The Story of Suikoden

It's 1996, and the PlayStation is just starting to take over the game industry. It has many genres covered: racing, fighting, action, sports, puzzles, train-conducting, deep-sea diving, fire-fighting, and so forth. But what about RPGs?

Well, there's one excellent game for role-playing fans on Sony's new system. No, it's not Final Fantasy VII, which loomed large in its hype but wouldn't arrive until the following year. The first notable RPG on the PlayStation is Suikoden, an ambitious experiment from Konami—and the start of something big.

Suikoden began before the PlayStation in several ways. Writer-director Yoshitaka Murayama and artist-designer Junko Kawano started an RPG project for a home console Konami developed internally around 1993, but both the console and the RPG were canceled before long. When the PlayStation emerged, Konami offered them another shot at an RPG, and that became Genso Suikoden (shortened to Suikoden in the West). Yet its origins reach further back, as Suikoden was inspired by The Water Margin, a classic of Chinese literature dated to either the 13th or 16th century, depending on which historian you ask. It tells of 108 heroes, outlaws, political dissidents, social misfits, and others who resist an oppressive government.

The Water Margin was not unknown in the West. English-speaking audiences might have been most familiar with All Men Are Brothers, Pearl S. Buck's 1933 translation of the story. Suikoden wasn't even the first video game to adapt to the ancient tale. KOEI's Bandit Kings of Ancient China strategy games and Data East's Dark Legend fighter predate Konami's RPG, just to name two. Yet looking at centuries-old novels was only the start of Suikoden's innovations.

The protagonist of Suikoden is like many a young RPG hero: taciturn, named at the player's discretion, and unsuspecting of the destiny before him. Yet he's also the son of a respected general in the Scarlet Moon Empire and struggling to match his father's legacy. Accompanied by bodyguards, his neurotic nanny Gremio, and his slightly mysterious childhood friend Ted (yes, just Ted), our hero (“Tir” in official materials) sets out on low-level missions for the Imperial Army, and it's soon apparent that the empire is sliding into tyranny and oppression. The general's son gradually drifts into the rebellion: he's declared a renegade, gifted with an ancient rune, and forced to fight his former comrades and his father, who is in turn honor-bound to defend the increasingly corrupt leaders.

Such a storyline could easily be mollified, but Suikoden rarely takes the easy road. The revolution is a vicious, costly struggle that tears apart an empire as well as the hero's family, and the storyline isn't afraid to serve up tragedy with a sure hand. Suikoden has an uncommon knack for building memorable characters in short order, be they minor recruits or pivotal leaders. It was remarkable in a field where the majority of games, role-playing or not, relied on cliches and simplicity, such that GameFan magazine's Casey “Takuhi” Loe said in a February 1996 preview of Suikoden: “Characters grow, mature, change, and even die…and, in a rare twist, you, the player, actually care.”

It's all the more impressive that Suikoden has a cast of 108 characters to recruit for the sake of rebellion and prophecy. Not all of them can be controlled in battles, of course, but the hero's castle is steadily expanding with new members: soldiers, mercenaries, sailors, gamblers, brigands, merchants, blacksmiths, elevator operators, laundry workers, artists, assorted scoundrels, enigmatic assassins, dog-people, dragon-riders, former imperials you decided to spare, a blatant Don Quixote homage, and a kid who stands at the entrance and welcomes visitors. He's just happy to be part of the team.

All of them have reasons for joining, from free spirits who are thrown in with your army just for the heck of it to at least one general who never quite stops hating you. Finding all of them is far more daunting than the game's central challenge, as many need side quests completed, and a few require timing of the strategy-guide sort. It's still an RPG, after all.

Gathering up all the characters is optional, but it leads to the game's best ending. Suikoden seems to relish making players think they have less freedom than they do. The hero's decisions appear limited at first, as the plot moves forward no matter how he responds. To be fair, the game wouldn't go very far if you were jailed immediately for mouthing off to the emperor.

Yet the hero has the choice to pardon or execute some defeated foes, and it's ultimately up to the player as to how many Stars of Destiny are recruited. Suikoden's illusory choices mask at least one major decision: if you level up a certain character enough, he'll win a duel that the story all but demands he lose.

The enormous cast also expands Suikoden as an RPG. Your party holds six members at a time, yet there's a constant supply of new faces to try out in battle, with abilities varying with their magic runes and team-up attacks. Enemy encounters are random but very rapid by 1990s RPG standards, and they're rarely a detriment to exploring for more characters. Regular RPG combat isn't the game's lone showpiece, either, as there are strategic clashes with armies (where characters can randomly die) and one-on-one duels that follow the harsh rules of rocks, papers, and scissors.

Suikoden does all of this in half the time of a typical RPG. The Dragon Quests, Final Fantasies, and other major RPGs of this era prepped audiences for quests at least 30 hours long. If one barrels through the story and skips numerous side characters, Suikoden might be over in 15 hours—short enough to finish during Christmas vacation in the winter of 1996. Yet those are memorable hours, and Suikoden beckons players back to find all of the 108 Stars of Destiny. Preferably with a guide.

Of course, Suikoden didn't catch the eye like PlayStation, Saturn, or Nintendo 64 games made with polygons and 3D environments. Suikoden is very much in the 2D tradition, and a casual observer might easily mistake it for a Super NES title. The characters have proportions more realistic than the giant-headed populations of many earlier-era RPGs, but the game breaks into detail at random: characters might simplistically jump in surprise in major scenes, while a negligible shot of them drinking tea is fluidly animated. The soundtrack, however, is a marvelous work from Konami's composers (including Miki Higashino and Tappy Iwase), and there's a memorable sketchiness to Kawano's character art.

A cynic would note that Suikoden had few rivals for the spotlight in late 1996. It arrived at the end of a brief RPG drought for genre fans outside of Japan: the 16-bit era of RPGs had closed in the West by the middle of 1996 with Super Mario RPG and Lufia 2, the Sega Saturn had a slim selection of role-playing titles, and they were equally scarce on the PlayStation. Sony passed on localizing G-Craft's visually impressive but short strategy RPG Arc the Lad, and they took their time translating Camelot's drudgerous Beyond the Beyond. PlayStation action RPGs like Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and King's Field didn't scratch quite the same menu-driven itch as Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue had on 16-bit systems just a year before.

Suikoden merely had to be a decent RPG at the time, but it went well past that. Even with the questionable art of its American cover (destined to become notorious itself), Suikoden sold well. It stayed with players. It won a following. It received Japan-only Saturn and Windows ports. And even when Final Fantasy VII arrived in 1997, with its cinematic push and inescapable marketing, fans were up for debating whether Suikoden was the better RPG.

So Suikoden was a deserved success, at least enough for Konami to approve a sequel. First released in 1998 for the PlayStation in Japan, Suikoden II stuck closely to the original in both gameplay and pacing. It opens in the nearby nation of Highland, where the hero (“Riou” in canon) and his childhood friend Jowy find their army division wiped out in a scheme concocted by their leaders. Hunted by their nation, they receive a mystical Rune of the Beginning and soon set on different paths: Jowy returns to the Highland forces and rises through the ranks, while the hero mounts a resistance and recruits his own 108 Stars of Destiny. While the cast brings back some faces from the original, including the rebels-turned-mercenaries Viktor and Flik, it's also full of new characters, and artist Fumi Ishikawa takes over design duties.

If the original Suikoden is about open rebellion, the sequel takes a more nuanced view of it. Similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, it sees two friends divided by their methods of changing a corrupt society: the hero by directly attacking it and Jowy by reforming it from within. It's full of gray morality, and even the game's chief antagonist, the utterly psychopathic Highland prince Luca Blight, has some explanation for his monstrous nature.

In between the well-executed story beats, Suikoden II expands everything that made the original memorable. Battles are still smooth affairs with six individual members and plenty of new infusions, duels are still quick and dramatic, and open-field warfare has a more strategic grid-based approach. There's a castle to build and a huge lineup of characters to recruit with even more diversions, including a cooking contest, a scruffy Kindaichi/Columbo detective who digs up dirt on other characters, and the chance to recruit the hero of the original Suikoden. Some characters are tougher to find this time around, and the game's best ending masks its requirements well, coming down to the player's split-second choice of dialogue.

It's an even stronger game overall than the first Suikoden. The translation has some rough patches (due to Konami providing the localizers confusing script assets), but there's no diluting the force of the game's best moments, whether it's a sudden betrayal or a deliberately drawn-out battle that slyly puts the game's biggest boss fight hours before the storyline ends.

Suikoden II faced tougher competition than the original had, at least in North America. Final Fantasy VIII, Grandia, Thousand Arms, and even the launch of the Dreamcast all took attention from Konami's RPG in the fall of 1999. Positive reviews and online fans gradually turned it into a sleeper hit and an oft-praised classic, one that commanded high secondhand prices well before retro-game collecting itself was absurdly expensive.

Yet Suikoden II was profitable in Japan, and Konami deemed it worthy of spin-offs. The first was the two-volume Suikogaiden visual novel line, released for the PlayStation in 2000 and 2001—in Japan only, that is. The games bridge the gap between Suikoden II and III, following the secret agent Nash as he travels Harmonia and the adjoining Grasslands region. There was no official release in the West, though a fan translation emerged in 2013. Suikoden Card Stories for the Game Boy Advance also stuck to the Japanese market only as it recreated the battles of Suikoden II through a card-based combat system.

These were preludes to Suikoden III, released in 2002 in Japan and North America. It once again moves to a new section of the world, the Grasslands, and opens some 15 years after Suikoden II—long enough after and far enough away that most of the characters are new. This time, players get three leads: Hugo is a young warrior of the local clans, Chris Lightfellow is the celebrated knight captain of the mercantile nation of Zexen, and Geddoe is the laconic leader of a mercenary band. The three of them gather allies amid a covertly orchestrated war, with the enigmatic Flame Champion offering possible salvation in the conflict. Eventually, they'll come together while building a base and gathering 108 unique followers.

It's as ambitious as its predecessors, but Suikoden III didn't land as surely. The 3D graphics are average for early PlayStation 2 games, and its storytelling is more stilted than earlier games' breezy 2D, sprite-based presentation. The battle system, where players now command pairs of characters instead of individual party members, feels limited, and the large-scale field clashes lack drama. The earlier games distinguished themselves through excellent pacing, but Suikoden III takes time backtracking and repeating plot points, all of which go slower in 3D environments. Some fans even found the leads uninteresting, though nobody said an unkind word for the veteran duck soldier named Sergeant Joe.

Even so, Suikoden III had its predecessors' strengths in mind: the large and likable supporting cast buoys the protagonists, and the game bends and subverts cliches at key points, even revealing its villain to be a seemingly benevolent character from the previous games.

Oddly, Suikoden III serves its most memorable stories on the side. The player's base of operations is built by a disgraced young noble named Thomas and his ragtag companions in a trimmed-down subplot, and the villain's true intentions are revealed in flashback if all 108 Stars of Destiny assemble.

Suikoden III doesn't feel much like a finale for the series, but it was still a sendoff in one way. While Yoshitaka Murayama directed and scripted much of the game, he departed Konami before it finished development, and, per corporate policy, the company removed his name from the credits. Murayama would go on to write, produce, and direct the somewhat obscure 10,000 Bullets for Taito (who would release it in Japan and Europe but not North America), yet he wouldn't return to the series—at least not under the Suikoden name.

Suikoden III did well enough for another round, and Konami looked to series veteran Junko Kawano. In her time away from Suikoden, she had written and directed the compelling adventure game Shadow of Destiny, and it fell to her to script and produce Suikoden IV. Declining another semi-direct sequel, Kawano and the rest of the staff opted for a prequel.

Set some 150 years before the first Suikoden, the fourth outing follows a silent hero and his friend Snowe through a conspiracy of pirates, naval warfare, and ancient Runes. Amid the divided loyalties and inevitable stabs in the back, the game gives new history to some characters in previous titles, including the Silverberg tactician family and Suikoden's mysterious Ted. Once again, don't let the name fool you.

Reception was divided, however. Suikoden IV's choice of a maritime setting led to its biggest problem: players sailing on an agonizingly slow ship to get anywhere. The game's first few hours drag as a result, and the storyline itself takes just as long to pick up. The player's party is reduced to four members (albeit with direct control over each of them), but duels are retained, while the larger clashes can be waged by ships on the high seas. With limited connections to the original games, it all feels less important in the overall series.

Suikoden IV is still true to its name, as the now-standard 108 recruitable characters are appealing, the storyline serves up some twists, and Snowe's arc is interesting enough to suggest that he should have been the protagonist. The game's woeful sailing sequences are largely irrelevant once Viki, the recurring teleport specialist, shows up, though a lot of players didn't stick around long enough for that.

Despite such mixed reaction, Konami deemed Suikoden IV worthy of a spin-off. Suikoden Tactics bookends it, covering events before and after Suikoden IV as it tracks a young man surviving a clash of powerful Rune weapons in the Kooluk Empire. Battles now take place on grids and equipping runes to characters provides much of the strategy behind the scenes. With no tedious sailing sequences, Tactics earned a better welcome than Suikoden IV, though it still feels largely detached from the first three games.

The Suikoden series continued to put up decent numbers despite its ups and downs, and Konami commissioned a fifth major title from a new source. Suikoden V did not involve Murayama (who would be scripting Tensho Gakuen Gekkoroku for Asmik Ace) and saw only a “special thanks” for Kawano (who would go on to write and design the adventure games Time Hollow and Zack & Ombra). Instead, newcomer director Takahiro Sakiyama and some Konami staffers worked with developers from Hudson Soft (which Konami would later buy) on this new Suikoden.

Again, Konami went with a prequel, though one set only eight years before the first Suikoden, and again, it's in a different part of the world: the nation of Falena. Players control the prince of the land threatened by squabbling noble houses, the queen's increasingly harsh sense of justice, and the ancient Runes behind it all. War breaks out, of course, and once again, there are 108 characters to rally in the prince's quest to reclaim his throne.

If Suikoden III and IV neglect the first two games' commitment to quick pacing, Suikoden V openly flouts it with a story that takes a good eight to ten hours before the main conflict kicks off. That said, it offers strong characters as well as some daring plot twists and a caustic, anti-aristocratic theme. The battles carry forward the series traditions of never bogging down the player, seeing the return of a full, six-member party. The game's load times are a sticking point for some, however, and an attempt at making its dungeons more complex also makes them more frustrating.

If had pleased many series fans, Suikoden V wouldn't have done the same for Konami's upper ranks. The PlayStation 2 was a busy place for RPGs in 2006, and Suikoden V's numbers were below those of its predecessors.

So Konami meted out the usual punishment for a series that couldn't pull its weight on consoles: they banished Suikoden to handhelds.

Suikoden Tierkreis for the Nintendo DS is, technically speaking, a spin-off of the main series. Released in 2008 in Japan and 2009 elsewhere, it's set in a parallel world where a player-named hero gathers an army of 108 characters strong to combat the secretive cult of the One King, and its callbacks to previous games in the series are very few. The player's party has just four characters at a time, though the collecting aspect gets a boost from players connecting DS systems to trade characters like Pokémon.

Perhaps Tierkreis isn't a terrible RPG by most metrics. Yet, it was doomed to be a disappointment for longtime Suikoden fans. The storyline has little political bite in its revelations, and there's a small sense of building a community. What's more, the DS saw a lot of RPGs from popular series such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Tales alongside many original creations—and even a few series, like Valkyrie Profile and Blue Dragon, that had been relegated to handheld games just as Suikoden had. Even a full-blown Suikoden would have trouble standing out, and Tierkreis just wasn't the complete package fans wanted.

The DS was not the only handheld in town, though, and Konami didn't neglect the PSP. At first, they re-issued Suikoden and Suikoden II in one slightly enhanced bundle in 2006, meeting unimpressive sales. After Tierkreis didn't ignite the best-seller charts on the DS, Konami went back to Sony's handheld with Genso Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki.

Another alternate-dimension finagling, Suikoden's big PSP outing follows a young warrior and his friends as they're tossed to different periods. That provides the game's biggest change to the formula, as you're now gathering up those 108 Stars of Destiny at key points in three centuries. This is coupled with a less-welcome twist, as only 18 or so characters battle in your six-member party, while the rest are just supporting cast members who broaden the player's base.

While Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki looks and plays closer to Suikoden's PS2 outings, it would be the end of the series. Konami released it only in Japan (an English fan translation appeared in 2021), and it didn't sell well enough to earn a sequel. The PSP gave way to Sony's shorter-lived Vita, and while the Nintendo 3DS lasted longer, Konami would not grant either system any Suikoden. The series went into that unfortunate hibernation that frequently overtakes promising middleweight RPG lines.

If Konami wouldn't step up, Suikoden's creators would. In 2020, Yoshitaka Murayama, Junko Kawano, and the staff of Rabbit & Bear Studios took up the trend of beloved series continuing through Kickstarter-backed spiritual sequels. It had led to the poorly received Mighty No. 9 and the well-received Bloodstained series, and now it was Suikoden's turn.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is unmistakably Suikoden. Drawing key inspiration from the first two games, it's a sprite-based RPG that sees the bonds of friends and nations tested by war. Here it's the Galdean imperial officer Seign and the villager Nowa who find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict, with the forest clan of the Guardians and the warrior Marisa in between. The battle system revolves around a six-member party with combination attacks and magic rune lenses, while there's a headquarters to build and a lineup of 108 characters to recruit. Previews for Eiyuden Chronicle have introduced the same variety of characters a Suikoden might boast, with warriors and mages alongside schoolkids and elder politicians.

During its three-plus years in development, Eiyuden Chronicle bridged the gap with a prequel. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is a small-scale story set in a remote town, where adventurer CJ disrupts everything and gradually wrangles kangaroo mercenary Garoo and local sorceress-mayor Isha into her treasure hunts. It's an action game rather than an RPG, with frequent backtracking and only the three main heroes playable. Despite that, Rising adopts the Suikoden model of community building, as CJ and her friends are constantly on mini-quests to help merchants expand their shops and townsfolk resolve their problems.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes arrives this April amid tragic news: Murayama passed away on February 6 after an extended illness. He leaves behind an impressive legacy and inspiration for any creator who ventures beyond genre confines. Suikoden games routinely garner praise. Sometimes, it's in casual social media mentions, and sometimes, it's from game industry names like Warren Spector, who credits the first Suikoden with partly inspiring the forking plots of the cyberpunk first-person shooter Deus Ex. It's also notable that Konami, despite distancing itself from much of its legacy in recent years, hasn't forgotten the series entirely. Not coincidentally, they announced (but haven't yet delivered) a remastered collection of the first two Suikoden games while Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes was in development.

What is it that makes Suikoden important? It's not just the tradition of giving players more than other games with its hundred-plus cast and varying battle systems. It's that the series does it well. The best Suikodens hit harder and dig deeper than countless other titles, then and now, that attempt sweeping drama or compelling world-building. Everything in them, from the expanding base to the immense character lineup, builds a connection that's hard to set aside. If Eiyuden Chronicle can recapture that, it may well be the start of another major name in RPGs, just as Suikoden was nearly thirty years ago.