The Problems With Suikoden II !!!!!!!!

By all accountable means, Suikoden II could have been the single best RPG on the Playstation. It's a great game, but quite a few marring little details seemed to have been an oversight of massive proportions. I'm talking about the translation and the massive amount of ridiculous glitches in the game.

♦ To say writing is important in an RPG is kind of an understatement. Suiko II has some pretty poor text contained within it. From characters saying things that make no sense to the over use of the exclamation mark, they definitely didn't have a competent localization crew. Not all of the awful text offends me however, talking to a cat and hearing him say "grumble, grumble" is pretty hilarious.

♦ The Langrisser styled wars are a definite step down from the Rock, Paper, Scissors wars of the first game. I'm not going to be brazen enough to claim the RPS segments were perfect, but they were not only much simpler, but had a greater impact on the playthrough. The major problems for me are simple: It's incredibly slow, most battles have a fixed ending, the lack of explanation on setting up the party entourages, and lastly, the worst offender is that the music almost NEVER loads. I've gotten to my eighth tactical battle in the game and I've only heard the music TWICE. I'm not sure what the problem is exactly, but I'm sort of lead to believe that the game just can't find the music.

♦ The glitches in the game completely kill the any difficulty the game could have had. There's two specific glitches I'm referring to. The first one is the least likely to occur, but still possible to do on accident. If you fight certain groups of enemies with one character left standing at either level 39 or 40 (dependent on the enemy group), their level will shoot up to 99 by the end of the battle. The one that makes me the most furious however, is the glitch that random stars of destiny will join your party already at level 99.

♦ If you import your data from Suiko I, you get exp bonuses to returning characters and get to recruit the main character from the first game. The problem with this however is that they completely neglected to fix Tir McDohl's name. Suiko II defaults his name to McDohl, but when you import your data, it attempts to use the first name you made up instead. Instead of the name changing to what you chose, only the capital letters will change, so for me, his name is now TcDohl instead of Tir.


(I was going to do my five favorite SNES RPG openings today, but it turns out there isn't a lot of stock footage on Youtube the way I want to use it. I'm going to have to play through most of the openings myself and record it. That combined with the fact that my internet was down until about an hour ago made me decide I would be better off postponing it to next week.)