First off, I've never played Suikoden. Everyone seems to have their opinion on whether or not this is a good successor to the series. I can't speak to that; only to whether or not it's good as a game released in 2024, and... it's not. The first thing that jumps out at you is the graphics. You have a beautifully-constructed 3D world, but all the characters are 2D sprites. Now that was a great trick on the original PlayStation, when the hardware wasn't good enough to render human bodies well. Today... it just feels badly out of place. There's a cuscene early on with Nowa and Seign sitting at a campfire. Beautifully-rendered PBR lighting and reflections on the slightly-shiny stone nearby... and two blocky guys made up of very noticeable pixels, who the lighting just does not look right on *at all!* You have no control over your camera. (Except on the world maps, where you do. So the devs did implement this; they just decided to deny it to you for 90% of the game!) And there are plenty of places where you have to walk through areas that are obscured because of stupid camera angles. Likewise, you have no control over the pacing. There is no way to skip cutscenes, or long battle animations. (Disgaea had this figured out 20 years ago. Why can't this studio do it today?) You have no control over the plot. The entire thing is on very, *very* noticeable rails. Almost every single war battle and duel battle is a scripted cutscene trying and failing to pretend it's a game with actual stakes. And there are really no stakes throughout. If a town falls to the Empire, for example, you can still walk around freely in it and even if you talk to the guards, they don't realize you're their Public Enemy #1! You have no idea what's going on. After playing all the way through, I still have only the slightest idea what a rune lens is, and no clue what primal lenses are or why they're so important. And the entire plot revolves around them! This game is a mess. Buy something else.
I really should have liked this game. The concept is right up my alley! But it just doesn't work in so many ways. First off, it's *punishingly* difficult even on the lowest setting, due more to poor design choices than to anything the player's own skill can affect. If your character is anything other than a physical-combat-oriented beefpile, you will struggle to even complete the intro. And once you get past that... it just never lets up. Save scumming is your best friend throughout the entirety of the game, because it's simply impossible to progress without it. Eventually, after a big long fight to bring down a local tyrant, you take over their keep and establish yourself as the Baron. This could have been a campaign in and of itself, but no; that's the end of chapter 1. Now the *real* game begins, and everything is different. Suddenly the entire game is taken over by timed missions, resource management, and city building. The city building seems pretty cool, until you realize it has no bearing whatsoever on the rest of the game. The resource management would have been great if they had gone all the way with it, such as organizing party members not in your current party into their own party and sending them to complete quests you don't have time to do yourself, but that's never an option. And then we have the timed missions. There are a plethora of important quests that take up 2 weeks of game time, which get fast-forwarded through as soon as you start them, with no option to interrupt them if some crisis comes up 2 days into that 2-week period. I'll just come out and say it: the awful timed missions and timed events of the main story quest make the game utterly unplayable without a mod to circumvent them. This could have been an amazing game. But the polish and attention to detail was simply abysmal, leaving you wondering if they even playtested it at all before throwing it over the fence to us. Do yourself a favor and play Pillars of Eternity instead.
