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Few more hours till KnB S3.

There’s not much out there like Suikoden. It’s a JRPG series, but while it has all the magic and destiny of that genre, each game is at its heart a war story. There are 108 characters in each game, a number that’s hard to use effectively, but with Suikoden, all these characters, all these people, serve to emphasize both the scale and the personal cost of conflict. Most of them will fight beside you. Some will cook your food or do your laundry or hoe your beans, and the games are set up where all of those roles matter.

Suikoden continued for five installments and a few spinoff titles, and while most of them are enjoyable, Suikoden II is almost unarguably the series’ finest hour.

Two young soldiers find themselves under attack by their own country in an attempt to wipe out their unit and blame it on a neighboring country as pretense to start a war. The two escape, and eventually find themselves in possession of two halves of a True Rune: a mark that gives the bearer incredible magic power and makes them destiny’s darlings. Because of the runes, and because of their disparate attempts to end the fighting, they end up as leaders on opposite sides of a war. 

The game’s scope covers both the very political and the very personal. I’m tempted to compare it to Game of Thrones, but while Suikoden II can be heartbreaking, and while your main antagonist is basically The Mountain if the The Mountain were a prince, it never gets quite that grim. One of your 108 is a flying squirrel. There’s an Iron Chef inspired mini-game. Like most JRPGs, the epic and quirky live side by side. It’s a fun world to get lost in.

Suikoden II was released for the PlayStation in 1999, and the PS1 was lousy with great JRPGs. Even if they were your bread and butter in the late 90s, you were probably looking elsewhere. Suikoden, with its very Japanese name and its dated 2D sprite graphics, didn’t stand much of a chance against the competition, but it aged more gracefully than most of its contemporaries. It was well-received by the few critics and fans that played it, but not very many copies were printed, so it soon became hard to find.