The full title is Genso Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki, which has something to do with time spun over a hundred years or something like that. Sounds more impressive than it really is, seriously. If I hadn’t played Shining Blade already, this would be my blah-est game of the year. I’ve had a pretty good 2013, all things considered, but I knew I couldn’t get away without a few clunkers.

Story so far

I’m only 12 hours in and just got a strategist, so things might change. My protagonist lives in a world where deadly monsters show up every 100 years and, of course, this is the 100th year. Finding the monsters too much for them to take on, they warp back into the past with the aid of a magic tree and get training from the heroes of 100 years ago on how to fight the monsters. It then turns out that a group, the Crimson Axe is manipulating these monsters with the aim of overthrowing the Aonian Empire. MC and his gang don’t trust either group, so they strike out on their own to defeat the Crimson Axe and their monsters and bring back peace to the world.

It looks nice on paper, as stories like this tend to do. But just like business is all about location, location, location, stories are all about execution, execution, execution. Once my party discovers how to travel into the past, their solution to every single problem is always “Travel back 100 years and get someone to help us fix it.” It makes them look weak and lame when they can’t stand on their own two feet and are constantly running back crying to the heroes of yesteryear. That leads to:

Problem 1: The older heroes are far more colorful, far more heroic and far, far more reliable than my gang of wet-behind-the-ears village kids. It’s not because they’re all at level 50; they just happen to be better characters. Cheerful, easy-going Troward is a much better main character than dull, goody two-shoes Trunks (not his name, but I should totally have named him that). Troward’s best friend Rolf is a much nicer fellow than cranky tsundere mage Myura. And so on it goes for the whole cast. The reason why the game immediately rules out importing any of those ancient heroes to the future is because that’s the first thing any sensible gamer would do. There’s simply no contest.

Problem 2: It’s unbelievable how anything and everything can be solved immediately and permanently by going back 100 years and planting a few trees. No fort of your own? Just go back and cry about it to Troward and he’ll make sure the fort is still around in your day. Village burned down? Go back and plant a magic tree in front of it and monsters won’t be able to attack it. It’s even more unbelievable that this solution doesn’t affect anything at all except the problem it set out to solve.

For example, killing a dangerous wyvern that had been terrorizing a region for 100 years should have a much bigger effect on the economy and development of the region than just making a bridge passable. Or consider the case of your party member who is the descendant of refugees from a village the Empire destroyed 100 years ago. Since you went back and stopped the destruction, shouldn’t she at least be from that village? Where does she come from now, then? Where are her parents? Even the in-game explanation of “Going back to the past creates a new universe” doesn’t work, because you directly affected her immediate family a mere hundred years ago.

Problem 3: Story progression is entirely dependent on the time travel gimmick. In other words, there is no other way to solve any problem but to go back into the past and change it. The game will give you the chance to suggest something else, but your party members will always shoot it down immediately, and you’ll have to time-travel anyway. It’s very close to Radiant Historia in that way, for those who’ve played it. Go forward a little bit, uh-oh roadblock, get out the White Chronicle, warp somewhere and fix it, and on and on and on until you finish the game.

Problem 4: The antagonists have a very weak presence. Things were exciting for the first hour of the game when it looked like the world was going to be overrun by evil, rampaging beasts. Sadly those beasts turned out to be the puppets of some very small-scale terrorists who have done very little so far. All right, they destroyed a city… off-screen. And they killed a few soldiers on a bridge. And they killed a few more soldiers… off-screen. And they beat up a few villagers… off-screen. I haven’t even seen them in the last 3 hours of play, yet they’re still being treated as a world-shaking threat. Sorry, not buying it.

Problem 5: Finally, something that’s not story-related. Also a really minor one, because sometimes I just feel like being petty. It’s about the ugliness of the in-game character portraits. In the movie scenes they look like this:

Outside of movies, they look like this:

A significant drop in quality. I suppose the real reason I’m shocked is because I only knew of this game from official trailers which used the anime footage every chance they got. I’ve gotten over it now, if only because quality anime footage costs so much that Konami stopped including it entirely after the 5 hour mark.

By the way, I know I just finished writing a fairly negative post about it, but it’s a little too early to conclude that Suikoden: Hyakunen is a bad game. If my main character mans up and starts taking matters into his own hands and the Crimson Axe stops being a Sunday afternoon women’s meeting and starts being a credible threat, this game could pick up very quickly. I’ll report back if anything note-worthy happens.

Related posts:

EarthBound, Suikoden: Hyakunen and some other stuff Suikoden: Hyakunen – The story is really good, but the game itself… Finished Genso Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki Almost finished a second playthrough of Final Fantasy Type-0 (slight spoilers)