Suikoden: Tierkreis

 

Platform: Nintendo DS

My Playtime: 68+ Hours (Could be shorter but I spent 20 hours leveling up)

Genre: Turn Based Traditional RPG

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I have to admit I always have known this game existed.  Unfortunately, I had this assumption that Suikoden was a strategy RPG game and since I'm not a fan of the genre, I always bypassed this game.  After reading a recent review and needing a game for a BOGO deal, I picked it up.  I'm glad I did.  With an interesting storyline, with a whole mess of characters, Suikoden: Tierkreis has become one of my favorite RPGs.  Just to let you know, I have never played any other in this series.  Unfortunately, I came too late into the series and already got rid of my PS2.  And since my PS3 is not backwards compatible, I probably never will.  Unless they re-release it.  But I'm not holding my breath.

Story: The hero and a group of his friends left their village to do a routine monster patrol.  They happened upon a cave filled with the strange, strong monsters and a mysterious book that grant the hero stronger powers to defeat the new enemies.  As you leave, the hero noticed a castle has appeared out of nowhere in the middle of their forest.  But no one else but him can see it.  Curious, the hero set out to find out the truth but uncovered a cult that wanted everyone to follow their "One True Way" and forced all citizens to join.  With a group of friends and enemies called the Starbearers, the hero must face The One King and save their future.

At first, the story was slow to build up.  After you get past the story behind the cult and meet others investigating the books, the story started to build.  And what was fascinating for me was the idea of their being multiple worlds and people were using the books to good and evil gains.  So, the plot was developed nicely and kept you guessing what was going to happen next.

There were sidequests that were given to you at intervals throughout the game.  Some are required for the story line to continue.  But the others were mostly used for finding more information about your characters, the background story and to earn more money.  These are pretty easy to get through.  Some have requirements that were needed to successfully complete it.  Another thing I like to mention is the barter system in the game.  Monsters don't drop money.  Instead they drop items that you sell to earn cash.  As you progressed through the game, the store's inventory increased with more items.  In essence, the whole point was to buy low and sell high.  It can be tedious work.  Start as soon as possible and the sooner you can get better weapons and armor and the more cash in your pocket.

Characters: You were only allowed 4 in your lineup at all times and 1 support character.  The hero will always be a part of your line up.  The problem was their over 108 characters and I personally love to have everyone leveled up to their max stats.  In this game, luckily, it was pretty easy to level up as you got closer to the end of the game.  From what I read, this was normal in all of the Suikoden games to have a butt load of characters.  However, it is a pain for a gamer like me.  I like to focus on few characters.  You randomly picked these characters up and add them to your castle.  It was fun actually.  But I highly recommend a strategy guide.  I accidentally missed only freaking 1 person!  XD  Arrrgggh . . . And I'm the type of gamer that have to have everything perfect the first time since I don't have time to go back and replay again.  My video game queue is too long nowadays to restart a game.  All the characters have their own side stories that enhanced the storyline a bit and gave more insight to their world. 

Dungeons: You travel to each city and dungeon by a map.  There are no monsters here.  As you traveled in between places, there is counter telling you how many days it took to get there.  The days go in 30 day increments.  It goes in 3 cycles: Seed, Bud and Flower.  In bud and flower, a more higher level monster tend to appear during these cycles and if your characters are underlevel, it will become a pain the butt fighting them.  In the cities, you are not allowed to travel too freely.  As you enter a city, a list of places that you are allowed to visit pops up.  As you enter a dungeon, it becomes an open field.  This was where you meet your monsters.  These are random encounters and pretty frequent at times that it can be annoying.  It's all turn based.  The dungeons are pretty navigable but you might have to backtrack a few times that can be annoying.

This is my one most major gripe with the game.  There is no magic spell for you to warp out of dungeons.  You have to walk all the way back.  It's annoying when you are in a rush and get stop by a lot of low-leveled monsters.  

Graphics: Graphics are okay. There are 3 forms.  As you walk through cities and dungeons, you are in chibi form.  The graphics are little sharp around the edges but decent quality for what it is.  And when the characters are talking, you get the flat 1-dimensional image.  And on occasion, you will get an anime FMV.

BGM/Sound/Voices:  Music was okay.  Nothing memorable.  O_o  Voices.  Not bad.  The problem was that they talked kind of fast.  I thought it was just me, but from other reviews, it was not.  LOL  However, as you proceed through the game, the voices do get better.  All the characters have their own voice actors which I found really amazing.  They did a great job matching voices.

Spoilers - The Ending:

I'm very pissed that I could not get the "true" ending.  There was also the "bad" ending but I won't go into details.  I suggest seeing a guide or youtube if you want more info.  However, the final boss battle was a breezed as long you are leveled up properly.  My final four were all at level 60+.  The ending was okay.  You get to see a list of blurbs what happened to each character.  So, don't expect anything awesome despite the lengthy battle to get to the end.  There are no New Game+.