Suikoden 3

Took long enough, but I finally polished off Suikoden 3. I guess it’s a tribute to my limited time that it’s taken me 6 months to finish. It was one of the first games I rented on Gamefly, and the first one I purchased and set out to complete. After doing all of the chapters with all 6 main characters, I’m sitting at 82 hours. I feel I’m missing out on some of the inside jokes in the game however. This is a direct sequel to Suikoden 2 (as opposed to an unrelated sequel somewhere else in the world) so there were quite a few references thrown back to that prior game that I only caught the edge of.

The final strategy battle wasn’t much of a challenge, but that could be due to the 12-15 hours I spent in chapter 4 getting all my characters up to lvl 50. I only lost a single character in that battle, and luckily it was a temporary loss. The final battle was a bit trickier. I first tried it with the default party (supposedly you get a special ending if you finish with that party) but had a rather rough go of it. Many of the characters in that party were just not strong enough. I decided on the second try that I really didn’t care about the in-game scenes as much, so I put together a party optimized for the battle. Hugo makes a very good healer with the high end water runes, was able to throw 12 AOE heal spells out with only touching his lower spell classes. Emily is an excellent attacker when properly setup, and can do tremendous amounts of damage to the enemy. Those two together handled most of the battle, with the rest just supporting and adding a bit of damage here and there.

The 6th character you get at the end is time consuming, but does tie the rest of the storyline together. I don’t think I want to do any more hour-long ending sequences though. Oy.

All in all, a pretty solid RPG game with an interesting story system. I recommend it.

Now it’s a tossup between pushing forward in rogue galaxy, or finish Atelier Iris off so I have a cleaner slate of home console game slots. Sometime I really need to get a list down of all my games in progress…