It feels good to play another good Suikoden game.
First off, let's get through the bad parts of this game. The biggest being the camera. The zoom in function can be handy, but with no other way to ROTATE the camera, you'll get lost quite a bit, as Konami made somes buildings a bit too big to see around in the default camera view. Another annoying problem is the ridiculous loading times before and after battle. This slows the pace of the game down, but do not fret! The number goodies easily outweighs the numbers of badies in this game
The plot is your typical run-of-the-mill storyline, your old kingdom gets taken over, you lead a resistence to stop it, blah blah blah. This is a bit different though, as you start off as a Prince, who's QUEENdom(completely ran by women...men are just figureheads....ok...)is overrun by a powerful political family that wants to use the Sun Rune to expand their kingdoms power. Ok, that's about all that's different, then the normal Suikoden storyline takes over...
The duel system is solid, though most will find it to be a bit on the easy side. The war system goes back to the ol' days of S2, but, naval battles are introduced as well. In this game, there's more strategy than guessing. Horse>infantry>archers>horse, in naval battles inf. ship>ramships>archery ships>inf. ships. Remember this can be slightly hectic, but recovery skills and other battle skills tone the difficulty down a bit.
The graphics fit the game quite well, and the sounds, while they could be a bit better, are fitting as well. Mini-games are plentiful, as are the side-quests. Suikoden 5 is a solid old school game that most RPG fans will enjoy.