been playing through older games lately, so i finished widdling away at suikoden 2. i've been meaning to replay it for years, as i didn't like it too much when i was younger, but it came out when a lot of rather good/interesting games were coming out so i guess i've wondered if i didn't give it a fair shake.
still kinda lukewarm about it i guess, though i was somewhat wrong to dislike it with much vigor. the whole game is about the main character, his childhood friend, and his barely functioning, obnoxious sister who goes to remarkable lengths to sour what could have otherwise been a reasonably poignant story. so automatically a third of the game's main story dynamic is just totally shit, and you can pretty much throw the main character in there too, as there isn't anything remotely rewarding about needing to choose between "................" and "Let's go into battle!!" every five minutes. but the dynamic between the main character and his friend(i guess IMPLIED dynamic, as the main character rarely has remotely worthwhile dialogue with him) is rather interesting, even if it's really only conceptually interesting. you have a slightly complicated relationship with your friend in the game where he ends up as the leader of the enemy kingdom, even though you're still friends and the game claims you're fighting for ultimately the same thing. i probably hated this when i was younger because it was frustrating that they had what could have been a rather effective story but just evaded a whole lot of worthwhile dramatic tension by having the main character be only slightly beyond mute, your friend generally being just shitty enough to not be fantastically sympathetic, and in general a lack of noteworthy difficult conflict at the end of the game.
you'd hope for an interesting ending with all of this, some sort of tough resolution, but there isn't one, and the [imho] best ending of the game comes about three quarters of the way through the game where you actually have the option to end the story prematurely by just running away from all the bullshit and living in a cabin somewhere. that was pretty cool, hadn't seen that done before, and it was a nice antidote to the whole attitude of the game seeing your brainless fanatics come by and tell you how deeply disappointed they are in you. i want to meet the person on this planet who got this ending and just lived with this as their ending to the game, didn't go back and reload the last save to keep playing. that's my kind of guy.
there isn't a whole lot to the story beyond that. they burn roughly half the cast just recycling characters from the first one, for no real reason that i can think of, and then do nothing terribly interesting with any of them anyway. they even feature a supposedly dead key villain from the first suikoden, Neclord, who was not all that interesting the first time around, and devote what feels like half the game to him just going on still being totally uninteresting. actually the only interesting thing at all about it is that Georg, this random optional throwaway character that has only two short scenes, ends up resurfacing in suikoden 5 as the highest profile protagonist of the whole story. that was kinda neat, particularly how the private detective actually spoils the suikoden 5 story if you get him to investigate Georg, though like with everything else about suikoden 2 these things only have value within the context of the whole series, not this game, which is a terribly lazy way to do this sort of thing.
it's kinda funny because i did like the game quite a bit more than the above paragraphs would indicate, and on the rare occasion the story reached some reasonably sincere notes, but on the whole i feel like my enjoyment of the game came from me generally liking the way the suikoden games play, not because i was particularly enamored with the way this one works. i need to play it again sometime but i recall suikoden 3 really fixing all of the problems i had with this one, particularly everything concerning the main antagonist, who i recall being about as sympathetic of an antagonist as i've seen in a videogame. i will probably be back here in a month or so posting all about this shit, more chronicles of disappointment, if only because there isn't a law against it.
ugh this has turned into a shitty game review, and not even a fantastically interesting one. i don't know if anybody actually goes back and replays these old games every decade or so, maybe this will be useful to one or two people who are going to play it again??? hopefully not!! there's probably something better to do with your time.
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