I’ve been playing bits and pieces of Suikoden IV every night, and I’m amazed at how terrible of a game it really is. I would say I remember this happening when I initially tried playing it, but I honestly don’t. Here I’m going to write down some of the complaints I have so far.

#1: The Hero has no personality, or background. He’s just there at the start to fill as your proxy.

The hero of Suikoden games (except for 3) is always silent. However Suikoden IV is the only game where the silence feels like a detriment. Normally the other games do a good job at showing you the protagonist reactions or how other characters interact with him. IV though, there’s none of that. He feels pretty emotionless and just kind of accepts things. The choices you’re given don’t allow you to give him much character either (at least so far)

#2: Fuck the enemy encounters

Okay, to explain how annoying enemies are, I have to explain some other stuff first.

A lot of the early game, so far, has been spent sailing on this boat in this WIIIIDE ocean. To give you an idea of how wide, imagine it taking you a solid 5 minutes to get from one place you’re at to another. If that doesn’t sound like much, keep in mind there’s almost nothing in modern games that takes a person 5 minutes. You could get from one end of a map in Fallout 4 to the other in that time if you booked it (heck even less I think)

That alone wouldn’t be so bad, but ontop of that 5 minutes it takes you (keep in mind I haven’t timed this) imagine random encounters every 15 seconds or so the whole way. Also imagine that these random encounters are not only pretty rough but after a certain level fail to provide worthwhile exp. So imagine you’re at a fairly high level, can’t get exp, and are forced into these somewhat harder than they should be battles every 15 seconds of a 5 minute boat trip

If that doesn’t sound annoying yet, well let me just tell you of something that happened in my game.

I went to this island to recruit some guy for my army (that took me about 5 minutes to get there and another 5 to get back to where i was supposed to be) Then the plot said I needed to go to that very same island and recruit another character there. So imagine I’ve already spent close to half an hour just travelling.. Not a very fun thing (especially when I’m already playing this in small bursts)

#3: Plot?
In other Suikoden games, it doesn’t take much to get caught up on what’s going on. 4 I have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Sometimes that can be an appealing thing, but with the first 2 complaints, it’s more like “why am I even bothering with this game?” At which point, I can’t even really give a good answer other than I need to finish it to feel like I’ve experienced all of Suikoden