Niahak's Place

I started Suikoden yesterday morning.   I finished it about a half hour ago.

I recruited all 108 stars and my last save point had a timestamp of 13:30ish.  I beat my old record of 14 something.   I never realized how incredibly short that game is.  True, I have practically no homework this quarter, but still.  If I hadn’t recruited all the stars or improved my characters for loading into Suikoden 2 I probably could’ve finished in less than 10 hours.  It’s a really fun game, but it’s too short.  And the strategy battle system is too simple, but that’s been true of all the Suikoden games.  Also, the translation is pretty bad (“We’re all over.” “See the power of the science!”).  But it has more flavor of the original material.  To explain a bit, all Suiko games are loosely based on the Shui Hu Zhuan (Outlaws of the Marsh), one of the four Chinese Classics (Others: Three Kingdoms, Journey West, Dream of Red Chamber).  I think I have a bit on this in my Suikoden series review (which I plan to rewrite after beating them again, naturally).  Anyway, Suikoden has several scenes that are almost directly from Shui Hu, including the tea scene and the recruiting of Lepant.  The game’s more enjoyable if you’ve read the book, and I can but recommend it, since its flavor is very similar to that of Three Kingdoms, even if it does tend to ramble more.  Sadly there is no place I know of to read it online.

I’ll probably start Suikoden 2 tomorrow.  Hope to do the Clive subquest, and I think I’ve got a good idea of what order to recruit characters in to do so.  I just hope it doesn’t have any issues playing, what with its scratched-ness and my PS2 not liking the cleaner Suikoden 1 (no major issues, just the “insert valid PS1/2 disc” screen when starting up every so often).