Quote Originally Posted by Lord Golbez View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno View Post
As has been mentioned, SV has the best War Battles in the series, being a simplistic RTS that uses the series standard Rock, Paper, Scissors mechanics whereas I feel SII has the worst in the series because the rules are poorly explained and the RNG factors in way too much. In SV, you actually have to learn how to flank troops or lead the enemy into ambushes all in real time which keeps you on your toes, whereas SII has too many instances where your high level unit suffers a devastating critical hit, from a units whose stats say they had no chance in winning.
I gotta disagree with you on SII's being the worst in the series. I actually think they're the second best, but the worst is easily Suikoden III for me. The war battles in SIII play like a dumbed down version of the regular battle system. It's awful. As much as I hate Suikoden IV, I'll even take their version of the paper rock scissors approach over SIII's. Also, Suikoden II might have a lot of RNG factor, but it's not completely random. It's largely based on army stats, which you can influence by customization of your units. Crits might happen on occasion, but generally the stats influence the outcome of most skirmishes.
The crits happen too often that they tend to undermine stats, not to mention SII is pretty notorious for throwing you into unwinnable situations until Shu finally joins you. Even with good stats, nothing is more frustrating than watching what should have been a sure thing turn into a total route because the computer can be a cheating bastard with the RNG. Throw in the fact that battles are painfully slow with the boring movements and waiting a round to even get into your first battle; and that the battles tend to be glitched removing music, and it's honestly the biggest eye sore of an otherwise perfect game. SII's War Battles sound nice on paper but they're honestly my least favorite part of the game and the one thing I would love to change about it. I would even take the first games overly simplistic Rock/Paper/Scissor nonsense over SII's.

I actually feel the ship battles in SIV are the second best war battles in the series and largely the only thing the game gets right. As for SIII, I honestly like the War Battles because it promotes making you actually developing your recruits. This is because as long as you're not in the early game dealing with generics, and even then those fights are painfully scripted much like SII's early war battles, then your units are based on how much you actually bothered to outfit your units or develop them. Which is nice for a series that tends to give you loads and loads of characters. Of anything, once the game actually lets you have real control over the war battles, they tend to go by real fast and easier since you can easily throw in some high level and well armed team mates into the battle. Yuber becomes a joke when you have him up against a Parry God like Hugo or Augustine. So even with the FFVI Coliseum thing going on for the individual battles, I appreciate that I have far more control on how they plan out and don't have to really deal with awkward and poorly explianed mechanics.