Suikoden V Review

     I’m about 35 hours into an adventure filled with political intrigue, assassinations, kidnappings, betrayal, and open warfare. I’ve just bested my enemy on the open water, then destroyed a dam/military base by releasing the force of an entire lake into a river and discovered ancient ruins at the bottom of said lake. Propelled by a sense of adventure, I enter these ruins, excited to see what they have in store for me…

            Five minutes later, I started texting a friend. Ten minutes after that, I got up to check my student e-mail. I began to browse Reddit after another five minutes. Almost fifty minutes after entering the ruins, I turned my PlayStation 2 off and have not turned it back on again. I had been sitting on the same loading screen, the music cutting on and off, that entire time.

            This was not the first bad loading time of Suikoden V, but it was by far the worst. Previous bad load times had extended as long as ten minutes, sometimes back-to-back (there’s one building in Raftfleet that constitutes the intersection of three areas that have to be loaded separately where I had already spent a large amount of time scrolling my phone during a black screen). Normally, I’m very accepting of load times; this is a big game, with a lot going on, running on old hardware. But it is the hardware this game was designed for, and I’m an adult with things to do. I simply don’t have the time for a load time this excessive anymore.

            And it sucks that my experience was marred and ultimately brought to an end by this black screen, because Suikoden V is an absolutely fantastic game. Every new city felt unique and alive in a way modern JRPG’s often don’t capture, from city on the water Sol-Falena to the nomadic Raftfleet and the hideous “artistic” abomination Haud. Each new character I encountered was a treat and felt totally different from one another, and their designs were beautiful. Those engaged in the story proper were fully fleshed out, rounded characters with believable reasons behind their actions, and the one-note characters you could encounter and optionally add to the party were never offensively flat or annoying, as I’ve found in some other games with extensive casts.

            Battles can mostly be fought by pressing the auto-fight button, but if you choose to make your own decisions, you’re rewarded for doing so, as the combination attacks between characters are incredibly powerful (early on, the Prince and Lyon, and Logg and Lun’s, combination attacks can help clear random battles very easily), as are the magic spells that can be utilized via the equippable runes. Boss battles can be challenging, but never frustratingly so, and the duels (the three I was able to encounter before setting the game down) were all unique and fun.

            The real-time strategy battles I engaged in were fairly simple to wrap my head around, but they were progressing in such a way that I’m sure by the end of the game they would be more complex and tricky. They were also utilized incredibly well by the story (honestly better than the duels were) to set up and display characters’ political machinations.

            Field areas suffer somewhat in comparison to the rest of the game, usually being a straight path with minor offshoots leading to treasure in either a forest or cave comprised of the same assets and textures, lacking much of the life found in the cities and villages. They’re functional for what their purpose is, but I find myself forgetting what they look like even now, about a week from when I last played.

            Suikoden V is a clearly phenomenal game with a lot of love and creativity poured into it that suffers from poor optimization for the system it lives on. It’s truly a shame that, like this review, my time was overshadowed and eventually cut short by a dark screen with a basic character animations and text reading “Now Loading…”