Finding the right time for a major reveal is never easy. Too soon and it lacks impact. Too late and no one notices because they’ve all gone away. In an ideal world, game writers would get the timing right every single time, but if they must err, I believe they should err on the side of ‘too soon’.
I was this close to dropping Suikoden: Hyakunen because it wasted the first 10-15 hours when I still had energy on inconsequential junk. Now they’ve finally gotten round to the real story, but my patience has already been worn to shreds by the slowness and dreariness of what went before. I’m still interested, certainly, but I don’t have half the enthusiasm I would have had if things had gotten underway sooner.
Of course, part of that lack of enthusiasm is rooted in an absolute lack of faith in the writers’ ability to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion. The world in Hyakunen faces a serious problem, one of the most serious I’ve ever encountered in an RPG, and if the game had any intention of tackling it seriously they would have started way earlier. Right now my party is doing the equivalent of fixing a window while the house burns down. For storyline reasons we can’t put out the fire until the window has been repaired, but I fear we will spend so much time (and Konami’s budget) on the lesser problem that we will end up fixing the larger problem in a cop-out “We beat the boss and everything magically worked out” kind of way.
I debated with myself long and hard about whether to spoil the story right here and now or to wait until the game is complete and I can see how things turned out. In the end my wiser, more jaded half prevailed. After all, the game has been sucking 90% of the time. It won’t do to get excited just because they pulled off one or two interesting twists. If they can wrap things up well, I might be able to forgive the slow start. And if they mess things up, they’re already in my bad books so they don’t have that much further to sink. Therefore instead of speculating here on what story Konami should write, I’m going to get back to the story they did write and save any further discussion until I’ve finished it as best as I can.
