Suikoden III

The Good
Let me state something that may result in chortling amongst the masses: I really enjoy the opening theme of this game. I really do. See, when you turn on "Suikoden III," you're treated to a little montage of anime clips set to a Japanese song. Quite good. I never really get tired of watching the whole thing, every time I play it.

Besides the opening theme, what's to like about "Suikoden III"? Oh Jesus, another one of those semi-pretentious, very cutesy Japanese console RPGs, right? Like the ones where your character has a lot of "attitude" and funny hair, yes? Like the ones where you have those absolutely ridiculous magical spells like "NUKE" and "BIGBANG" that you can throw around like reality television shows? No to all counts. Let's start at the beginning, then proceed to the ending.

"Suikoden III" is, essentially, NOT a character study. This immediately separates it from the "Final Fantasy" games that have preceeded it on PS1 and PS2. Those games introduced you to one, maybe two or three main protagonists, who become your sole avatars in the digital fantasy world played out on your television screen. Well and good, except the characters in these "Final Fantasy" games haven't really been worth exploring. Who really cares about them? Case in point: Irritating main character in "FFX." God damn, is that guy annoying. I gave up on "FFX" because I could not imagine myself investing 30+ hours in a character who annoys me almost as badly as President W. Seriously now, if I wanted to step inside the shoes of whiny, self-indulgent ex-sports stars, I'll just watch Court TV.

"Suikoden III" does give you protagonists that you come to identify with. Geddoe, the one-eyed mercenary...Chris, the stoic Zexen knight...Hugo, the son of the chief of the Karayan clan...Thomas, the affable young master of Lake Castle. Yet these people, along with over a hundred other characters, are not our sole concern. Rather, and this is the crowning achievement of this game, we are more interested in the burgeoning political and social conflicts plagueing the nations in this game. To my knowledge, this is the only RPG (surely the only CONSOLE RPG) that even attempts to draw you into a vast socio-political struggle, let alone succeed as well as this game does. Throughout my time with "Suikoden III," I was intrigued by the political maneuvering and skillful portrayal of discrimination and prejudice. I fervently wish that more RPGs would adopt this kind of global perspective. Characterization is wonderful, but when combined with a political, social, economic and / or ecological references, the experience can become profound (see Frank Herbert's "Dune" series).

Furthermore, the dialog is mostly crackerjack. The characters in "Suikoden III," though not so skillfully animated as in that 100-pound gorilla, "FFX," come alive through the words they speak (and through some nice facial animations). You can expect the highly refined Zexen characters to speak carefully, choosing their words for precision and sophistication, while Geddoe's ragtag mercenary band enjoy bantering back and forth. I was particularly fond of the character Ace, the administrative assistant for Geddoe's group. His personality type rang completely true to me, an experience I had never really had with an RPG before.

Yes, some of the characters have funny hair. But it never reaches "Final Fantasy" levels of ludicrousness.

Combat is different. Of all the divergent elements to this game, combat took the longest to get ahold of. Rather than issue commands to single characters, you are given control of three pairs (for a total of...um...six). So, in a given pair, you may want to tell one character to heal himself while another character casts a spell. Sorry, not gonna happen. If you tell a pair to cast magic, only one character will do so. The other will do whatever his character type dictates he does (which mostly boils down to attacking, by the way). While put off at first by this system, I grew to like it. It simplifies combat immensely, and since you can tell a pair of characters to share a healing item, you aren't really hampered tactically. Combat is also helped out by a de-emphasis on magic. Your characters will only master a few spells, and unless their magic skills are very high, you will find actually casting a magic spell a difficult prospect since the powerful ones can take multiple turns to complete (during which time you're vulnerable to losing your concentration due to enemy attack). This makes for more tactical gameplay, which I greatly enjoyed.

There's lots more to like about the game. The skill system is cool, and allows you to customize your characters as you see fit without bogging you down in too much complexity. The Trinity Sight System, whereby you play the same story through the eyes of three different people, offers an admirable amount of depth in storytelling. Finally, I enjoyed the experience of developing Lake Castle (or Budehuc Castle, whatever you want to call it). Seeing all my characters setting up shop was pretty neat.

However, not everything is completely rosy...

The Bad
First of all, this game wins the "Worst Manual" award. So many things are left unexplained that should probably have been covered. For example, I spent a long time looking at the stat screen wondering what the hell "REP" meant. Reputation? Only after finding a game FAQ online did I discover that that score meant "repel." Oh. How hard would it have been to provide a cursory overview of these abbreviations in the manual?

The music pretty much sucks in this game, once you get past the excellent opening theme.

There are far too many times where you don't know what you're supposed to be doing. This is especially apparent in Thomas' chapters. I'm all in favor of nonlinearity in my RPGs, but don't make it overly difficult for me to advance the main story. That spoils some of the fun by reminding you that, yes, this is just a game after all.

Why can't I skip through cutscenes? There were a couple of times where I died. There, I admitted it. There's no shame in saving and restarting, after all, but why then do I need to watch the same five-minute movie over and over again? That just pisses me off!

The Bottom Line
This is a console RPG you should play. Screw "Final Fantasy."