Suikoden 1 - great game, yes it was slow and unrefined in many ways, but it introduces some amazing characters and very few aren't awesome enough to appear again. Fu Su Lu's waiting in Harmonia.
Suikoden 2 - the finest RPG ever created, amazing gameplay, wonderful characters, an epic and deep story with a
that was worth every single damn replay. Throw in that it's an emotional roller-coaster (the only game I've shed man tears over), has a fantastic ost and Luca Blight is
the big bad of anything ever. You jelly, Sephiroth?
Suikoden 3 - I never liked this when I first bought it and I can't remember why, maybe because I had to import an NTSC PS2 to actually play it and my PAL Suikoden 2 saves didn't load. I loaned it to a friend from work, also a Suikoden fan and he loved it, so I got it back and promptly loved it too. It starts very slow and has probably the worst war battle system in the series but otherwise this game is so unique and charming I don't mind even sitting through Thomas's chapters. So many plot elements introduced for the series as a whole that, sadly have yet to be resolved.
Suikoden 4 - If this had been called Generic RPG 4, it'd be a pretty good installment of that series. It's a shame they came from three amazing games to this downer, really. I understand they lost a bit of direction after Murayama's departure during 3, so it wasn't too much a shock they decided to eschew moving the overall story forward and decided to go so far into the past it's almost entirely unrelated. Still a few things seemed out of place, battle system was a step back, the story was rushed and actually made little sense (until Rhapsodia came and fixed it), many characters were dull and joined you because why not? Still it's not all bad, it has a great soundtrack, a very very cool True Rune, a nice sRPG sequel and ship battles were kind of interesting. Overall I'd say disappointing but still a good game.
Suikoden 5 - Why u no start faster? I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've wanted to replay this, only to be put off by the painfully slow intro. Still, once you are past that, this game easily reaches the epic heights of the first three games and in some ways exceeds them. Fantastic cast, perhaps the best in the series, an enjoyable story with another roller-coaster of emotions, hints to the future of the series (Jeanne) that gave the false hope we may actually get answers. Also this game has
Georg Prime. That's instant win button right there.
Suikoden Tierkreis - One of the better DS RPGs and perhaps my favorite soundtrack in anything called Suikoden. Some good writing there and a few of the characters (Blades of Night's Veil) were surprisingly strong and endearing. But yeah, it's not a good Suikoden game at all, I liked it fairly well but it simply can't match up. In some ways it was hampered by the DS limitations (inability to show more than 7 character models on the screen at once forced a 4-person party, audio compression made the hero sound like he's on crystal meth etc), but in other ways it was just...
bad. The story is nonsensical/convoluted and has no connection to Suikoden lore, why did they think fans of the series wanted that? Did Runes really need to be called Mark of the Stars? Worse still they latterly tried to tie this mess of a continuity to Suiko-verse saying it's one of the many parallel universes (ala World of Dragons etc). Yuck.
