When I first started thinking about this list a few years back, I knew this entry would be on here, but I expected it would be in the high 70s. Then when I decided to use the list to go back to do a reassessment on some titles, I found myself pleasantly surprised to see that not only did this game stand up, but was better than I actually remembered it. III has definitely aged a little worse than I had hoped for, but barring the games few issues, I feel the good elements ultimately outweigh those issues.
Suikoden V takes place about ten years before the events of Suikoden 1, in the Queendom of Falena, a place that has been blessed by the Sun Rune but cursed with centuries of political infighting within the government. You play as the Prince, the oldest child of Queen Arshtat and her consort and Captain of the Queen's Knights, Ferid. Since leadership passes down through the women and not the men, your character ultimately gets stuck doing boring ambassador duties awaiting the day he'll be married off for some political ties. When the story begins, the Prince and his entourage, including his overprotective bodyguard Lyon, his politically savvy but incredibly lazy aunt Sialeeds, and the newest Queen's Knight Georg Prime, who is a friend from Ferid's past with a very rich military history that spans most of the series; are now returning from such an expedition to get an assessment of the damage done to the town of Lordlake. A few years before the story began, Lordlake had been the center of a rebellion that saw the sacking of a sacred temple and the theft of the Dawn Rune, which is one of the two runes needed to control the Sun Rune. Queen Arshtat ended up taking the Sun Rune upon herself and used it's powers to transform the town into a scorched desert that is barely hanging on and even more resentful of the royal family. Unfortunately, the True Rune the Queen has taken is beginning to warp her mind and giving her a god complex. Because of this, everyone in the palace, including her family are wary of her wrath.
To get her mind off the troubles in Lordlake the family prepares for the Sacred Games, a Falena tradition where possible suitors for the future queen wage gladiatorial battles to see who will become the queen's consort and captain of the Queen's Knights. The Prince's little sister has started to come of age and the family is preparing to find out who their future in-law will be. The contest really comes down to which of the two major politically powerful noble houses will win the battle. The Barows family are a wealthy if very scheming faction that wants to play nice with the kingdom's enemies to help line their pockets and they are often accused of being too close to foreign governments. On the other side is the Godwin family, who are hardliners who preach of military conquest and wanting to create a more unified and nationalistic Queendom. These two factions scheming against each other have caused several succession wars within the queendom, including a fairly recent one which resulted in the death of several family members on both sides and the royal family. When the games begin, the Prince comes to learn the harsh truths of the political climate of his country, slavery, xenophobia on all sides, and both families scheming to win the games for the chance to control the government. The games end with a strange upset, and before the family has time to investigate, their enemies strike and the Prince is forced to flee the capital with his aunt. With his sister being controlled by the enemy, the Prince has to try to bring together various factions to form an army to protest the events concerning her marriage. This gets more complicated as the Prince must navigate between various factions who have allegiance to one of the two major political factions, groups who have years of grievances against the royal family, and even attempts by foreign powers to manipulate the war for their own purposes. More than any other entry, I feel like Suikoden V really embodies the complexity of war on a historical level far deeper than previous entries in the series.
The plot actually unfolds very slowly and the story paragraph I gave you is a very very abridged version of just the first ten or so hours of the game. The title is a slow grind in the plot department, but it actually winds up being worth it in the end. Especially since a lot of this is to help establish several characters and factions you may not even meet again until 20 to 40 hours later. The cast of the game for the most part is pretty strong, almost as good as Suikoden IIIs and I love how the slow build actually makes some of the major plot twists before the game starts proper have more impact on you. The amount of depth and history that goes on in Falena is a bit more than usual for the series but it helps to make the conflict feel real, and the fact the game let's you really grow to care about the characters makes the tragedy that begins the war have more impact. If I'm going to nail the plot for anything, it would simply be that the villains start off strong and super competent before the take over, and then become incredibly incompetent afterwards, I mean it's like they were trying to piss off everyone after they took over which makes it easier to get the other factions to join your cause. I mean I know Highland kind of did the same thing in Suikoden II, but they were also being controlled by a bloodthristy psychopath who wanted to watch the whole world burn, whereas the villains of this game are more out for their own personal gain which makes their actions seem like political suicide. Also, Lucretia the Tactician is a bit of a Mary Tzu who is trying way too hard to be like Shu from SII without any of his fallable traits that make him a great tactician, but a horrible human being.
Gameplay-wise, Suikoden V is an amalgamation of several design elements from all the previous entries that combines all of their popular traits. After being missing in action for two numbered entries, V brings back a fully controllable six character party. The main battle system plays like a more fleshed out version of Suikoden II with characters having three possible rune slots. From Suikoden III, the game brings in a new Skill system that is partially better balanced in some way, but still pretty powerful. Characters now only have two skill slots in which they can equip a skill that raises their stats like Attack, Magic Defense, or Technique. You use skill points to level these skills to get better stat gains but you'll soon unlock skills that only take up one slot, but affect multiple stats as long as you've leveled the weaker skills to the appropriate level. This means that by end game you can have a character using both slots to give huge stat boosts across the board. Yet it also follows the smarter choices in SIII, in which there are some unique skills that only certain characters can learn and these skills can never be removed, and not all characters can learn all of these advanced skills. There is actually one skill that only the Prince and one other character can actually learn and the better warriors can learn the most advanced physical skills while the best mages can learn the best magic ones. So the game avoids making you teach everyone everything and becoming clones. From Suikoden IV, the armor sets have returned and thankfully don't require the insane levels of crafting and item farming that made them a pain to acquire in that title. New to the game is party formations, where you can change the party formation to gain stat bonuses but also to gain a special ability that can be used once in battle. These range from special attacks that can wipe out enemies, to special defensive bonuses that block all magic for a round, to even letting the party get a preemptive strike on enemies.
With the huge cast and customization options offered, this is a pretty fun game to play around with party configurations. Unite attacks are still here and thankfully the game avoids the earlier games habits of handing you some overpowered party wiping one ridiculously early, so battles don't become quite the chore. If I had to be honest though, SV is hands down the easiest game in the series barring collecting the characters. There are so many broken characters in this game that one of the biggest treats about the final dungeon is that you get to make three parties, allowing you to use most of them. There is one character named Ernst, who has such a broken rune, that if you combine him with the Formation that gives you a preemptive strike, you can effectively beat every boss in the game once he joins without every getting hit, and you don't even need to resort to that rune because characters like Belcoot, the two Maximilian Knights, Richard, Viki, and Zerase are all game breakers in their own rights. Georg Prime is so overpowered that not only is he usually taken out of your party for large chunks of the game for plot reasons, but even with the fact one of his skill slots is permanently filled with a non-combat skill he is still game breaker enough that the devs won't let you use him for the final battle until NG+. I didn't really understand until I watched the guy activate two of his special unique abilities and his runes special skill, only to proceed in battle by one-shotting the boss and cause five digit damage, in a series where doing 2500 damage is enough to call you overpowered. So yeah...
On the flip side, Duels have been overhauled. They retain the same setup as the previous game but now have a timer forcing you to make more quick decisions. Like the previous games, the duels utilize motion capture but have more of a wir-fu quality to them. The Prince is a pretty brutal fighter I might add. My favorite new addition is the War Battles, which work like Suikoden II where you build calvary, infantry, or mage units, but now expanded with water battles involving ramming ships, archery ships, and troop ships. It now uses the rock/paper/scissors approach to damage algorithms over whatever moon;ogic algorithms SII was using, and the battles are all Real Time Strategy so you have to stay on your toes so you don't get outflanked and watch your troops get slaughtered. This is easily my favorite war battle system in the series and offer some of the biggest gameplay challenges in the game. Well until you learn that the Beavers are the Navy SEALS of all aquatic battles. Another, and often underappreciated element I liked about the game was that it continued to utilize a trandiotnal world map/town/dungeon set-up which was being really fazed out around this time as games were transitioning to more realistic scaled maps. In fact, with the exception of maybe a few obscure RPG titles here and there, I have a hard time thinking of another RPG on the PS2 released after 2006 that had a classic world map.
Of course the real challenge of these games isn't combat or dungeon crawling, it's acquiring all of the 108 Stars of Destiny and SV might be one of the most difficult. Part of this is due to the fact that several characters actually have multiple methods to get them to join and the easiest solutions are often the easiest to screw up. Oboro the Detective is a good example. You need to hire him in the early game to investigate the Barows family and their connection to the Lordlake Rebellion, You're told to hire him and then go home, but if you travel to a certain town, you can team up with Oboro to help him with the investigation. Doing so allows you to recruit him at the first possible chance you can offer him. If you missed this, you have to ask him after every major story event and hope the RNG let's him, otherwise you have to wait until almost the end of the game and since he's the character you use to find the other characters and learn background information, you want him ASAP. Another character involves winning a war battle with overwhelming victory and then asking him while you have young cute girls in your party cause he's kind of a lech.If you don't, he won't join until your over halfway through the game and he feels you have a chance of winning the war. So yeah, it gets really challenging without a guide to recruit everyone.
It's kind of interesting how similar this game is to another game on this list, Final Fantasy IX. Both games actually started off as Gaiden games and then got turned into numbered entries. Both games were also designed with the intention of being a celebration of the series with numerous shout outs and fan service to the series. Both games are also criticized for awful load times. Sadly, Suikoden V could not escape the series various curses such as low production values which get annoying when you realize the same company makes Silent Hill and Metal Gear Sold. The other curse being the games always being released around the same time of a more high profile and generally better produced game by Square-Enix. Suikoden II was released the same month as FFVIII, Suikoden III was released just a few months before the hotly anticipated FFX, SIV missed holiday and was released after DQVIII, an SV was released the same smurfing week in the States as Kingdom Hearts II. None of this is helped by the fact the series rarely got much advertising from Konami, permanently pigeonholing the franchise into cult status. It's a real shame because after the lackluster SIV, V turned out to be a fine addition to the franchise despite the handicaps but it was too late and it remains the last installment of the major story arc the series had been building up until this point. Still, if you're franchise is going to go out, I like the fact Suikoden V ends it with abang before the inevitable whimper of the gaiden titles. Although the game is kind of hard to come by now, I honestly feel it's a pretty good gateway entry into the series, though you will miss half of the references to the franchise.
Coming Up Next: Some mountains are scaled, others are slain...
Last edited by Wolf Kanno; 10-09-2017 at 11:59 PM.
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