Resurrection | Suikoden

Year: 1997 | Format: PlayStation | Genre: RPG | Publisher: Konami | Developer: Konami

By Jennifer Allen

You know the Chinese novel Water Margin?

I thought not. It’s regarded as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of China, so if you’ve studied Chinese literature it may well ring a bell, but I suspect most people have never heard of it. Despite this, it’s amazing to see just how far these Novels’ influence has spread, particularly in the world of gaming. For example, Romance of the Three Kingdoms has influenced various manga titles, as well as the Dynasty Warriors series of games. In the case of Water Margin, it influenced various later pieces of Chinese literature, and one of my favourite console RPGs: Suikoden.

Suikoden saw a European release in 1997, right in the middle of the PlayStation’s golden era. The mid-late 90s delivered classic titles such as Crash Bandicoot, Destruction Derby 2, Parappa the Rapper, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider… the list goes on. Shortly after Suikoden’s release saw the arrival of Final Fantasy VII and Gran Turismo. It was a good time to own Sony’s console, and because of the huge influx of great titles, it seems to me that Suikoden missed out on the enormous success it clearly deserved.

Rather than following the clichéd storyline pattern of a mysterious and moody stranger arriving in town and ultimately saving the world, mostly by himself, Suikoden relied upon unity. The nameless hero is the son of a general in the Scarlet Moon Empire who comes to realise that the Empire is deeply flawed and corrupt. Opposing this, he becomes the leader of a rebel organisation in a plan to overthrow the evil mage Windy. Yes, okay, it may still be a little clichéd at times, but at least it tries to throw some politics into the equation.

//Originality Ahoy
Where things become a lot more original, in a way that I have yet to see surpassed, is that you can recruit 108 new characters to your cause as you progress further into the game. With over 90 of these being playable, there was certainly a huge amount of flexibility allowed when it came to battle tactics. Some of these characters could be recruited through the natural progression of the story, but many demanded certain requirements to be fulfilled in order for them to join.

Initially, one would think this would make for some wafer-thin characters that you simply didn’t care about. In some cases, yes, this happened. It’s bound to happen, after all, otherwise the game would have been hundreds upon hundreds of hours long, and the player would have been bored to death by the end anyway. However, with others such as the likes of Viktor and Gremio, key characters in the game, only a heart made of stone could feel nothing as they suffered in their selfless plight to free the Empire of near enslavement. One pivotal story arc resulting in the death of a main character affected me more than – dare I say it? – the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII. Suikoden may have looked more akin to a SNES game, but the sprites still couldn’t hide the deep sadness behind the selfless death of a character that I was certain could never die.

//Rock, Paper, Scissors, but more violent
The creativity offered in Suikoden was further amplified by the different methods of combat. There was the typical turn-based battle system which we’ve all seen countless times before, but there were also duel battles and war battles. Both of these emerged at specific moments within the story, and were essentially glorified versions of Rock, Paper, Scissors, but it certainly made a change from the usual fighting methods, or merely spectating as the battle unfolded in a cutscene.

And just when you think Suikoden has run out of tricks up its sleeve, it delivers one final inspired touch in its ending sequence. It provides a sentence for each and every character that has been collected, just to let you know what happened to them after the war. It’s a small addition, but one that can’t help but provide you with a warm sense of pride that you helped these people rebuild their lives after such oppression.

I did fear all this love may be a rose-tinted one. That is, until I returned to it recently thanks to the US PlayStation Store. It’s a lot simpler to play than I remembered, and I found myself only being defeated once in an entire play-through. But it still has some great ideas that I’m surprised haven’t been used in other franchises. And despite there being five games in the Suikoden series, it was the first one that seemed the most pioneering – even right down to the fact that save files could be transferred over to Suikoden 2.

It may not be the prettiest of the PlayStation RPGs, or the most mainstream, but it’s certainly worth paying attention to. I can think of a number of current generation RPGs that would do well to take a lesson from the simple pleasures of Suikoden.