RETRO GAME CONTINUUM
I finished Suikoden II yesterday. I’d played through the
first game to get the backstory and bonuses for this one. The lore ended up more
valuable than the carryover for the save file. Suikoden II’s a great, maybe excellent
game. It might inch into my top 10 JRPG, a genre I love. Weirdly I skipped
finishing some of the side quests and mini-games (cooking contests, seed
harvesting, etc). Usually I do all of that. But the drop rates for rare items
from the monsters meant that I ended up spending more time than even I like in
grinding battles. I wanted to see how the story turned out, maybe more than any
other game I’d played.
And when I finished it, I immediately wanted to play it
again. A second playthrough would give me a better sense of where to invest my
time and a chance to use different parties. Like many of these games, you can't
do that much in to truly shift the story unless you want the bad ending. But
you can get a different experience depending on who you put in your six person
party out of the 60+ possible characters.
SO WHAT’S SUIKODEN?
On the off chance
you’re unfamiliar with these games, Suikoden’s a jrpg series which started on
the Playstation in the mid ‘90’s. It had five installments plus a spin-off in
the US. In Japan, it had a much larger mythology including a host of Gaiden
(side-story) games. It has several novel features. Most notably, your story
revolves around the recruitment of 108 NPCs. Some act as support (shopkeepers,
tutors, lorekeepers, sources of mini-games), but over half can be used as
characters in your active party. Some characters gain special attacks when paired together. So you can have a quite different experience
depending on who you choose. In each game you gain some kind of castle (in Suikoden IV it’s a
ship). This serves as your home base, where you can interact with all of these
characters. It upgrades and changes as you progress. Suikoden has a unique but
simple magic system, allowing you to shift talents and powers
to different characters. Finally each includes military set-piece battles.
In these your NPCs form leaders for units and fight a larger scale battle.
These battles aren’t that involved, but do change the pacing. If you’re not a fan of
jrpgs, Suikoden isn’t going to change your mind. Currently Konami seems to have given up
on the line. The dropped the world and published as stand-alone game for the DS,
Suikoden Tierkries, but it didn’t do that well.
IS IT EPISODE I OR
IV?
I’ve posted before about video games which I’d love to playat the table. But I’m not sure I could bring the feeling of Suikoden to a pen
& paper game. How would you simulate the vast number of playable
characters? Maybe by abstracting it? Maybe a Troupe system?
Oddly I'd played Suikoden III, IV, Tactics, and V before I
played this one. Suikoden II gave me better perspective on events of III,
especially the nature of the villains. I actually immediately went to start Suikoden III, but discovered I'd lost my copy in the fire. Luckily it hasn't jumped in
price like the other series entries. I’ll probably find a copy and play through
that, and then maybe Suikoden V. I’ll skip the 4th one though. I finished
it once and the ending left me little enthusiasm for another go. On the other
hand Suikoden Tactics remains on my list of games which absolutely defeated me.
That’s a side-story game to Suikoden IV. Despite sinking many, many hours into
it, it crushed me. And I’ve done the Seraphic Gate and a 100-level no-save end
dungeon. It has some truly brutal battles. The worst’s a variable side complex
with no save points and the best loot. Your characters will die. And in this
game most of them can permadie. Some day when I’m feeling particularly
masochistic, I’ll play it again.
SIDEBAR: TACTICAL GAMING
I’ve played many
tactical rpgs (several Disgaeas, Makai Kingdom, various Final Fantasy Tactics,
Chaos Wars, La Pucelle, Devil Survivor, Radiant Historia, Stella Deus, Soul
Nomad). Actually I’ve played a ton of them. But I have to admit that I’ve only gotten
all the way through one of them. In some cases I’ve tried, gotten a
little way in, and decided I wasn’t digging it. In others I sunk a chunk of
time but got distracted (La Pucelle), lost my save (Chaos Wars), or took a
break long enough that game consoles shifted (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance).
But Suikoden Tactics…after sinking 100+ hours in, it just plain beat me.
My love for this genre
made me pick up a tabletop miniature system called Endless: Fantasy Tactics. That
tries to emulate these games. It looks decent and fun, and the it has awesome
shots of the terrain. I can imagine devoting time to building a table like
that- imagine but I’m not going to. I have been thinking of another way to play
it though: Roll20. That allows for a grid map with snap-to, tokens with
associated information, and background images. The only tricky part would be
figuring out a decent system for marking elevation. For maps, you could borrow
images from various game guides showing the layout. I’ve hunted around and
found a few I use. I haven’t played too much with setting that up, but I might muck
with it this summer.
ALL NPCS ARE BROTHERS
Suikoden draws inspiration from The Water Margin, one of the classics of Chinese literature. The
name series name is the Japanese translation of that title. The epic story has
been adapted many times. If you dig Shaw Brothers films, you may have seen their
version, Outlaws of the Marsh. Suikoden
lifts the basic concept of assembling a large and diverse group of rebels to
oppose a tyrannical force. Imagine Star
Wars if you ended up with 100+ important character. Suikoden borrows
Chinese elements for many of the designs: art details, naming, costumes, and
architecture. You can see that throughout the series. But there’s also a
joyfully strange mish-mash of other cultures here. Some places and characters look
more 18th Century or Three Musketeer-ish in design. Others have
pseudo-Prussian military uniforms. Some have stereotypical Samurai designs,
Amer-Indian costuming, or even Steampunk elements. And, of course, there’s a
decent segment of characters wearing Final Fantasy style impracticalities.
There’s little explanation of the where and how of these things. Many of these
cultural beats exist together in one region or area of the game. I love how
crazy that feels. It reminds me a little of Valkyrie
Profile’s strange welding together of Japanese, Arthurian, and Norse peoples.
If you like consistency in your
world-building, you may find Suikoden a brain-burner.
THE GOOD, THE BAD,
AND THE LOW ARMOR CLASS
Being a JRPG the Suikoden
series has some problems with representation. Most of the characters are
clearly coded Asian by dress and depiction, as are some Caucasians. Most of
that reading, at least for me, comes from naming. But generally they’re generic
lighter-skinned. A few of the games offer a broader range of persons of color. In
particular Suikoden III has a
non-Caucasian main character (one of the three mains), as well as several other
characters from his people. But they’re, of course, tribal, grassland nomads. A
few other PoC pop up- Nikea & Zegai in V, Hauser in II, Samus & Hortez
in III- but they’re infrequent. Suikoden
I and IV don’t have any. Some of the games hints at alternate. Each has a
system where the player can pay an NPC investigator to find out more about a
character’s background. Some of these factoids suggest lesbian characters
(Oulan) or perhaps transgender (Jeane). A few male characters seem to be coded
gay, but with stereotypical effeminate features played for laughs.
That may not make it sound great, but Suikoden does better than other contemporaneous jrpgs (Final Fantasy, DragonQuest). Where the series shines is in the number and
presentation of playable female characters. On the one hand, all of the “Hero”
main characters are male except for one of the three from Suikoden III. On the other you get a ton of cool women with
distinct identities, designs, and roles. We have the classic hyper-sexualized
characters- impractical, skimpy outfits, bare midriffs. That’s par for the
course. But we also have women in reasonable armor, older women, younger
non-sexualized characters, and female sword & shield warriors. These women
aren’t all light fighters, archers, or mages. As importantly, some of those
characters aren’t gorgeous. They’re allowed to be more interesting than beautiful,
closer to the span offered male characters. That’s better in the earlier games
than the latter, though. Suikoden has a neat array of choices in genders here
and given the sheer number, players can really build the party they want.
TELLING YOUR OWN STORY
Here’s weirdly what I love about Suikoden. They have so many
characters, you only get a little bit of set up and characterization for each.
Some are clearly “mains” with stories, arcs, and segments when they force their
way into your party. But many more you recruit and get just a general sense of
who they are, fleshed out by the investigations. In doing so, these games leave
imaginative space for interactions between characters. By penciling less in,
you end up with more room to come up with stories. I love trying to figure out
what different combinations of characters would make of one another- how they’d
fight, what kind of respect they’d develop, if friendships would emerge. I can
also come up with stories about where they came from. For example, we have the
black character Samus in Suikoden III-
a striking contrast to others we see from his country. What’s the story there?
An immigrant? A pluralistic society? A distinct sub-culture? More than more
other jrpgs I’ve played- even big cast features like Final Fantasy VI and ChronoCross-
I enjoy the self-created lore of Suikoden.
That’s reinforced by most of the games having fairly mute or
tabula rasa main character. But even in those with more defined reactions, like
Suikoden III, this holds true. I can
imagine who the main character has a crush on and who has a crush on them:
unrequited love, spurned affections, and romantic comedies abound. I like the deeper
interactions and choices something like Dragon Age gives. Those offer some
autonomy in the interactions. But games like Final Fantasy XIII, Wild Arms
3, and Star Ocean spend time
telling me exactly how these characters feel about one another, usually
with little or no player input.
WE’RE FIGHITNG THE
GHOST OF MY DAD? OR THE PROBLEM WITH JRPG PLOTS
Suikoden also resonates more than other jrpgs. I’m not
certain how to put that. Many I’ve played had interesting stories that kept me
moving forward, even when inscrutable (Radiant
Historia, Xenogears). Others focused on battling abstractions (ChronoCross, Final Fantasy X). Some had villains
with strange or arcane motivations (Wild
Arms 3, XenoBlade Chronicles). In Suikoden
the stakes are real and apparent, grounded in the personal. Twists and
mysteries aren’t something you couldn’t have predicted (ala Final Fantasy XIII). Instead the characters’
development pays off with actual dramatic tension (especially in Suikoden II). The same general structure
runs through all the games- a betrayal of some kinds leads the Hero to gather
forces for a struggle against a tyrannical and callous Empire. Often the Hero
comes from that Empire and aims to restore stability and bring peace. But the
game often questions the cost of that: what devastation the war brings, how
power corrupts, the uncertainty of force to bring peace. Even more than other
games with clear drives (Skies of
Arcadia, Final Fantasy VI), this series pulls me in. I don’t know if that’s
just me, but I think not. Rob Donohue has talked about his love for Suikoden V.
LAST, MARGINAL
THOUGHT
As a weird side note, I’ve always heard that Runequest made a significant impact in
Japan. That may be an urban legend, though I do know that RQ was among the
earliest pen & paper rpgs translated for there. In the West, you can see
Glorantha’s fingerprints all over The Elder
Scrolls. But I think there’s an argument to be made for that maybe
with Suikoden. On the one hand, the
series has no real active divinities. But it does have a focus on “True Runes”
as building blocks of the world. Magic comes from runes which echo those
originals. But, more importantly, Suikoden
III has a race of duck people- armed, armored, and treated seriously.
Perhaps there’s an echo of the Druulz there? I’m probably reaching a little…
No comments:
Post a Comment