A solid RPG which lasts for over 40 hours and involves over 108 interactable characters
+ Around 70 playable characters
+ Animations, cut scenes and locations look great
+ Good value for money
Negatives
- Way to easy
- Too many random encounters
- May dissapoint Suikoden fans
Suikoden Tierkreis is an off spring from the Suikoden series, but it does how ever follow the exact same principals.
It contains over 108 characters to recruit into your army and around 70 of them you can have in your party, of course there's a limit of 4 characters at a time in your party, which traditional Suikoden fans may frown at since it used to be 6.
First of all is the story, an essentiel ingredient for an RPG, does Suikoden Tierkreis do well in telling its story?
Well, in some ways it does, otherways it dosen't, the story its self is quite good, it involves a villain trying to collect 12 'chronicles' so he can summon the 'one king' to exist in their world in which they can live in a predictable and safe world were everything is pre-determined, altough complicated at times it makes a change from the more traditional RPG's predictable storylines.
So, on the whole the story is good, but however the game its self has a slow pace.
For example, it'll take a few hours for a significant event to happen, the rest of the time is either spent dungeon crawling, doing side quests or recruiting characters, slowing down the stories pace a bit to much.
This results in getting distracted and often lost outside of the plot.. but if your willing to jumble and hold peices of the story in your head when it all comes together it's a different, linear, but good story in the end.
Combat is reasonably good, the wide range of characters to recruit keeps it fresh, you can switch your characters everytime your in your base and have up to 4 in your party at a time.
It uses a tradtionally turn based style.
There are 'marks of the stars' which most characters can use, as the story progresses you unlock more skills for more characters, you change your characters skills again, at your base, and depending on where abouts in the story are manipulates how many skills you can have equipped at one time.
Traditional Suikoden fans will be pleased to know there is the combo system, if you have 2 characters with a significant relationship of some sort they may have a combo attack, in which they both/all attack.
For example, you can recruit a group of 3 pirates and they're combo move causes massive damage to one enemy.
There are also status effects, some of these come when you use a particuarly heavy skill.
Another example is you can use a skill which causes huge damage but leaves you 'dizzy' meaning you miss your next turn.
Random encounters are very heavy, this put the games score down a lot for me, it seems every few steps you'll have a random encounter.. or you'll have one when you really don't want one.. it's just really heavy and we all know that spoils any RPG.
Graphics and animations are really good through out the game, most characters are really detailed and there's a broad selection of weapons and armour that can be purchased to improve your characters.
There's also cut scenes done in an anime style and they're pretty good on the whole, it is like watching anime, I can't describe it in any other way.
Music, I had mixed reactions- some of the music sounds pretty epic but often it can get loopy if you get stuck on a certain stage.
Voice acting however is different, most of it is pretty good, but they fail when it comes to the main characters of the game.
So for all the minor characters the voice acting is pretty solid, at times it's really good, but for the main central characters it can be awful..
This ruins the game at times, but it isn't a major issue.
On the whole if your looking for a solid and colourful RPG which has a fresh story and many characters to play with then Suikoden Tierkreis is great!
However traditional Suikoden fans could be dissapointed with its stray away from the series with the true runes and the fact that no previous characters from the last 5 games return as we're used to.
Thanks for reading
~Gormo