by a disgraced former general named Genkaku. The night before the peace treaty is signed, the unit is attacked by soldiers of the City States and are largely slaughtered, realizing their commanding officer's command to retreat down the only road to escape is a bad call, the two boys backtrack to the camp where they discover that the "attack" was actually a false flag operation led by Highland's own Prince Luca as a means to fire back up Highland's desire for war against the City States and to keep the war going. The boys barely escape the attack and soon are separated after jumping down a waterfall to escape pursuit. Riou is rescued by a band of mercenaries working for the City State of Muse. Riou is thought to be a spy and put to work on meager chores until he is eventually rescued by Jowy who was rescued by a kind family from a town not to far.
The two return to their homeland but are captured and tried as spies and traitors working for the City-States in order to conceal the truth they know. They are rescued by the mercenaries Riou had met and are smuggled back across the border by them. Here they witness firsthand the depths of cruelty that Luca Blight has in store for the City States as he has no intention of conquering his enemies, he seeks to genocide the entire population. The two boys decide to join the mercenaries to stop the war but find the City States are a dysfunctional group where every nation is more concerned about their own priorities and old grudges to actually recognize the real threat Luca Blight is. The City States begin to fall one by one. The boys end up devising very different means of stopping the war, which ultimately finds them on opposing sides in the conflict in order to bring the war to an end.
The original Suikoden is such an odd game when I think about it. The original concept for Suikoden story would eventually become the more popular sequel Suikoden II, but in an odd moment of brilliant foresight, the developers knew their total lack of experience in developing RPGs would hinder their ability to live up to the stories intricate nature, so instead they wrote up a different plot that became this game and used it as a test run to work out all of their ideas and build their experience. From a narrative perspective, Suikoden jumps back and forth between brilliance and hokey cliche storms. You have to deal with Tolkein-esque Dwarves and Elves conflicts, fruity French stereotypes, and a goddamn Dracula expy. On the flip side, there are some powerful moments of betrayals, noble sacrifices, characters dealing with war crimes, and Tir's climatic conflict with his father.
So the game really goes back and forth between some great writing and feeling irrelevant. Not helping is the fact the game has some awesome background narrative introduced in a few production manuals, the novelization, and a series of short stories that give lots of background info about the Succession War, Odessa's background, the Kelekka Incident, the history of the McDohl household including Gremio's past, Pahn's past, Ted's past and more; yet all of it is left in supplemental material that never made it out of Japan so yeah...the game still feels like a 16-bit RPG trying to be really epic and not always succeeding. Granted, I'm making this sound worse than it really is, Suikoden's plot is still fairly enjoyable but I don't want to mislead you into thinking it's so great it can stand alone in my top ten. In truth, if I had done the games individually, Suikoden would be somewhere in my 60s. A good game marred by an amateurish design that has not aged as well as I would have hoped. Still it has these profound moments like with the characterization of Emperor Barbarossa, a man who actually shows up only three times in the game, but proves to be such a well rounded figure who subverts the usual evil emperor role that he comes across as one of the game's most tragic figures. His final scene really places a different spin on the whole war and transitions the conflict from a corrupt empire to one simply by one figure manipulating the system for their own ends. He comes across like Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who was considered to be a very personable figure who allowed his personal domestic issues to blind him to the real troubles of his empire and see him lose everything. Of all the villains of the series, Barbarossa was the most human to me.
Course it's when you take the game as an action packed prologue to Suikoden II that I feel the game really shines. Twenty three characters from Suikoden return in this game as playable characters and at least a dozen more make cameos. In truth Suikoden 1's ending is rather bittersweet, even with the best ending since it leaves so many questions unanswered but Suikoden II ends up actually putting those questions to rest and some of the game's most powerful moments for me are when old allies reunite. This is not to say Suikoden II can't stand alone on its own merits. Far from it actually, most of the callbacks create a nice cohesion and fill in some backstory for people, but none of that is needed to enjoy Suikoden II's standalone story. The best way I could put it is that you can appreciate the history concerning WWII without really delving into WWI history, but knowing that background creates a clearer picture of the events. despite that, between the two, Suikoden II has the superior writing and design.
The politics are more complex, there is less emphasis on traditional and overused fantasy cliches, the villains and antagonists are largely played more straight and serious with the exception of returning villain Neclord who is still hammy as ever. What I really have to give my respect for is that Luca Blight is a pretty straight omnicidal maniac which is kind of a dime a dozen in the medium, but he's shown in such a ruthless and frightening way that despite being one of the more straight evil characters in the series he is truly effective. The boss battle with him alone may be one of the best boss battles in the series and is up there with Magus in CT as one of the coolest boss battles in an RPG. There is almost an interesting parallel to the Battletech franchise here as a major part of Suikoden II's conflict really comes down to the petty squabbles among the City States despite facing a common enemy. Much like the Clan conflict of Battletech, the City-States have to be almost completely conquered before they wake up to realize how serious of a threat Luca Blight really is. It was kind of amusing to learn in Suikoden III that Tinto, easily the biggest pricks of the City States, wound up seceding from the Dunan Republic that forms by the end of SII because they were pretty selfish bastards and didn't get along with anyone. I mean they only end up helping Riou's cause because Riou saves them from an unrelated incident from the war and the Mayor of Tinto owed him.
This in itself is a large part of why I love the Suikoden series, because it's hard to find a make-believe world function so close to real world politics and history. A minor conflict in SII is the bad blood between the cities of South Window and Tinto over territory they lost to the Toran Republic (the nation formed by McDohl from the remnants of the Scarlet Moon Empire) which itself is a callback to an event from the first game, because your strategist defeats one of the Great Generals by temporarily allying with the City States of Jowston to attack his region at the same time as the Liberation Army, Mathiu ultimately saying that the land lost to the invaders would be taken back later, and that "later" is the event that caused the falling out between the two City State members. It's that level of continuity that makes this series so unique and interesting. I think only Front Mission has ever come close to the same level of detail and even that series tends to be way more coy about it's interconnected nature. While the Highland City State conflict has it's own unique history, the actual Dunan Unification War winds up being nearly lost and won thanks to unrelated events from the first game showing one of the unique ways how history kind of ebbs and flows like in real life.
Also, unlike FFtactics, Suikoden I and II does a better job of making sure the human drama stays upfront as opposed to the Rune being the central plot element. The Soul Eater begins the conflict in the first game but doesn't really come into play outside of the beginning and ends of the game, the Rune of Beginnings in SII feel more like a plot excuse as to how some nobody 16 year old orphan ends up leading a major war. They are a means to an end. McDohl has to face struggles within the Liberation Army by former members under Odessa, he deals with traitors to the cause, the death of close allies and friends, and he ends up facing off against his own father over political values. Riou faces being betrayed by his own homeland and having to find a new life in a foreign land that hates him, he deals with political infighting, genocides, assassinations, and ultimately comes into conflict with his own best friend who is fighting for the same thing as him. This is what makes the series so great, it's the human element of it's conflicts that make the stories compelling. The True Runes draw you in but it's the characters and the historical backdrop that make you stay.
I think I've rambled enough on this, for me Suikoden has always felt like a hard sell to other people. The games are kind of on the easy side, the "collect 108 characters" sounds more daunting than it really is, the games kind of look low value compared to flashier and prettier games in the genre, and historical drama style plots are pretty niche in the genre as well. Perhaps part of this also stems from my own experience with the franchise. I found out about it in a magazine preview that I showed a friend. They picked it up and ended up really loving the game so when I finally got my own PS1, they lent it to me. I was not terribly impressed at first, especially coming off FFTactics and Xenogears, but I stuck to it and ended up really enjoying the game. I vaguely remember playing the sequel he lent me a year or so later but my interest in the series didn't start up until I got the third entry which really made me want to retrace the older installments. I got the first game in a bargain bin along with P2: EP at EB Games and was annoyed that Suikoden II was just too damn expensive to get a copy of. I finally acquired it by taking advantage of some Amazon gift cards a few years back and I seriously sat down and played the trilogy again to great satisfaction. It's definitely one of those franchises I end up liking a little more every time I play it and my only gripe nowadays is finding people to really talk to about the series. I work on the series Wiki but it's not really the same as a forum experience sadly. So I guess what I'm saying is that I need more of you to bite the bullet and pick up the series.
Coming Up: Link... Zelda is your...
