I love Suikoden III, and it remains a great game. However, the series' entrance into 3D mechanics was not without its glitches, and from my last replay a couple of years ago, the 3D mechanics (or lack thereof) have not aged well. This includes a clunky, fixed camera and your character sprite "running" at the pace of a 70-year-old grandmother on her second hip-replacement. I've never been so happy to see Viki. After that, my biggest gripe is probably the 999,999 potch limit.

That being said, I still tend to think more highly of S3 than S5, because S3's cast and storytelling are just fantastic. I even began enjoying the battle system, except for that friendly fire bulltrout making the game's True Rune virtually unusable (not that Hugo needs any magic to demolish everything in his path in chapters 4 and 5). My first time through, I thought the game had a very nice range of difficulty and challenge. I liked the concept of the main story boss battles that were optional to win, and Yuber was a nightmare for major battles for my first few encounters. Of course, the skill system for your main party and mounts are easily broken (as is farming Fury runes), but that's not until late game anyway. And I really liked how your characters in major battles were linked to their level/skills/equipment, which rewarded you for putting in the effort of using more people; for the life of me, I'm not sure why that concept was never utilized again.

And then there's one of the best parts of S3: the stupidly hilarious theater mini-game. You can have any of your characters star in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, as well as Suikoden-themed stories from important events in previous games. Some of the characters are great actors and others, well... not so much.