Trent
Suikoden II 1998
Log Status
Completed
Playing
Backlog
Wishlist
Rating
Time Played
--
Days in Journal
4 days
Last played
June 16, 2024
First played
January 4, 2024
Platforms Played
This review contains spoilers
True ending and bad ending spoilers ahead
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Replayed to get all 108 stars of destiny and it was very worth it. I also did the bad ending again during this play-through and man it is so well done. I didn't give Nanami's character the respect she deserved before, because throughout the game I noticed how she was always at odds with herself and wanted to tell the main character to quit and just run away from the war. She occasionally threw around the idea but bottled it up until the Neclord segment where there was a whole segment and ending dedicated to it, both of which are extremely well done. On the topic of the true ending, for some reason I've seen a lot of controversy surrounding the true ending and if you're one of the people who hate it please play the game and try to make your takeaway something more than "they go to war"
That being said this game is somehow even more buggy than I remember from my first play-through and the translation is even WORSE with the true ending and I've come to the conclusion where I don't think anyone dared to proof read it before release. There's so many parts that I could cite but I would end up writing a college thesis and im not trying to do that until im in my masters so to summarize, there's a part in the true ending where Jowy says something and there's no space in-between the words. I'm pretty sure it was "everyoneand". This happened multiple times throughout the game in story dialogue.
Something else I noticed throughout the game after being blown away with the Luca Blight boss from my previous play-through and falling in love with his theme is the use of his leit-motif throughout the game and how even though he died his legacy still lived on as the final boss since he summoned the beast rune.. Very cool. Another thing i went to go take a shit or something while i was dueling some guy and since i have wireless headphones i heard the second part of the duel theme and it goes so fucking hard i dont think anyone has been in a duel with a character in this game for more than 30 seconds so if you haven't listen to this https://youtu.be/CL50Xv0r2tA?si=8Dxjxq79VGts9c7M&t=54
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Replayed to get all 108 stars of destiny and it was very worth it. I also did the bad ending again during this play-through and man it is so well done. I didn't give Nanami's character the respect she deserved before, because throughout the game I noticed how she was always at odds with herself and wanted to tell the main character to quit and just run away from the war. She occasionally threw around the idea but bottled it up until the Neclord segment where there was a whole segment and ending dedicated to it, both of which are extremely well done. On the topic of the true ending, for some reason I've seen a lot of controversy surrounding the true ending and if you're one of the people who hate it please play the game and try to make your takeaway something more than "they go to war"
That being said this game is somehow even more buggy than I remember from my first play-through and the translation is even WORSE with the true ending and I've come to the conclusion where I don't think anyone dared to proof read it before release. There's so many parts that I could cite but I would end up writing a college thesis and im not trying to do that until im in my masters so to summarize, there's a part in the true ending where Jowy says something and there's no space in-between the words. I'm pretty sure it was "everyoneand". This happened multiple times throughout the game in story dialogue.
Something else I noticed throughout the game after being blown away with the Luca Blight boss from my previous play-through and falling in love with his theme is the use of his leit-motif throughout the game and how even though he died his legacy still lived on as the final boss since he summoned the beast rune.. Very cool. Another thing i went to go take a shit or something while i was dueling some guy and since i have wireless headphones i heard the second part of the duel theme and it goes so fucking hard i dont think anyone has been in a duel with a character in this game for more than 30 seconds so if you haven't listen to this https://youtu.be/CL50Xv0r2tA?si=8Dxjxq79VGts9c7M&t=54
Great game with amazing themes held down by duck tape and one of the worst localizations I've ever seen, which is sad because the characters are held back by it a lot. There are many questionable gameplay choices, most notably the shitty wars, and honestly I can put them aside even though they do suck ass, however what I can't put aside is that the NTSC release of this game doesn't even play the music that plays during wars along with a few other tracks due to a bug in the games code. That's just stupid and it's equally as sad as the localization shit because the soundtrack is rather good.
This game is a clear step up from Suikoden 1 in nearly every single way, but some of the things I didn't like about the first game remained in this version, namely the fact that some characters in this game are missable and unless you google how to acquire them, you don't really find out that you missed them until you get access to a tablet that shows you which characters you missed... and by then it's too late to do anything about it.. It's very backwards and confusing.
I really like Suikoden's gameplay loop and I'm planning on playing the rest of the series relatively soon, sadly however my save file from Suikoden 1 didn't transfer for some reason and I didn't find out that it didn't until I was more than half way into the game, which really sucks.. but I'm open to replaying this game in the future and getting all the stars of destiny as I did in Suikoden 1. Chances are I'll do it before I get to Suikoden 3, so I'm not really that pissed about it. Who knows I might end up liking this as much as everyone else when I 100% it later down the line
Hope those remakes fix the problems, though knowing Konami... it won't. Lol
This game is a clear step up from Suikoden 1 in nearly every single way, but some of the things I didn't like about the first game remained in this version, namely the fact that some characters in this game are missable and unless you google how to acquire them, you don't really find out that you missed them until you get access to a tablet that shows you which characters you missed... and by then it's too late to do anything about it.. It's very backwards and confusing.
I really like Suikoden's gameplay loop and I'm planning on playing the rest of the series relatively soon, sadly however my save file from Suikoden 1 didn't transfer for some reason and I didn't find out that it didn't until I was more than half way into the game, which really sucks.. but I'm open to replaying this game in the future and getting all the stars of destiny as I did in Suikoden 1. Chances are I'll do it before I get to Suikoden 3, so I'm not really that pissed about it. Who knows I might end up liking this as much as everyone else when I 100% it later down the line
Hope those remakes fix the problems, though knowing Konami... it won't. Lol