really love the artstyle, both for character design in the portraits and the actual models, both the characters and the environments. a lot of neat details, like water reflections, that just make everything feel a bit realer and neater. the soundtrack also is incredible, and the english dub is surprisingly good! the story and characters seem very well-done too, healthy dose of humor and serious writing, political intrigue, slow introduction into the worldbuilding

absolutely no tutorial for combat and highly questionable level design are. choices. though. i am enjoying the story and all so far, but i am not very sure about how far i will get. it's very... jrpg-y in the worst way. even looking at item descriptions makes me feel tired. i do not get any sense of progression and often get lost bc theres no map and again the way things are laid out leave a lot to be desired: some areas are inaccessible until you visit all other available areas, but its not always clear what is important and what is just fluff (i.e townspeople houses), and then the person blocking your path just disappears. sometimes the path is obscured by a second floor of a building or an eave or smth like that. just. Choices were made...

EDIT: well its a JPRG and you know what you are getting into. the combat has some variations in formations, joint attacks and what not, you can have a fairly big party with an "back rows" under-party that can give you bonus effects but. man. the whole 108 stars system is... something else. it's very easy to miss characters that give really important mechanics like The Literal Map Of The World, and some characters have extremely specific recruitment windows which... well... i think this is a game to be played solely with a guide lmao

that being said, the story is quite good! i also just looooove the world of suikoden, the mishmash of cultures, the colorful garments... the various locations are also plenty memorable and some of them are quite unusual, like the "rich people have bad taste" art town or the enormous water regulation lake that hides an ancient castle. they were definitely limited, possibly by memory limitations of PS2 or maybe just budget, so some textures are used very often and the dungeons particularly are repetitive and barren, and make for a very dull play, but if you can handle typical JRPG grind and dungeon crawling, i think it's worth a shot for the charming characters and writing. i also like that characters generally do not act like idiots to move the plot...? even the things that seem silly at first - i remember rolling my eyes at the marina/belcoot subplot at the start thinking that it was stupid to poison someone out of jealousy - get a reasonable explanation later. there's still some silliness, particularly pertaining to lyon's plot, but nothing that jumped out at me much. there's also a lot of comfy fluff like the letters characters write to you or the bath scenes... it's all just really nice. i liked it for what it was