People who blame Suikoden 4 for the death of the franchise

[sticky-runes]

are Cunts.

There, I just wanted to get that off my chest.

[Wolkendrache]

What a warm opening post...

Don't forget that they at least bought and played the game (whatever opinion they might have), so there would not have been a fifth part without them.

Better blame the ones who never played Suikoden, which would also guarantee that nobody in this forum will be offended by your unique choice of words

[Antimatzist]

Its multicausal, I guess.

They didn't release Suikoden III in Europe - which is just dumb. I can only speak for myself, but if I hadn't seen Suikoden IV randomly in a shop at some point, I wouldn't have even known that the franchise was going on. They did, however, release the III manga in France which is just a super strange move.

Suikoden IV then tried to streamline the series a bit after the (from a mainstream RPG POV) strange design choices in III. But that's its main fault, instead of improving he series and what it makes special, it just drops these aspect (e.g., the SML system and four party members instead of six, I feel like there are even fewer runes in this game than in the first Suikoden, and some more). Also, after the three previous titles were always improving the dramatics and storytelling, IV went back and is pretty simple without a lot of depth. There is only few politics involved, a lot of interesting story parts were only hinted at but never fleshed out.

So I think it's not that far fetched to say that IV at least partly killed the series. It neither pleased old fans, nor was interesting enough for new players to check out.

[Pyriel]

The characters often came over as recycled and thick too. That King Wakka and his long-lost Sullen Tidus danced around their relationship so clumsily that it seemed outright stupid to not address the possibilities explicitly. Maybe there's more subtlety in the Japanese version, or maybe things were said in a way that would be considered straightforward or blunt by Japanese standards, but that seem coy by ours. Stubbornly sticking to the silent protagonist killed it too. Somebody's sat there pouring out all these sad memories to him, and all Lazlo can do is stare at the floor and walls, looking like his acid reflux is acting up.

That sort of writing is where they lost me on it. Its only links to the ongoing narrative were fan-service, and large sections of the story left me feeling that I'd been beaten over the head with a bat made of clumsy exposition.

Actually, now that I think about it, that's kind of a Japanese trope, isn't it? If I lived in an anime, and Konami's writers were trying to hit me with the aforementioned bat, the scene would cut away mid-swing to my childhood. In a lengthy flashback spanning many years, you'd learn my sad story, culminating in how I came to be in the path of the bat, and why I'll be able to stop it without lasting harm by channeling a bit of qi into my teeth as I form a rictus grin. That actually makes me a little less pleased with Konami. They couldn't even be bothered to develop art assets for a proper flashback, and instead opted to have a lengthy conversation, that was actually just a monologue the King In Short Pants directed at Lazlo Spindleshanks.

[wataru14]

Plus there was the phoned-in plot. From the time you flee Obel, what are the major plot points?

1: Sail to Kika's place and hear about Elenor (5 minutes of story - 10 of sailing)
2: Recruit Elenor (takes about 10-15 minutes)
3: Lazlo gets the Golden Seal, Elenor says to unite the Islands against Kooluk (5 minutes)
4: Go to Middleport and recruit Reinbach (this entire sequence takes 5 minutes)
5: Naval Battle in Razril and subsquent story scenes (takes about 15 minutes)
6: Deal with Axel and the Elves in Na-Nal (takes about 15 minutes)
7: Talk to the chief of Nay twice (it takes more time running back and forth to the ship than the plot takes)
8: Give the Golden Seal back, Naval battle in Obel (15 minutes)
9: Endgame

If you ignore the recruitment drives and make liberal use of Viki, you can zip through this game in an insultingly short time.

[Antimatzist]

Most definitely - the any% Speedrun record for IV is 3:12 ( on emulator, but it's still a good estimate.). The first Suikoden is 3:30.

So you can beat the fourth gamef aster than the first! And not because of glitches - because it really is so short. I was disappointed when I recently replayed IV because it really is a syou descirbe.

[Sasarai10]

Guys don't forget the mini-games,and the treasure hunting.

It took me more time to collect the secret items by casting Shiramine's net and dig up hidden treasures,than the time i consumed for the main plot but i don't complain.

S4 had the best mini-games in order to make-up for the lack of main plot

[sticky-runes]

What a warm opening post...

Don't forget that they at least bought and played the game (whatever opinion they might have), so there would not have been a fifth part without them.

Better blame the ones who never played Suikoden, which would also guarantee that nobody in this forum will be offended by your unique choice of words

And maybe if Suikoden 3 had a PAL release, more copies would have been sold and we could have had a better Suikoden 4.

Sure, Suikoden 4 had its flaws, I won't deny that.

But what have we had since S5? A couple of weird spinoff titles that had nothing to do with the original series, which was hardly going to appeal to new or old fans. Tierkreis turned out to be a generic fantasy with a bunch of good guys fighting a dark lord, which is kind of the thing that Suikoden would normally steer clear from.

S4 was set in the original world and stuck to the mythology of the original games, and it was about conflict between human nations instead of stopping some evil dark entity from taking over or destroying the world. We had allies who weren't all that good and enemies who weren't all that bad. The right content was there, just not as fleshed out as the other games in the main series.

I see people getting angry about not having a Suikoden 6 and making a scapegoat of Suikoden 4, and that seems like a really cuntish thing to do.

[Wolkendrache]

Unfortunately most of the criticism is eligible. S4 had good ideas, but bad implementation. I love the sea, I love sailing, but unfortunately it was implemented so poorly, that I couldn’t wait to go ashore, which is a bad thing if over 90% of the world map is water.

It's really hard to find something in which S4 stands out:
- searching for materials to get the best equipment (some baldur’s gate nostalgia came up)
- less overall elaborated game, and yet the most elaborated and unique falcon rune user (plus sexiest despite tramp stamp)
- best hero weapon: S1 broomstick, S2 patrolman’s weapon, S5 another stupid blunt weapon
- unique war battle system, a matter of preference, but at least unique

Suikoden games are about 1. friendship/loyalty, 2. mercy/conviction/recruit, 3. protection, 4. tragedy/fate, 5. justice.
Now, people enter a game store and buy a game about 1. ego, 2. kill with headshots from the back, 3. extinction, 4. good vs evil, 5. personal fame, the exact opposite.
To me, these are the scapegoates, although I know there are several reasons. Murayama mentioned some in an interview which was placed in the Future Suikoden News section recently.

[Pyriel]

Well, the series always had so-so sales at best, regardless of how wide releases were. In that regard, it's like a child born with a chronic, but manageable disease. Somewhere around the fourth installment is where it got pancreatic cancer, and didn't realize until it was diagnosed some time later that its chances of living more than another 5-10 years after 4 were slim at best.

That's a really terrible analogy, huh? At any rate, there were myriad causes for the end of the main series, and general decline of the brand. Suikoden IV is just where a lot of the bad decisions and circumstances coalesced into a terrible result that you couldn't help but notice.

Personally, I'll always have a bit of a soft spot for 4 in my head because during the time I spent hacking it, I learned the hard way to be wary of sharing partially completed work with other hackers.

[Antimatzist]

What happened back then? What did you hack in IV?

[Pyriel]

Well, this: http://www.herrvillain.com/codebreaker/suikoden4/

Not to derail too much, but Suikoden IV did that overlay/module file thing like most Suikoden games, except packed, and I couldn't identify the compression with the tools I had at the time. As a substitute, I had made debugging codes that would dump sections of memory to the save file, but I was getting tired of having to work in smallish chunks and only being able to pull dumps at a point when I could save. So I hijacked the memory card routines to enable me to write files at will by pressing a particular button combination. In theory. The memory card write function kept returning an error condition that may not have even been documented in the official developer's kit, and I didn't have access to it anyway. Much later I discovered it was down to the way the game handled the I/O hardware.

I was chatting with a friend on MSN while packing for a business trip. I told him what I was trying to do, and lamented the fact that I would have to lay it aside until I got back a few weeks later. In the interim, he took what I'd told him to one of the "official" hackers for the PS2 devices, and that guy turned out almost exactly the same procedure as me. It turned out what I had done would work on about 50%-60% of games that didn't get tricky with I/O handling, and the remainder would require special handling, or would simply not work due to the available space. I just hadn't bothered porting it to another game yet because I was so focused on Suikoden IV. When I got back my buddy had coyly posted the framework for it in several places with no mention that it wasn't his idea or work. I felt like he'd offered to mail my manuscript, since he was going to the post office anyway, and had scribbled his own name on the work the minute I turned my back.

Basically, it's not something you guys would be likely to use, but it had a lot of potential for people who wanted to pull memory dumps on about 2,000-2,500 other titles without needing modified hardware.

[eldrasidar]

I would say the ultimate lesson of 4 was that if it's not possible to half-ass an RPG and make money. I think that the ever-increasing costs of making an RPG makes it hard for a company to green light any RPG they don't see as guaranteed profit. Given that Suikoden 4 sold less than 3, and then 5 sold even less than that, it's pretty easy to get why Konami hasn't chosen to revive the series for another console installment, and you can make the argument that 4 was the death knell, being so bad that even afterwards gamers had lost faith in the series and didn't return.

Simply put though, Suikoden has always had a small market that has never broken 1 million units sold worldwide, mostly because of failed marketing. Things like Konami failing to produce enough copies of Suikoden 2, or failing to get Suikoden 3 released in Europe, not to mention capitalizing on the generally great reviews the series got and doing more to advertise it. I mean, I never even knew the series existed until a random girl in my local game store said, "Hey you like RPG's, you should try this game," and handed me a copy of Suikoden 3. If that random encounter had never occurred a decade ago, I'd probably never have picked up single Suikoden title. Failing to market what has been a mostly quality series is what killed Suikoden.

[Antimatzist]

I would say the ultimate lesson of 4 was that if it's not possible to half-ass an RPG and make money. I think that the ever-increasing costs of making an RPG makes it hard for a company to green light any RPG they don't see as guaranteed profit. Given that Suikoden 4 sold less than 3, and then 5 sold even less than that, it's pretty easy to get why Konami hasn't chosen to revive the series for another console installment, and you can make the argument that 4 was the death knell, being so bad that even afterwards gamers had lost faith in the series and didn't return.

Then you could argue that IV sold more altogether, because III wasn't released in EU. The Japanese sales were only slightly worse, I can't find data in American sales.

Simply put though, Suikoden has always had a small market that has never broken 1 million units sold worldwide, mostly because of failed marketing. Things like Konami failing to produce enough copies of Suikoden 2, or failing to get Suikoden 3 released in Europe, not to mention capitalizing on the generally great reviews the series got and doing more to advertise it. I mean, I never even knew the series existed until a random girl in my local game store said, "Hey you like RPG's, you should try this game," and handed me a copy of Suikoden 3. If that random encounter had never occurred a decade ago, I'd probably never have picked up single Suikoden title. Failing to market what has been a mostly quality series is what killed Suikoden.

Bravely Default recently sold its millionth copy worldwide and SE was initially reluctant to release it outside of Japan! Only because Nintendo published it, it became a million seller. This could happen for a GOOD handheld Suikoden as well - if they'd just try. I seriously hope that Bravely Default (even though the game's not that good) will inspire more Japanese game companies to make RPGs again and release them over here.

[eldrasidar]

according to vgchartz.com, worldwide sales of suikoden 3, even without an EU release, were highest of the entire suikoden series. Afterwards sales regressed and ultimately collapsed.