There are fireflies inside? SPOILERS EVERYWHERE FOR PS3 OWNERS THAT LIKE VIDEO GAMES.

[Pete for President]

I never had issue guessing their action from the dialogue 75% of the time, which is more than enough to win. But if you struggle with it just look it up in a guide because indeed those battles are dumb.

Digging up this old thread because I've continued my first and blind playthrough. I'm at the Luca Blight battle. I farmed for it. I beat him. And then proceed to lose the stupid 1v1 rock-paper-scissor battle. It doesn't even make any sense! As in, the dialogue somehow telegraphs what he's gonna do? It doesn't really though. The rage quit was real and I'm not sure whether I can be bothered doing the whole thing again. It takes like 30 minutes altogether.

That one is less obvious than the other duels, largely because Luca is entirely insane at that point. His desperate attacks are generally more angry/emotional, and he does them frequently, so you may be better off just straight Defending for non-obvious ones. You had to have gotten pretty unlucky, because his health starts pretty low.

Yea I did look up a guide this time as I went through it.

I'm on Rockaxe castle now. The random encounter rate is way too high for my tastes : /

[Pete for President]

I intended to finish the game before leaving the country again but I got to what I think was the final boss, got my ass whooped and then ran out of time. It's kind of a shame but I also recognised this game isn't meant to be rushed and I did exactly that. I guess the point was to enjoy wandering around the world talking to people and recruiting and stuff. Then again the battle system feels slow and old and sometimes the encounters with people are just vague. Like that priest in South Window, he just goes: "I am Gotetsu, I am a priest!", so how does that help the player to guess to recruit him? That's just not very helpful I find.

Flawed, but pretty cool game. Will finish it when I get back to the Netherlands.

[Raistlin]

When you ask Gantetsu to join, doesn't he mention something about strength?

Also, as in all Suikoden games, your investigator (Richmond for S2) is a great resource for learning how to recruit new people. I think S2 is a pretty good balance in difficulty for you to try to figure things out for recruitment (too easy except for 1 or 2 characters is S3, too hard is S5).

I do agree with you that S2 is certainly not meant to be rushed (unless you're trying the stupid Clive quest).

[Jowy]

This is an insanely long thread to bump, but I'm on another replay via emulation and a weird ass glitch hit me. Screenshot inserted. Admittedly, I did the gate glitch after I snagged my runes since the RNG gave me a troutty party BUT this is playthrough 10+ and has never occurred. And I'm allowed to bump it because my account name has a Black Sword Rune. Heehee.

Oops! Can't upload my file via phone since it is too large. Tl;dr after the Luca fight someone joined me at level 99 and wtf did that happen to anyone else?!

[Wolf Kanno]

My guess is you may have triggered an overflow glitch. Is Riou a higher level than he should be? Then perhaps when the game was trying to factor the recruit's level it went too high and jumped their level to max by accident. Suikoden II has a very broken leveling mechanic and it's fairly easy to max out a character's level in this game compared to other entries.