Pyroclastica

I only played this because I wanted to play Suikoden II, and planned on doing the thing where you use a Suikoden save to start the game so you get whatever extras that comes with
By and large, not a very good game, but it is pretty short for an RPG (my time was around 26 hours) so it’s not like the agony drags out for weeks on end.
For those who don’t know what Suikoden is, the entire “hook” of the game is that there are 108 possible party members, from which you will choose 6 to make your party at any given time. You “recruit” them throughout the game, and after being recruited they go to a castle that serves as your home base.
This is a very, very good idea, which in this game is not executed very well. There are two big problems:
(1) Even though you can have 6 people in the party at a time, this is almost never true in practice. The Main Character can’t leave, which is understandable, but every new chapter of the game seems to have at least 1 required party member taking up space. Even at the very final battle, there are 3 required members so you’re really only choosing 3 more out of the possible 106 left. It feels almost like the HM system on Pokemon. Like there’s this terrible game mechanic always standing in the way of your absolute freedom
(2) Despite (1) being true almost all the time, you can tell the developers really wanted to make it so that any party can win the game. It is very, very clear that you are supposed to choose the characters you like, rather than trying to minmax. For this reason, the game ends up way WAY too easy. There is not a single difficult battle in the game, never a time when you have to use your brain power to think up how to exploit weaknesses or devise some kind of special strategy, literally nothing at all that the game is asking you to do as far as execution.
Which, honestly, (2) would almost be forgivable if it wasn’t for (1) being in the way.
There are also things about the game design which aren’t even annoyances, but seem poorly thought out. For example, there is an MP system which works like Final Fantasy 1, where every spell has a set number of times you’re allowed to cast it, and those casts come back when you sleep in an Inn. In Suikoden, these spells come from Runes which you attach to your character. Each character can only have exactly 1 Rune attached, and you get whatever spells the Rune comes with. If it has some really high level magic on it, and you don’t have the MP for that, you raise the character’s level until they get an MP and become allowed to cast it. Some characters, however, come with Runes attached to them which cannot be removed. Their 1 Rune slot is forever taken up by something special to their character. The problem is that some of these characters have MP, despite their Rune not providing something that requires MP. Their MP can literally never be used, because their Rune cannot be switched out, so what is the point of giving them the MP at all?
All of that being said, I do still think I’ll move on to the 2nd game eventually, because I know this is a long-running and beloved series, and I know there are a lot of good ideas here and they just needed to be refined across a few more games.
There is also a LOT else they got right. The character avatars and sprites look awesome, their personalities are all distinct, which are mostly believable and lovable. The music is famous and for great reason. The sound design and story design is great.
Speaking of which, this game is also one of the rare few JRPG’s where the story is coherent. It has a beginning, middle, and end; characters have their own motivations which you can understand; events logically follow one another from one plot beat to the next. Credit where due on that; you don’t see many JRPG’s where that’s true so I gotta call it out when I spot it

Suikoden