Suikoden 2 entails the Suikoden series at its greatest, it's a game about war and the tragedies and disputes that creates. Gameplay is not as important as story and characters development. Unlike the majority of JRPGs, the story does not occur in a global scope, where the hero must save the world or something like that, it is a much smaller scale of just two countries, where the only thing you fight for is what appears to be the right thing to do, as your hero grows in power and more people depend on him. At its core, the story revolves around two friends that start together but at some point they must go to separate ways and eventually fight against each other. This is melodrama at a high stage for a video game (not counting visual novels).

Even if the story and characters are the strong points of the game, it also has interesting game mechanics such as a strategy-like battles, and one-to-one combats. The main combat system is traditional turn based, more on the easy side. The best game mechanic in my opinion is companion recruitment. There are 108 recruitable characters (counting the hero), some of them join automatically but others need to fulfill some requirements or even mini-quest. As you have more companions your base grows and new mini games become available. A lot of the companions can join your party while others do other things (like enable an awesome mini-game about cooking, or spy on other characters to know more about their background), being this the case the leveling system is adjusted to gain levels more quickly when a character is under leveled. The game is very easy but some characters can be missed, and you need all of them to reveal the true ending, which it is totally worth it.

Despite being in an apparently small setting, the reality is that the series is so ambitious and big that it would not be possible to cover more than two or three countries in a single game. Each Suikoden game is situated in the same world at different times, all the stories are linked together by means of the 27 true runes (basically magic orbs) which bring great power to their bearer, including eternal youth, but also some undesirable side effects. Each game revolves around a true rune and the destiny of its bearer. The saga has a lot of recurring characters that in some cases are really mysterious. So in reality Suikoden 2 is just an small fraction of a bigger story that has a lot of mysteries, places to discover and link together, and characters that move forward the world and its history.

This is a totally recommended game for anyone looking for a great story and characters, is a game for relaxing and enjoying.

Suikoden 2 is very much more of the same of what we saw in the first, and I'd expect that from a direct sequel. The first one was a good time, so thumbs up that we'd get more of that.

So combat, exploration, world map, towns, recruitment, a number of characters, abilities, magic, all of that is basically the same. There's little in the ways of graphical improvements or gameplay changes. The major two I can think of off hand are 1) characters can use more runes at a time and that system is a bit more flexible and 2) army battles are now strategy style on a grid rather than rock paper scissor style like the first. Which is good, because the duel mode was already basically rock paper scissors, so two modes like that gets redundant and too easy.

The soundtrack is also fine, more of the same. It's a bit aimless, perhaps leaning a bit too heavy on tropes established in the original. It's hard to explain. Like, the combat music to me was dull, doubly so because it's trying to be a new thing but similar to the original's. This is really nailed home when you go to visit Gregminster from S1 and hear S1's fight music on the way. Obviously the best example of doing this successfully can be seen in Final Fantasies 1-6 and Uematsu's masterful soundtracks. Kenji Ito's SaGa soundtracks also do a pretty good job. Anyways, so you wind up with a soundtrack that is pretty good, but also just feels derivative of the first. And I don't just mean as in bringing back and changing up themes from S1, which are generally well done, but in the new music. It's hard to get folk-esque music wrong, and S2's music is still fine, but it just hit a weird way with me.

Suikoden 2 is unfortunately plagued by more than a few bugs/glitches/oversights, but there are a handful of other problems I'd rather focus on.

• First of all, I found it a bit more nerve wracking finding the 108 SoD in this one. It's easy to feel like I was missing someone or something, since you're constantly getting locked out of previous areas and don't know if/when you'll be back.
• Second, personal preference here, but the manner in which you recruit the squirrels is stupid. See my previous statuses about this game to see that drama unfold in real time.
• Next, the addition of the trading system just feels like a huge annoying waste of time, all at the service of recruiting one character.
• I hate having characters forced on me that leave the team permanently, and I'm not talking about just Jowy...
• The strategy army battles are TERRIBLE. To my recollection, there is literally only one battle you win by fighting and winning. The rest involve RNG and putzing around to stall getting damaged long enough to declare the battle a stalemate and advance the story. It's such a lame way to have implemented this game mode. Also, the music just doesn't work in half of them.
• Speaking of music not working, one of the most unintentionally funny moments of the game was recruiting a singer, and you can choose to listen to her sing. You then proceed to stand there in complete silence for three minutes wondering if she's going to sing or if your game froze. Until she's like, "oh, thanks for listening!" Unless this is like, an easter egg of John Cage's 4'33" and she's secretly Cathy Berberian, in which case, well done, but I don't think that was the case...

Okay, and the creme de la crap, the translation is FREAKING. ATROCIOUS. I have never played a game that has such a cluster dumpster fire of a script. Game ruining. Characters regularly say each other's lines. Mis-translations lead to factual errors. The plot is basically ruined because of how cruddy the dialogue is. Numerous NPCs speak in garbled gibberish code because of programming errors, same with a number of enemy names in battles. Konami should be embarrassed of this translation hack job.

One small, funny one is in the ending, it says Humphrey and Fitch go off to find a dragon in the Crystal Ballet, when Crystal Valley is spelled properly about two seconds beforehand. Also, why are they looking for a dragon when the whole plot of recruiting them is finding a dragon? Another issue is that Shin disappears to study swordsmanship and is never heard from again. Even though he's pledging his allegiance to protect Teresa during the entire game? There's so much stuff that doesn't make sense.

The plot issue (well, issues) that bugged me the most, were Jowy's character development, and his role in the ending. They never really explain why he becomes a bad guy and kills thousands of people. And marries a princess. And then abandons that princess. I also thought it was absolutely tragic that there's no ending that doesn't attempt to redeem Jowy, where you basically just get to beat the everloving shit out of him because seriously, fuck that guy.

Phew. Suikoden 2, y'all.

Suikoden II grabbed me tight in its opening moments and didn’t let go until I had put in 25+ hours over 4 days to see its incredible story to the end.

I’ve long had an affinity for JRPGs, but they tend to be hard for me to get into these days due to their tendency toward extra-long runtimes, high encounter rates, and grinding. It respects some players’ desire to savor the experience at the expense of others’ limited gaming time. Suikoden II instead seems to make every moment count, avoiding tedium and unwelcome difficulty spikes, and last exactly as long as it needs to.

Battles are not super hard. I died maybe 2-3 times in the game, and not one felt cheap—they felt more like a scouting run to learn a weakness for the next attempt. Despite that, I felt super engaged and challenged building up the perfect soldiers and making them execute my big plans for how to wombo combo the enemy. I felt I could be creative and flexible thanks to super generous ability swapping and leveling catch-up as you rotate between dozens of viable fighters. The rune system is pretty brilliant as it lets you stack various effects and ability-sets to create the perfect synergy, and combining with character-specific unity attacks reinforcing the bonds between friends makes the combat so varied and interesting.

The game also offers two alternate forms of combat, the 1-on-1 duels, which are more of a mind game with the AI opponent, and the strategy game-like military battles, which have you commanding an army toward different goals. I found these to be weaker moments gameplay-wise, but they felt necessary to present big story moments with the scale and focus they deserve. Managing the troops and item stock between missions can be a bit of a chore if you want to optimize gear and items as obsessively as I did, but it’s not completely pace-breaking.

While many of the classic PS1-era games (especially JRPGs) started moving into 3D, Suikoden II instead took 2D sprite art and animation to the next level. Characters really pop on screen, not just in their charming dialogue portraits, but through some really expressive sprite animation and coloring. Battles are visually dynamic and exciting, with sprites on a 3D plane and tons of unique 3D attack animations—an FMV one near the end got an audible “whoa” out of me.

All of the above is great, but what really got me in this game was the writing. This is a perfectly-paced, surprisingly grounded main plot for a JRPG. Its focus on believable politics, history, culture clashes, and military strategy was super engaging to me, even if it occasionally gets a little off the rails in a couple of its more fantastical subplots. There may be a little too much ”fate” talk for me, but this is not one of those cheesy stories. It’s very tonally balanced between the tragic and the fun, and great at building out its characters and making those bad and good moments resonate deeply with the player. I’ll give a special shoutout to some of the main cast, the madman Luca Blight, who is one of the best gaming villains I’ve ever seen, and of course Jowy and Nanami. I was pretty fond of some of the side characters like the obsessively-lovestruck Nina, the scatterbrained teleporting mage Viki, and many more. The idea of 108 recruitable companions is genius—while I didn’t come close to getting them all, I got a lot and had a great time with most of them.

I have to give it some time, but it’s very likely this could be my favorite JRPG ever, and one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time! I’m not gonna give it a 9.9 for some little flaws—it’s a 10!