Niahak's Place

Started Suikoden 2 this morning. Great game.

There is one plot point early on that I don’t think I ever made note of before. When you first see Luca, he says “all I’ve had to fight lately is that old man”.   I guess you never do find out how Genkaku died…

Anyway, the main point of this post was to comment on another aspect of Suikoden 2.  I can’t be the only one who’s noticed this, but Suikoden 2 has several links to Three Kingdoms.  Some of them are more tenuous than others, but here’s what I could come up with off the top of my head:

• When you’re in Genkaku’s house, take a closer look at those weapons.  There are a pair of swords, a long spear, and a halberd.  If you “search” them, you find the halberd is named the “Blue Moon Dragon”, one of the multifarious translations for Guan Yu’s weapon.  The others would be for Zhang Fei and Liu Bei.
• When you recruit Shu, I believe you have to meet him 3 times (and pass his last test) to get him to join you.  This would be a parallel to the Three Visits.
• Look at the geography.  Highland’s mostly in the East and North; when you flee the sacking of Muse, you go South across a river and seek refuge with the leader of South Window (Granmeyer?  South Window is probably a mistranslation, but whatever).  If you look at him as Liu Biao (or Liu Zong), notice he surrenders and is immediately executed.  Your first task is – after beating back the Highland troops initially – to unite that small area, which could be a parallel to Jing.  After a while, you get the Western areas to ally with you, and eventually the far Southwest (a mountainous area… a parallel to Shu?).  You also ally with the Blood Moon Empire (Wu?) in the Southeast and eventually take Greenhill in the Northwest (Hanzhong?)
• Maybe a bit of a stretch, but Viktor is a parallel to Zhang Fei and Flik to Guan Yu.  If I remember right (I’ll confirm it if necessary when I reach that part) they don’t really trust Shu at first.

More on this later, I guess, if I find more.