The Latest in my random antics! Playthrough of Suikodens 1-3 + SuikoGaiden!

[Raistlin]

I completely agree with you about the jumpy, contrived story. I distinctly remember being in awe at just how forced some of the plot points were, especially on your first visit to Obel. Between the convenient ruins that you explore for no specific reason and the suggestion to start recruiting people just for the hell of it (presumably to have more people at your poker games), it's really like some one high school writer decided to write a Suikoden script and then they realized after-the-fact that certain things were never explained -- so they just added in a random line or two.

A lot of the background characters were definitely done poorly. The silent protagonist can be a powerful literary tool when done well, when there are sufficiently developed characters close to the Hero who can essentially speak for him. This was demonstrated very capably in S1 and S2, where Gremio, et al and Nanami respectively were very well developed -- and through them, the Hero. But Lazlo's friends were never really developed and never given sufficient screen time to speak for him.

It is very interesting to see how the series developed, as S4 had pretty much scrapped everything S3 had done right.

Suikoden I: Completely new series, great potential, but lacked polish.
Suikoden II: Developers obviously learned, as this took everything S1 did and made it at least a little better.
Suikoden III: New platform (PS2 and 3D), so tried a lot of new things. Very strong writing and characters, but lacked polish.
Suikoden IV: Instead of improving on S3, decided to revert all of its advancements, and tried entirely different new things. Most of them flopped, and it still lacked polish.
Suikoden V: What S4 should have been, it took everything good about S2 and combined it with everything good about S3, while polishing up S3's new concepts.

If only other development teams were so capable of learning from mistakes and building on previous advancements.