Pong and Beyond

892nd played so far

Genre: Role-Playing
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2002
Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo
Publisher: Konami

I’ve been careful going through the JRPGs as I always enjoy them for the blog – and because they are pretty long plays, which I need to be careful with so I can keep up the pace of playing so I have a chance of completing it – a bit more than a year left!

Suidoken III looks interesting in part because of its cast. Based on the characters of The Water Margin, we have 108 characters, with about 27 or 28 being more proper main characters. Still, that feels ambitious, especially if they get more background than the typical Tactics characters.

Our Thoughts

Even in the time I had for the game – which exceeded the five hours I took for this, thanks to the Easter bank holidays stuck inside that gave me extra time – I just barely scratched the surface. There are thre emain characters, each with a number of chapters, and a fourth with less chapters as more of a support character. That last one I didn’t get to see – nor did I get to play one of the three main characters, as the story of Chris Lightfellow, the (female) paladin took about four hours while the rest of my playing time so far, of Hugo, the indigenous swordsman, involved a fair amount of grinding as it’s the canonical first character and starts at level one, while the others start a bit higher.

Aside from being an interesting set of characters, a lot of events happen from another person’s perspective as well, which makes for a nice different cadence f or its storytelling, especially as it works in any order (so far) as well. You have the remnants of story telling of the other characters around, with bits and areas that only make sense later (or are a nice area to revisit). It gets a bit confusing sometimes, but works out eventually.

There’s a whole castle building system that comes up after these first few chapters, but I didn’t get to really play with that yet. Similarly, I didn’t recruit many characters beyond the default ones for the first chapter, but I did see a lot of it around already. There’s named characters standing around, asking for things, but it takes a while (and the right character) before you can do anything with it, but it seems like a fun set of challenges.

Aside from a decent RPG battle system, the game also has strategic battles at a bunch of places. You move several teams of characters around these nodes. When they encounter the enemy, you take them on, but in the first one I tried, the main focus was to escape and you ended up fighting some strategic battles to make sure you can continue from there.

Final Thoughts

Not only did I enjoy this game throughout, I ended up getting other games in the series as the idea behind it appealed to me so much – the size and scope, the amount of contents, that part of my brain that wants to collect all of them. It feels like a fun challenge while providing a world and story that I’d love to dive deeper into over time.