Finfreeze
Joined: 17 Jun 2007
Post Count: 28
Location: Middle of Nowhere
177377 Potch
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 Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2008 2:26 am Post subject: |
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In general:
- The silent protagonist. Especially in the 3D games with voice acting, it doesn't work and just raises questions of the main character's mental capacity. It just forces the designers to create a Gremio character whose only roles are to say stuff that the main character should be saying, obsessively follow you around, and be really annoying.
- Really poor balance. Physical attacks simply outclass magic and can be used at all times, leaving attack spells useless relative to an optimized team. And while second-tier runes could potentially help with balance, they're usually too rare and hidden in some of the most obscure places to be of much use.
- Demi-humans. Simultaneously uninteresting and underused, and yet Konami seems obsessed with creating more of them just to populate their token demi-human village. Elves are probably the least likable things on the planet, and only rarely they get their just desserts. It gets even more annoying when the game tries to make them sympathetic...by making them maybe 1% less arrogant, racist, and likely to shoot you full of holes.
- Most of the stories seem to run out of steam before the end of the game.
SI
- Just a general feeling of undeveloped...ness. Characters that are seemingly important don't get any screen time, and Camille only gets back into the spotlight when you kill Milich, which you really shouldn't do if you like stew.
- Dialogue is stilted.
- It looks really cheap for a PSX game, even considering how ugly they could get. At best, it can be considered SNES-quality, but Chrono Trigger had more expressive and varied sprites and didn't have ugly 3D terrain effects (which granted are part of the experimentation process). All the sprites look too tall and lifeless, as if they were cast from a template, with their arms falling straight down from the shoulders and with legs that just slide along the ground.
SII
- Translation.
- The part from the Tinto segment to right before the end of Rockaxe. Tinto and Neclord in general seemed filler, and the battles in Greenhill are just really boring. Rockaxe is just a pain to fight through, but fortunately it picks up from there.
- The later dungeons in general. Just a pain to navigate through with mostly-identical rooms placed one right after the other, and the enemies (especially the Highland soldiers) are pointless if you're optimized.
- A few stupid glitches that really should have been spotted, like Annalee's song and the McDohl name bug. Oh yeah, and how you can never recruit Clive if you don't do the scene in Muse, even when you have the boat to Lakewest he needs.
- Generic command runes are less viable in this game than in I.
- I guess I can agree with those who say that the Beast rune felt tacked on, like they needed some sort of "final boss", if you will.
SIII
- The fact that the forced pairing halves the amount of control you have on the party.
- I feel the story falls apart after your army settles in at Lake Castle for the first time, possibly because they had to write dialogue for three similar routes. The Sindar Ruins at the Ancient Highway just felt uninspired, and there's next to no meaningful lines said by even your FC. The strong characterization and party dynamics from Chapters 1-3 are gone, replaced by copy/pasted one-liners from you party members.
Chapter 5 just progresses way too fast, seemingly because Konami didn't know what to do once everybody got their True Runes. So they just decide to strip the runes from everybody in the lamest way ever and rush to the final showdown. The final dungeon's pretty cool, but I wished there was more. I thought that we'd do SOMETHING about Le Buque's situation, what with the second coming of the Fire Bringer and all. The ending just felt way too anticlimactic, like it was thrown together along with the rest of chapters 4 and 5.
- The "zone of emotion" Sarah mentions at the end of the game. It's not enough that both the tribes Grassland and the knights of Zexen are at odds with one another and are on edge, no, they need magical interference to get the war to work. It just seems like a cheap way to absolve Chris, Boris, and Lulu in the eyes of the player.
- I wish there were more dungeons, at least the kind that require skills more advanced than running left-to-right. And maybe it would be nice if you didn't have to run left-to-right through Brass Castle like a billion times throughout the game.
- Definitely has the least-inspiring music of the entire series.
- Combat system is just too swing-dependent. Characters with tons of swings dominate, leaving guys like Dupa and Leo in the dust.
SIV
- Loading.
- Encounter rate.
- The story just disappears after you hit the Nest of Pirates. It had so much potential, but it's just way too rushed to work.
- How not being able to get all the Razril knights at the beginning of the game makes it so what lines the ones that join you do say are totally generic and lacking emotion. It's Suikoden III chapter 4/5 all over again.
- Kika and the pirates, as well as Elenor and Agnes, are hyped as being important to the story, but they don't do much of anything. Even the original ship's crew is just there. I mean, who are these guys?
It's pretty sad when DARIO is pretty much the pirate that you can say the most about. Seriously. You've got the whole thing with Louise and Nalleo, the fact that he's popular with kids, the newspaper segment, his sense of justice, and he even has something vaguely resembling a personality. That's more than you can really write about Kika or the other pirates.
- I hate how the gameplay has been simplified, but yet the battles still take forever thanks to load screens, really slow rune animations, and inefficient time management with attacks (like the entire battle pausing for one enemy to attack one character or a character to use a spell on someone, then for another character to attack a separate enemy).
- Character diversity is slightly above Suikoden I.
- The overworld is just way too big for the amount of places populating it. You NEED Viki just to get anywhere in the game, but Konami randomly shuts her powers off, making you sail there manually anyway. Just really frustrating with the encounter rate.
- Voice acting is just shaky, especially when they skip over the main character's name.
Tactics
- Again, Kika seems like she'll be important, but she doesn't get any real lines after you talk to Lino for the first time. It's a total waste of potential. And what's with Frederica? She gets fewer and less-important lines than PABLO, and yet she's somehow deemed essential to the plot at the same level as Kyril, Corselia, and Andarc.
- I could buy the Rune Cannons being eyes from the Eye Fish that magically blow up and focus the vast energies from the seeds of the Giant Tree. I could understand how turning people into insane fishmen could be horrible. But the fishmen themselves being considered ultimate weapons on the same scale of explody tree seeds that can be launched from huge distances or super magic marbles? Really? Really? They can barely be controlled and aren't better than normal troops.
- Now that I think about it, how come the first fishman you meet and Iskas can both talk, while all other fishmen are uncontrollable and mute?
- Enemies don't have enough variety. None of the humanoids use command runes, mages mostly stick with lightning or wind runes, Obel is just way too full of skeletons and fly lizards, and most of the vaguely-interesting enemies are optional and level capped.
- I think the battle system is too terrain- and gear-dependent. You simply win if you're on positive terrain, and S-rank goodies make it so much easier to dominate battles and get more S-rank goodies. Also Berserker Belt is insane if you've got a command rune.
- Magic is mostly useless in the beginning (besides Thunder Runner, but you've only got one of those then), but becomes broken at the end.
SV
- Loading.
- The encounter rate.
- The fact that the game tried to emulate I and II's battle system, while completely missing the biggest advantages: speed and dynamic camera angles. The battles in the early games loaded fast, proceeded fast, and used zoom-ins and different angles to make the fights seem more energetic.
- The worst menu interface in history. This is worse than Suikoden I. You go to the equipment screen, only to be shown a list of every item you have in your bag and UNSORTED TO BOOT, rather than relevant items. And if you sort them, they stay sorted that way in the regular inventory menu, forcing you to resort that, too. Every time you choose something in the menus, you get asked, "Are you sure?" with the cursor defaulting to "No". It makes doing mundane stuff like using medicine between fights a hassle.
Oh, and the menu screen takes a second to load, with not even the neat effect of IV's menu. Even those tiny portraits take time to load, which is just shameful since STAR OCEAN 2 handled status-screen portraits better. It's just shameful after seeing IV's, where equipping is a breeze, relevant items are always on top, and using items out of battle can be done rapid-fire.
And for all the complaints of unlimited inventories I've heard in IV, at least you don't end up in situations where you have to throw out an item in your inventory because medicines and rune fragments don't auto-stack and can't be stacked in the toss out an item menu. Seriously, there would be enough room for everything if you'd let me group them together, game!
- The fact that doing anything in this game makes my PS2 sound like it's dying.
- The zoomed-out camera pointed at the worst angle ever. Seriously, the characters are pretty, but you rarely get a chance to see them up close. And all the story scenes that aren't lovingly-animated are stuck at this position, leaving tons of dead space. And in towns and dungeons you can barely see where you're going.
- The fact that they nerfed technique runes even more. Sure, it's nice that they can multi-hit now, but now they can only be used once per battle, unbalance the user, and lower the user's stats! And these are the unique runes, the ones that typically are better than those you can buy in stores. And they're not compatible with Formation skills, so there's no real reason to use them.
- Formations in general. A decent idea, but the only good ones are Circle, Cross, and True Men, and only for their skills. Well, I guess Tiger and Arrowhead are good too until you get Circle because they let you attack all at once.
- The tiny bonuses items, formations, skills give you compared to your actual stats. I mean, what? +1 HP when I have like 200 of those! +2 to magic when my mages are pushing 400!
- The skill system is pointless. As I said, the bonuses are far too small compared to what you get from leveling up in all but a few incidences (Chain Magic being chief among them). And it's annoying trying to find the items just to bring your skills up to a point where they might count, and town trainers are useless because they can't raise stuff above C. They should just let you raise skills without having to find those stupid little items, they don't add anything to the game.
- A mostly-useless detective who can't help you recruit characters you haven't already talked to. I could have used some help getting the characters past the forest "that only elves can see."
- I felt that Sialeeds's betrayal felt like filler. Couldn't we just have the Prince and Lymsleia just take on the increasingly-desperate Godwins rather that just add another token betrayal because they didn't know how to get the Barows even further out of the picture and give the Twilight rune to Lyon?
- The part in the end where they try to make the obviously-bad Godwins morally gray. Yes, the same group that don't give demi-humans their deserved rights, attempted to commit genocide on them TWICE, hire obviously-evil assassins to do assassin stuff, rig the Sacred Games in the most wall-bangingly awful way ever (this poison is completely undetectable even to magic! And who would trust some vaguely-evil kid about a poison when you've been kidnapped in the middle of the woods? And a whole lot of other things), forcefully take over the throne after rigging the Sacred Games, support using a rune that slowly drives the user mad with power and has before nuked countries to the ground, and who are total hypocrites who hate Armes but beg for their assistance when they're losing the war. Yeah, I'm sure the Godwins are good. Not to mention that the assassins they hire kill off the Godwin's own supporters at the drop of a hat, just in case some people still thought they were the good guys.
Then when the war's pretty much over, Marscal goes off and tries to melt the glaciers and drown everybody in Falena, just because he's a sore loser. But it's OK since Marscal and Gizel make speeches saying they're not evil before they die, so they've got to be doing things for the greater good! |
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