Mazakiel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 904
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I've taken a chance with this one, actually, and after III (which was bad) and IV (which I couldn't bother to get too deeply in as bad as it was) it was taking a pretty big chance. But, the game's actually surprised me by being overall pretty good so far. Granted, I'm not too deeply into it yet, roughly 10 hours or so if my memory is correct, but what's there is good.
They've changed the battle systems yet again, this time we have both land and naval warfare. Both are real time, but movement speed of the units is rather slow in the battles I've had so far, so it's overall pretty relaxed. I still prefer turn-based for these types of things, and I think II's system was the best, but it's better by far than III's. IV I only fought a few battles in, but nothing was compelling or interesting enough about it for me to bother to remember much about that. So, in comparison to the last two, it's a superior system. The dueling system remains pretty much untouched , though there's a timer to make your decision on what move to make based on the dialogue, which I believe is new. However, the duel I had flowed well and was entertaining to watch, although it was on the easy side. But, as it was the first one and therefore essentially a tutorial, I didn't expect that difficult a battle.
Party battles are pretty standard fare, though they've added formations you can use that add to defense, attack, etc., as well as giving you various options for formation attacks that vary from giving you first strike to letting you hit every enemy on screen. You can only use one formation attack during a battle though, from what I've experienced. The skill system from III is back, but different in that you can only have two skills equipped at once. Some characters have their signature skills permanently in a skill slot, and so only have one slot that you can choose yourself. I'd prefer a little more flexibility with the skill system, like even one extra slot, but from what I'm led to understand, two's all you get.
The plot so far is predictable in some parts, while throwing some good twists in it for other parts. Overall, I'd rate it pretty good so far. Plot is advanced from a combination of standard text dialogue in some parts, with other scenes using voice acting. As usual, with the majority of the voices being pretty well handled/cast, they throw in one annoying voice that just makes me roll my eyes. Overall, especially considering some of the utterly awful stuff that is out there (Magna Carta, I think it was) it's pretty good. It's no Shadow Hearts III though.
Graphics are good...well, sorta. Half the time, at least. When the camera zooms in for the cut scenes with the voice acting, and so actually uses some angles that show off the graphics well, they're very nice. When in towns/dungeons though, you're either so zoomed out that it's hard to see much detail on the characters. If you zoom in as close as you can to see the characters better, it's too close for my tastes to see the environment and explore. That also means that alot of the time, when a text dialogue scene occurs, you're not as zoomed in as you'd like alot. The button to zoom in seems to be disabled during those cut scenes.
Also, I've seen some screen shots that really make the graphics look bad. They don't do the game justice at all, they really do look better up on a tv screen.
So, I'll end my rambling now. Overall, the game's a purchase I'm very satisfied with. No Shadow Hearts, but as far as I'm concerned, it's hard to beat that series. It does come pretty close though, and puts Suikoden back on track as being one of the best series of RPGs on the consoles. Hopefully they can keep that going for VI.
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