Back on the review track after a few months of absence. Gamespot's Justin Calvert send me Suikoden Tierkreis for review (my first encounter with a review ROM cart! It's got a big hump on the top) and I'm 25 hours in. Hearing that this was supposedly a 30-hour game, I thought that I'd be well done by Wednesday, but man... considering where it looks like I am in the story, it seems as if I've got quite a ways to go.

The game doesn't really make a good first impression -- there's intermittent voice acting, which is cool, but then your main character's voice acting can be putrid at times, and at best is incredibly rushed. I thought at first that maybe they wanted to speak as fast as possible to fit all the voice samples in the DS card, since this isn't a UMD we're talking about here, but some of the better-voiced characters (and thank goodness -- they do exist) speak at a normal pace. The written dialog is also full of fluff -- no, that's too kind; it's full of wasteful, empty words. I know in our own daily conversation we respond to things our friends say with, "Oh really?" and "Hmm, yeah, I think you might be right about that," but there are way too many instances of that here. The fluff extends into your typical chipper, spunky anime stuff too -- "Yeah! Let's get 'em!" "Alright!" Again, there's no issue with it every so often, but all the wasteful text could have been condensed to make for a much tighter script; instead, those who are impatient might just jam crazily on the A button and then accidentally skip over the important stuff.

The battles are okay -- there's nothing much incredibly special about them, though there are special combo attacks depending on who you have in your party. So far they've come in handy, and are very powerful -- but I haven't been able to use them too much because for much of the game I've been forced to use some characters based on the storyline who don't work with the others for combo attacks. There's no real penalty for using them but you basically sacrifice multiple party members' turns for a single attack, so it's not like abusing them is a real problem. At least, I don't think so. Also, non-boss battles can go by really fast -- which is completely awesome, considering how it's turn-based and old-school. It follows that ol' Suikoden motif of multiple characters carrying out their moves at the same time. For instance, two guys from your party will simultaneously attack their targets (whether you chose the same target or different targets for them) -- even as the enemy is attacking one of your other guys. In addition to speeding up the battles, it just looks cool. So even if the turn-based battles aren't anything special, they're entertaining and over quickly. It's just a shame that they didn't put one-on-one and massive battles in when they could have tried to spice things up.

I'm really, really liking (most of) the presentation. At worst, the music is decent; at best, it's really well-done. Many tracks are done with MIDI instruments, which still sound very nice, but there are a few recorded tracks (or at least they sound recorded) that sound absolutely exquisite. (I'm reminded of some of the best Baten Kaitos tracks -- the very unique, very beautiful ones.) Some of the environments rule too. The game's got colorful, detailed structures with pockets of light and shadows that reflect appropriately on your polygonal characters. I've encountered some boring dungeon designs (both structurally and graphically) which stick out especially because of the other, better-looking environments, which is sad, but the good definitely outweighs the bad. I'll say this much about the in-battle character models, though: They look mad creepy. Imagine the super-deformed Crystal Chronicles characters, except they look less cutey-cartooney and more... realistic. More realistic, except with beady, slightly large eyes. That always seem to be looking at me. Ugh -- I'm getting the chills. Anyway, yeah -- creepy.

Earlier on I thought I had this game pegged -- but the story, however poorly its dialog can be written at times, started getting intriguing about 15 hours ago. (And I'm not even a story guy.) I guess Suikoden fanatics might be disappointed that this is essentially a new storyline -- no major story elements from the previous games appear here. But collecting all the characters to band together is always cool (and yes, there are 108 of them here too), with the two caveats that (1) not all of them are interesting from a character-development perspective and (b) a lot of them are interchangeable in battle.

As always, it's too early to call it -- but my opinion has gone from "meh" to "cool" in the past three days. I'm genuinely looking favorably towards experiencing the rest of it.