After Years Of Waiting, Suikoden Finally Gets The HD Glow-Up It Deserves
Almost every major Japanese publisher had to have a big RPG franchise in the PS1 era. Square Soft had Final Fantasy. Enix had Dragon Quest. Capcom had Breath of Fire. Bandai Namco had Tales. And so, Konami made Suikoden. Its innovation was trading a set party of heroes for a cast of 108 total characters who could be recruited on your adventure. Combined with a world of rune-based magic and political intrigue, Suikoden I and II managed to carve out a unique lane in a crowded field, and now both games have finally been updated with modern bells and whistles for current platforms.
I've played around a bit with the Suikoden I & II HD Remaster collection, which technically includes the much longer subtitle 'Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars,' and am pleased to report two main takeaways. First, these JRPGs still have the juice, especially Suikoden II. The snappy turn-based combat and open-ended collect-em-all-fest holds up 30 years later, with decent storytelling and even better character writing.
Second, both games have survived the journey from low-resolution 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9 HD mostly intact and looking better than ever, especially in Suikoden II. The character sprites remain perfectly pixelated-looking without any smoothed-over upscaling effects or muddy silhouettes. The backgrounds, never a series highlight, look crisp and get the job done. The tiling of its top-down world can feel a bit bland and repetitive, but certain scenes with more detailed shadows and lighting really pop. Most importantly, the battles still look and feel great, at least to the eyes of someone who grew up with these games back in the '90s. Things are less great in Suikoden I where some environments look weirdly flat and empty.
For those unfamiliar, Suikoden I (1995) follows military nepo-baby Tir who comes into possession of a magical relic that jumpstarts a rebellion against the empire he had previously pledged to serve. Suikoden II (1998) follows childhood friends Riou, Jowy, and Nanami after a false-flag attack by their military unit leads them to be branded as traitors amid an invasion by a neighboring kingdom. The first game is about 20 hours long and focuses mainly on recruiting characters to aid you in your fight against the evil Scarlet Moon Empire, while the second is longer, much more narratively dense, and a bit more morally grey and complex.
Both are propelled along by random encounters and boss fights, toil made much better than in some other games thanks to Suikoden's old-school but flashy turn-based formula and the fact that you're always finding new characters with unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses to fight alongside. Instead of just three or four characters, you get to fight with six, with front and back rows as well as synergistic combo attacks adding to the strategy. None of it felt revolutionary at the time like the multi-cam cinematic quality of Final Fantasy VII battles, but it's crunchy and well-balanced as far as conventional turn-based combat goes.
So what improvements and new quality-of-life features does the Suikoden I & II HD Remaster collection bring to the party? Aside from the graphical overhaul and updated script (the original localized versions were far from perfect), there are standard additions like auto-saves and a menu log that keeps a record of what people have told you. There's no mini-map but you can sprint from the start now. You can speed up fights to auto-battle through them quickly, though weirdly the music speeds up during this as well. Plus there are optional difficulty modes now. The ability to turn off timed events is coming in a day-one update (certain characters can't be recruited if the in-game clock ticks past a certain point).
It's unfortunate that you can't speed up the game outside of battle, and it feels like a missed opportunity not to have the option to turn on the game's old graphics and aspect ratio for enthusiasts who want to revisit the original experience on PS1. The inventory systems in both games are also still a pain (though not nearly as clunky as how they were left in the recent Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake). An in-game gallery, museum, or other historical feature would have been a nice bonus as well, especially for the $50 price tag. The bar keeps rising for modern remasters of all-time classics, and it certainly feels like there was room for Suikoden I & II HD Remaster to be a more comprehensive package.
It doesn't make any major missteps, though, which can't be said for every PS1 JRPG that gets an HD makeover. Suikoden I & II HD Remaster presents one good game and one excellent one (it's sacrilege to say but if you're short on time I think you should just play II) with everything a modern player needs to enjoy two genre classics (well, except for maybe an option to turn off random encounters). Konami has already announced an anime adaptation of Suikoden II and a new mobile spin-off called Star Leap that looks beautiful but has gacha microtransactions. If this burgeoning Suikoden renaissance is successful, though, maybe we'll finally get Suikoden VI, or at least Suikoden III as a PS2 classic on PlayStation 5.
.
For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
J-Pop Star Comes Clean on Claims She's Newest Musk Baby Mama
A Japanese performed dubbed the 'Empress of J-Pop' broke her silence Monday on rumors that she is a secret Elon Musk's baby mama. Ayumi Hamasaki denied the theory that she was one of the multiple women with whom Musk had fathered a child after an another baby mama told The New York Times that he had a child with a Japanese pop star. 'I've been keeping an eye on this, and I guess it's time for me to speak up. Elon Musk is not the father of [either of] my children,' Hamasaki wrote on her Instagram Story, according to Tokyo Weekender. Hamasaki, 46, has two sons with two different men, born in 2019 and 2021. The fathers' identities have not been publicly revealed. The rumors around the singer began to spread when MAGA author and influencer Ashley St. Clair—who gave birth to his 13th child, a son, last year—claimed that the billionaire had also told her that he had a child with a J-pop star. Musk has previously claimed that 'civilization is going to crumble' if people did not have children, stating that 'I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.' 'He made it seem like it was just his altruism and he generally believed these people should just have children,' St. Clair said. According to text messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Musk texted St. Clair in 2023 about a meeting he had with people he referred to as Japanese officials, saying that they wanted him to be a sperm donor for a high-profile woman. 'They want me to be a sperm donor. No romance or anything, just sperm,' Musk texted St. Clair, later telling her that he agreed to give his sperm to the unnamed woman. As social media users and J-Pop forums began speculating which Japanese star St. Clair could be referring to, Hamasaki quickly became the prime suspect. The singer admitted she could understand why this seemed like the 'sort of thing' she would do. 'Even my mom laughed when she heard the rumors, saying, 'This seems kind of Ayu-like,' and if I were someone else, I'd probably be saying 'Ayu is the pop star [St Clair] was talking about, right?' But it's just not true,' she said on Instagram. 'Setting aside my personal image, when my kids are old enough to start Googling things, I don't want them to run into the rumors and think they're true, so I'm firmly denying them,' the singer added. Hamasaki is the best-selling solo artist in Japan, having sold over 50 million albums. Her influence across Asia has earned her the title the 'Empress of Pop.' Musk's complicated family dynamics have long been in the spotlight. His first six children, the eldest of whom died as a baby, were with first wife Justine Wilson, and include transgender daughter Vivian Wilson, who has become a prominent public critic. He went on to have son X, now five, with Canadian musician Grimes, then two more children during an on-off relationship. But in July 2022, when the relationship with Grimes had apparently recently ended, he had twins with Neuralink executive Shivon Zillis. He then had two more children with Zillis, the latest born this year shortly after his son with St. Clair. On her end, St. Clair is currently in an ongoing custody battle with Musk over their son, Romulus, the MAGA influencer wanting full custody over their child. She officially announced the pair's secret child on X in February, asking for privacy from the media and to 'refrain from invasive reporting.' 'Five months ago, I welcomed a new baby into the world. Elon Musk is the father,' she wrote in a statement on X with the caption 'Alea Iacta Est,' meaning 'the die is cast.' In March, Musk also took to his app to claim that he had given St. Clair enough money to take care of their child, despite not knowing whether Romulus was his or not. 'I don't know if the child is mine or not, but am not against finding out. No court order is needed,' he wrote. 'Despite not knowing for sure, I have given Ashley $2.5M and am sending her $500k/year.' According to the Journal, the paternity test results from Labcorp revealed that Musk's 'Probability of Paternity' was 99.9999%.
Chicago Tribune
8 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
At this museum, no one will shush you, and you can touch the objects
LONDON (AP) — A museum is like an iceberg. Most of it is out of sight. Most big collections have only a fraction of their items on display, with the rest locked away in storage. But not at the new V&A East Storehouse, where London's Victoria and Albert Museum has opened up its storerooms for visitors to view — and in many cases touch — the items within. The 170,000-square-foot building, bigger than 30 basketball courts, holds more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. Wandering its huge, three-story collections hall feels like a trip to IKEA, but with treasures at every turn. The V&A is Britain's national museum of design, performance and applied arts, and the storehouse holds aisle after aisle of open shelves lined with everything from ancient Egyptian shoes to Roman pottery, ancient Indian sculptures, Japanese armor, Modernist furniture, a Piaggio scooter and a brightly painted garbage can from the Glastonbury Festival. 'It's 5,000 years of creativity,' said Kate Parsons, the museum's director of collection care and access. It took more than a year, and 379 truckloads, to move the objects from the museum's former storage facility in west London to the new site. In the museum's biggest innovation, anyone can book a one-on-one appointment with any object, from a Vivienne Westwood mohair sweater to a tiny Japanese netsuke figurine. Most of the items can even be handled, with exceptions for hazardous materials, such as Victorian wallpaper that contains arsenic. The Order an Object service offers 'a behind-the-scenes, very personal, close interaction' with the collection, Parsons said as she showed off one of the most requested items so far: a 1954 pink silk taffeta Balenciaga evening gown. Nearby in one of the study rooms were a Bob Mackie-designed military tunic worn by Elton John on his 1981 world tour and two silk kimonos laid out ready for a visit. Parsons said there has been 'a phenomenal response' from the public since the building opened at the end of May. Visitors have ranged from people seeking inspiration for their weddings to art students and 'someone last week who was using equipment to measure the thread count of an 1850 dress.' She says strangers who have come to view different objects often strike up conversations. 'It's just wonderful,' Parsons said. 'You never quite know. … We have this entirely new concept and of course we hope and we believe and we do audience research and we think that people are going to come. But until they actually did, and came through the doors, we didn't know.' The V&A's flagship museum in London's affluent South Kensington district, founded in the 1850s, is one of Britain's biggest tourist attractions. The Storehouse is across town in the Olympic Park, a post-industrial swath of east London that hosted the 2012 summer games. As part of post-Olympic regeneration, the area is now home to a new cultural quarter that includes arts and fashion colleges, a dance theater and another V&A branch, due to open next year. The Storehouse has hired dozens of young people recruited from the surrounding area, which includes some of London's most deprived districts. Designed by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, the firm behind New York's High Line park, the building has space to show off objects too big to have been displayed very often before, including a 17th-century Mughal colonnade from India, a 1930s modernist office designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and a Pablo Picasso-designed stage curtain for a 1924 ballet, some more than 30 feet high. Also on a monumental scale are large chunks of vanished buildings, including a gilded 15th-century ceiling from the Torrijos Palace in Spain and a slab of the concrete façade of Robin Hood Gardens, a demolished London housing estate. Not a hushed temple of art, this is a working facility. Conversation is encouraged and forklifts beep in the background. Workers are finishing the David Bowie Center, a home for the late London-born musician's archive of costumes, musical instruments, letters, lyrics and photos that is due to open at the Storehouse in September. One aim of the Storehouse is to expose the museum's inner workings, through displays delving into all aspects of the conservators' job – from the eternal battle against insects to the numbering system for museum contents — and a viewing gallery to watch staff at work. The increased openness comes as museums in the U.K. are under increasing scrutiny over the origins of their collections. They face pressure to return objects acquired in sometimes contested circumstances during the days of the British Empire Senior curator Georgia Haseldine said the V&A is adopting a policy of transparency, 'so that we can talk very openly about where things have come from, how they ended up in the V&A's collection, and also make sure that researchers, as well as local people and people visiting from all around the world, have free and equitable access to these objects. 'On average, museums have one to five percent of their collections on show,' she said. 'What we're doing here is saying, 'No, this whole collection belongs to all of us. This is a national collection and you should have access to it.' That is our fundamental principle.'
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
Mel B and Eddie Murphy's child, Angel, comes out as trans
Mel B and Eddie Murphy's kid just quietly came out as trans! It recently came to light that 18-year-old Angel Brown made a simple but meaningful change on Instagram with the addition of "him" as his preferred pronoun. It's unclear precisely when this update took place, though it was reportedly widely over the weekend. "It's a decision Angel made and Mel has been understanding, likewise Eddie," a source told The Daily Mail. "There was no big event to mark it. Angel just wanted it to be known what pronouns are now suitable." Despite the pronoun change making headlines just in time for Pride, Mel B was already speaking about Angel as her son back in May. An interview with Us Weekly featured her talking about co-parenting with Murphy and mentioning that Angel keeps "very much to himself." "He went to Japan last year with his girlfriend and just embraced the whole Japanese vibe," she added. Fittingly, Angel's Instagram is largely devoid of content, but does include two photos of him and his girlfriend, both posted this year. "My angel," he captioned one. "Couldn't wish for anyone else," she responded. See on Instagram
