Thought this was a really good game until I had spent hours trying to figure out a puzzle only to finally give up and look online for a hint and discover that there is literally no way to solve it in the game. They're all "optional" but it turns out that there's more than one puzzle requiring external resources, including one EXTREMELY visible one where the solution is meant to be obtained IN THE DISCORD as an "ARG" no one who buys the game will even know happened. And once you know this, it's simply not possible to enjoy the game because ANYTHING you haven't solved yet might actually be impossible, and the only way to know is to look it up. To be clear, I got ~90% of the hidden items before I looked anything up, but by that point i had also spent like 6 hours of my life banging my head against non-puzzles out of a total 20. If you don't want people to engage with your game as you released it, why did you bother releasing it to the public? Also another half star off because playing the flute is a nightmare user experience. This is a real unforced fuckup that could be turned into an ACTUALLY good game by just NOT including this shit.

I REALLY liked Suikoden I, much more than I expected. When I started Suikoden II and saw it had helpful features like An Inventory and the ability to remove items from inactive party members, I thought this game was gonna be GREAT. I was sorely mistaken. The plot, writing, gameplay, dungeon design, pacing, characters, interface, and even the actual code are all so incredibly disappointingly bad by comparison. The whole experience was like pulling teeth. I played S1+2 because I was advised I should before playing Eiyuden Chronicles, and I have now decided I'm not gonna be playing that actually

On the one hand it IS Dragon's Dogma, which is worth a lot of points. On the other hand I found the early difficulty weirdly high considering how it leveled out (possibly a consequence of Gregor and co just vanishing and leaving me to walk to the capital with no sense of the world and the most basic skills and equipment). I also find basically every attempt to play it in anything but the most predictable way is frustrated at every turn - no matter how little a main line quest could actually influence later ones, you MUST complete them or events will not progress. For instance, you can get to Battahl as soon as you like, no major character will ever do anything unless you've completed a bunch of quests they literally don't know about that didn't affect them.

Much was made of the fact any NPC can be permanently killed but 1) 99% of quests do not react in ANY WAY to NPC deaths, not even to fail you, which means if you kill a plot-critical NPC you ABSOLUTELY MUST get a wakestone, find them in the morgue, and revive them, at which point the game will pretend that never happened 2) actually many NPCs cannot be killed at times when the game designers felt it would be inconvenient, even if they can be killed at other times - generally this is during quests where they have scripted events 3) some NPCs like shopkeepers may have people who come to replace them if they die, but in at least some cases kiling that replacement just makes the original come back to life??? 4) Perhaps most irritatingly, there is EXACTLY ONE CASE where you can decide to kill a specific NPC during a specific quest and you will not be given the option to resurrect them solely so that another character can be mad about it later, and then after that scene the character will act like it never happened anyway lmao.

Anyway this is still a 4 star review for all the complaints i have about it but man.