Suikoden II PC vs PS1

[Raww Le Klueze]

So for some peculiar reason Konami made a PC version of Suikoden II that was only (as far as I know) released in China. Generally the same as the PS1 version just in Chinese, but with some graphical improvements so I took some comparative screenshots. Generally it's just crisper, clearer and less jagged, so it's kinda like an HD edition.

If there are any story differences then I am unaware of them by virtue of not understanding a word of Chinese.


Title screen, clearer, blends better with the background.


Jowy greets... I have no idea what my name ended up being.


Still the biggest badass in town.


Quite the hue difference.


He may have a clearer portrait but Tuta still looks like a girl.

I like it. Also runs on Win7 without having to muck with compability, though the intro movie didn't want to play and was just black unfortunately so no idea if it's also an improvement.

If Konami can't get Suikoden II on PSN then they should just slap their translation onto this and release it on Steam already, cause the file systems seem to correspond at least somewhat.

[Themadcow]

Looks great. I'm sure this would be a nice little earner for Konami if the port is pretty much the PS1 game with nicer graphics. If it's worth companies like xseed doing massive localization jobs on (quite frankly) minor titles then an easy job on a well respected title should sell well?

[Xelinis]

The font and all the portraits look crisp, but the sprites themselves look interpolated with one of the higher-quality scaling algorithms (HQ2x possibly). Not necessarily a bad thing, just an observation.

How does the game look in motion?

[Raww Le Klueze]

Looks fluid. The unites seem to have been sped up as well from what I remember but that could be a product of my PC being overspecced for the game.

EDIT: Maybe not, while Buddy Attack appears to be 2-3 seconds faster than the PS1 version I didn't perceive any increase in the circus trio's unite.

As an added bonus, I'll bet you anything that cat is saying "Sonya..."

And nice to see the Matilda border is as closely guarded as ever. Doesn't bode well for the other glitches.

[Pyriel]

I can take or leave the scaled and smoothed character sprites, and it looks like they didn't touch the background elements at all. Still, visually, what they did is a pretty significant improvement.

[Raww Le Klueze]

Oh hey, got the movies working. Too bad they appear to be the exact same as the PS1 versions so they're pretty grainy, was hoping they'd have gone back to the raw files for those.

And... I don't think that shadow is there when you fight the Doublehead in the PS version...? It's not on any youtube vid I can find at least, though could be emulator thing so not sure. Weird thing to add though.

[Antimatzist]

I don't remember that shadow either and yeah, strange thing to add.

[Piisuke]

Yeah, I do not remember that shadow either. I do like the crispness.

[AlOnZo]

I'm assuming it's the same as the PSP version. I remember that looking smooth and the Buddy Attack being rather fast. Diagonal running was a nice feature also.

[Raww Le Klueze]

You'd be assuming wrong.

[Omnigamer]

Reviving this in the hope of finding some way of getting it to work. I have a copy but it doesn't seem to run at all (Win8, x64). Did you do anything special to get it to behave on your machine?

[Raww Le Klueze]

Nope, but I have Win 7. Did have to put it in compatibility mode for the movies to work though.

[Omnigamer]

Compatibility mode/administrator mode don't appear to help. Hmm. I will try to reinstall it and see what happens from there. At present the launcher won't open and the game executable doesn't start up at all.

[BrucePrintscreen]

This looks very beautiful. Can you extract the character portraits? They would be less pixelised than their PS counterpart in case we want to use them for something else.

[Pyriel]

If what he says about the file makeup is true, and they used similar file structures and the same compression, it wouldn't be too hard. Or you could just do what the rippers do, and take screenshots.