This chapter of the Suikoden series is widely regarded as the weakest, and with good reason.
The camera does rotate, but does so far too slowly, leaving you often waiting unnecessarily for the camera to pan to a usable angle. The encounter rate is way too high. A lot of the character animations are stiff and awkward.
Perhaps all of these issues pale in comparison to the fact that the game revolves around sailing between islands and the sailing system is terrible. The controls to sailing the ship are sluggish and unresponsive. The ship tends to suddenly and abruptly turn whenever you get within a mile of shoreline, making circumnavigating islands a chore as you have to navigate around their invisible bounding boxes as well. Additionally, you'll try to aim your ship into a port only to have your ship turn around 180 degrees if you didn't aim for the invisible and far too small "sweet spot" that'll let you port correctly and turning your ship back in the right direction is painfully slow. Often the other ships in your fleet get in your way and prevent you from turning at ALL.
All of this is painful, indeed, but the worst part is that the ship sails REALLY slow unless you're holding R1 (also works while running around). Why you'd need to hold R1 throughout almost the entire game is beyond me.
Even while holding R1, it can take 5 minutes of straight sailing to get from island to island and the encounter rate is so high that you'll have a random encounter every 10 seconds or so along the way making it more like 15-20 minutes of sailing on even the shortest of trips.
Take my advice, if you're going to play through this game GET VICKY ASAP, then at least you can teleport more often than not and avoid a lot of the headaches.
With Suikoden III the game made up for it's flaws with an excellent story. Suikoden IV's story is fairly mediocre, however, making this game not worth the headache of playing through unless you're a hardcore Suikoden fan.