I'm writing this review of Suikoden IV mainly because I feel I should warn you all away from it. For some inexplicable reason, I played through it twice, even though it was a truly lacklustre game. The previous games in this series were excellent. So much so that, regrettably, I went out and immediately bought IV at launch without renting it first.
A mere ten minutes with a rental copy would have saved me a good chunk of change. The graphics are sub-par. The voice acting is retched. The cut scenes are chock full of mood-breaking lengthy loading screens. To top it off, at several key points in the game the only way you figure out what to do next is to look at the map of the world and see where the little blue arrow is telling you to go... with no clue as to WHY you would be going there story-wise.
The previous Suikoden games have always had a rather dark-story line with an underlying theme of the fact that war is both ugly and deadly. In this version the plot is pretty much non-existent.
Here, the main character is a blank-faced idiot. He has a constant large eyed totally blank look on his face, regardless of how exciting, or earth-shattering the current events are. Supposedly this is to allow you to impose your own emotional responses on the character. It certainly didn't work for me.
The limited speech options the game gives you are ridiculous. Usually there are two options, the obviously correct option, and the blatantly stupid, insulting, or suicidal one. At other times the two options are just close rewordings of the same choice, and whichever one you pick the same result ensues.
And I haven't even touched on the main flaw with the game... The ridiculously high fight frequency. The fight frequency was (utterly without exaggeration!) approximately 1 fight every 10-15 seconds. Also, there were a series of main bad-guy fights which took place out at sea, and once you've triggered the set story-line fight vs each monster, it would then appear as a random fight. These "main" random fights were so long and tedious they would actually take over ten minutes to fight through. They weren't difficult per say, just extremely lengthy, tedious and boring. It almost seemed like a game flaw to run into these main bad-guys as random fights.
I really missed the "Iron Chef" mini game, which was present in the previous Suikoden games but not in this one. Still present were the myriad sub-quests to collect "all 108 stars of destiny". (which is what had me playing the game through twice.) The game is also remarkably short. I'm guessing about 30 hours, less if you ignore side quests.
Overall this game didn't live up to the franchise. Poor production quality plus lack of story line means this version of Suikoden fell so short of the mark set by it's predecessors that it felt as though the developers had sold it off to someone else. If you happen to find it dirt cheap, or you're a diehard fan of the series, pick it up, otherwise avoid at all costs. (And if you enjoy old school turned based RPG video games and you've yet to try Suikoden I through III you are truly missing out. Run out and get them NOW.)
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