7.23.2006
SUIKODEN 3
I've been playing Suikoden 3 for the past days. I wasn't going to but my interest rekindled when I loaded up my god Chris game. (level 99) I thought it was cool how you could mount animals. I don't think they brought that back in S5, but they brought it back in Rhapsodia. And then out of curiosity I decided to check Koroku's game out. Dammit, I had to play this game again. (For those of you that don't know, Koroku is a doggie. :D) So after about a year or so of buying it I finally played S3 in English for the first time. I'm surprised that I actually understood practically everything back then.
Wow, there's so many things I take back that I said about this game. I remember when I first played it I whined about how you could only go into shops. Well whoever was behind S4 was probably like: "Those fuckers think what we did in S3 was bad? Just wait till they see what we did with S4! HAR HAR!" I remember I said the music sucked too. The music wasn't bad at all, the ethnic music is retained (just without the higashino charm :() I guess I just forgot because the main song that stuck out in my mind was that god awful battle theme. Hugo seemed pretty much like the typical RPG hero except for his physical looks, Chris also seems like another typical RPG hero except that she's a female knight, but Geddoe? You don't see RPG heroes like him everyday. YES. He punches people without looking like a fag like Yuri.
The translation seems a bit better (despite obvious mistakes and well really, you've got to be professionally bad to do a worse job than S2's) and I like how they actually took the time to reanimate things in English. Like in S2 (by far one of the worst localizations I've ever seen) they didn't re-do the war battle signs. They took the easy way out and put a crap black box with white text over it. Great that everyone actually speaks English in this game unlike S2 where they forgot to translate dialouge near the end of the game. A lot of people complain about a lot of the character names being wrong, but they're written exactly the same in the Japanese strategy guides. (Fubar, Jacques, Luce, Ghetto - I mean Geddoe) Even Flame Champion is used despite the wrong wording. I think they changed around a couple of lines. Like in Le Buque I remember Franz going "I'm doing this for our village, I mean for Iku!" (how unromantic!) But they altered it to sound better. I thought Jimba called Luc a "spring chicken" not "kid" as well. We get "Dharma and Chaos" even though at the end Leknaat speaks about "Order." =/ Sasarai and Luc's conversations didn't seem to be the way I remembered them to be so I went to Keepers of the Flame to check. Oh, that's why. O_O Also what's with "Mcdohl Mcdohl?" Well I used an old save and it was interesting to see people repeatedly refer to "Tacobell" in a serious matter.
As for the negatives? (not including translation issues)
- I still think it sucks they make you go through 9 chapters (11 if you count Thomas) and then you get two short chapters with everyone's PoVs combined.
- While the buddy system takes some time to get used to, I hope that never comes back again.
- No new game +. So after you see everyone's PoVs there's little replay value. Oh great, but they first added that in the game no one wants to replay.
- Lack of music. While the music is good, a lot of times there IS NO music in times where music seems pretty much needed. Like Luc and Sarah's last scene. That would've been the perfect time to revive "Theme of sadness." No instead you get the sound of rocks crumbling. There was also a lack of familar tunes from the older games. I thought they didn't revive any songs to begin with but they did revive two songs for the plays you get if you loaded S1&S2 data, and also the last boss song is a remix. They also could've thrown the Tinto theme in there or something. >_>;; It would've been really great if the very last scene of Luc's POV with Leknaat had her theme song in there. That part did at least actually have a song in there though.
- They really could've used a Flame Champion PoV. I would've loved to play as Wyatt.
- The map sucks. If they used a normal overworld map I probably wouldn't feel like "damn I have to walk through that again?" because of the map it makes everything look closer than it actually is. Yay for getting to point A to point B.
I chose Geddoe to be the Flame Champion and I just finished Luc's POV. I remember when S3 first came out I had the biggest infatuation with Luc and Sarah, I don't know why. Why did I like Luc? Why did I admire Sarah? Her whole life revolves around an angsty 32 year old. But I don't dislike her character, it's easy to see why she's the way she is. Luc is pretty much the only guy she knew in her life (I sure pity her!) Luc? Why did I ever come to think positively of some stupid 14 year old kid that summoned a golem on me for no reason in the first game? Oh and I love this part:
Luc: "I'M SO OLLDDDZZ. I'M THIRTY-TWO!!111" *angst*Jimba: "I'm 92, dumbass." ...Well I wish Jimba said that.
I've done pretty much everything there is to do in S3 - except beat the last boss with a party of puppies. I'm going to try that sometime.
After playing S3 that made me think over S5. Well I knew from the first time I played it pretty much all the characters in S5 are more or less copy and paste characters from earlier suiko games. There's Sanchez, Seed, Culgan, and Gremio for example. Out of the recent games S5 left me feeling almost completely fulfilled at the end, but not compeltely fulfilled like S2. No, no, i'm not one of those hardcore S2 fangirls. I'm just hoping that S6 goes under a different formula like S3 did (But WAY BETTER). Some of the deaths near the end of S5 felt like they were just there just to be there. (Not so much as Rhapsodia's killing off people we DIDN'T EVEN KNOW) While I did care about the characters, their deaths didn't impact me or anything. Aside from the death that was mentioned in S2 (well since we knew it was going to happen beforehand anyway it wasn't a plot twist or anything but a story set-up) the only other one that I thought was dramatic was the one in the bad ending. I still love S5 though. But after playing Suikoden 3 I really hope S6 takes place in the present. NO MORE EFFING PREQUELS! BTW I love how all the Suikoden games connect to each other (not including S4 and ST since they both seemed pretty out of place. While S5 did make some references to 4, what did those games reference? Thank you shitty Kawano!)
While people thought/think S3 lacks the Suikoden feel, to me Rhapsodia really doesn't feel like a Suikoden game. The only Suikoden-like thing about it is the rune elements and such.
I forgot what Corselia said - "I'D RATHER DIE THAN BLAH BLAH BLAH"
Kyril: "Don't ever talk about dying again Corselia, then I can't do you when you become legal." *cries at awful story* I forgot all about Hikusaak. Ah, the guy I'm dying to know more about. Yay for wasting a game on "evil eyes." Â