The Batlord

Oh yeah, and Suikoden 2 is pretty sweet so far. The combat is pretty standard, but from my experience with 4 and 5 that's not surprising, but the selling points from those later, PS2 games, that I remember are that you have a MASSIVE cast of characters to build your parties from, like, I think this game has just over a hundred or something, and you get to build your own army and base.

The first Suikoden I played was 4, and I loved it - even though its combat system was totally generic - just because the world was made up of cool little islands, and your military base of operations that you could build up was a galleon, so you could just sail around like a pirate. But that game is still considered one of the worst of the series.

Then I played 5, which is generally considered the second best of the series, and its story was pretty epic, with another massive cast of characters, and a relatively better combat system, even if it was still JRPG standard. One of the staples of the series is that you get to engage in actual battles, and while 4 had some decent, turn-based naval combat, 5 had a sort of dumbed-down RTS system that took place on both land and sea that was a definite improvement.

And Suikoden 2 is generally considered to be the best of the entire series, so I'm hoping for a brilliant story and some awesome large-scale combat, whatever form it may take. Even at this early stage, where it's basically just a good JRPG, it's still caught my attention in a way that I can't really define, so I'm hoping that that is a very good sign. I doubt that a game that was basically a throwback to 2D SNES rpgs would get such massive amounts of praise, being held up against the best Final Fantasy games even, if there wasn't some serious magic to it beyond just the combination of turn-based rpg cliches with larger battles.

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