Suikoden Tactics (PlayStation 2)

Page 2

You can adjust your characters' skills as well. After each battle you'll be allocated skill points, which you can use to either teach your characters new skills or level up existing ones. The skills are pretty basic. There's a skill to increase accuracy, a skill to increase your chance of getting a critical hit, and so on. Magic users can purchase magic skills, which increase their proficiencies with given elements. One of the more useful skills lets you move twice per turn so you can move up and attack an enemy before moving away (usually you can't move once you've completed an action). Characters can only equip a few skills in the beginning of the game, but as you progress, you'll be able to equip more skills, and you'll be able to level those skills up further.

Suikoden Tactics also has a friendship mechanic that's used to learn cooperative attacks, which inflict heavy damage on multiple targets. In battle, certain characters can use the talk command, which initiates a brief exchange and increases goodwill between the two characters. Once two characters chat a few times, they'll learn a cooperative attack, which can be used if the characters are in the correct formation. Friendly characters will also help each other out in other ways. One character might jump in to protect another from an enemy attack, or he or she might provide a support attack in the form of an assist. The friendship stuff is all well and good, but it rarely has a substantial effect on the outcome of a battle.

Overall, the battles are a lot of fun. But sometimes they can be a bit frustrating. In certain battles you have to protect an artificial-intelligence-controlled character, which is annoying, because these AI-controlled characters often make completely brainless decisions, thus getting themselves killed unnecessarily. It can be especially aggravating because the battles in this game are quite lengthy. So you can put an hour or more into a single battle only to lose at the end of it, which forces you to do it all over again. There is a nice feature that lets you continue after losing a battle, which resets everything except for your experience. So if you keep losing a battle, your characters will keep leveling up until they eventually become strong enough to complete the battle. For the most part, though, the battles strike a nice balance between strategic management of elements and straight-up fighting.

The presentation in Suikoden Tactics does leave a lot to be desired. The characters are blocky and undetailed, and the basic animations are stiff and awkward (though the attack animations are fairly fluid). Each character model uses about five different washed-out colors, and none looks particularly cool or interesting. The character portraits are nicely drawn, but the eyeless nonplayable characters look a bit creepy. The enemies are also pretty bland. There are several different colors of fish men and some generic enemy soldiers, but a bit of diversity would help make this game a bit more interesting. The battlefields are all quite large and well designed. There are elevation changes and obstructions that force you to adjust your strategy accordingly, but the layout of the terrain still feels natural--though the backgrounds do have a blurry low-res look that doesn't do much to impress. The graphics, of course, aren't a major concern in a game of this type, but a little added detail would have been nice.

The audio is just fine in Suikoden Tactics. The voice acting is terrible at times, but a few of the parts are respectably delivered. The sound effects work just fine. There are the usual clashes of swords and squeals of anguish, but there are also some cool little touches, like the way a magic user mumbles a chant when casting a spell. The music is generally good as well, although a couple of tracks are more likely to put you to sleep than get you primed for battle.

Suikoden Tactics doesn't do much in the way of story, but the simple-yet-unique mechanics make it a satisfying strategy role-playing game. You can beat the game in fewer than 25 hours if you don't replay too many battles or complete any of the several side quests. If you have the inclination, though, you can easily spend a lot of time collecting all the characters and trying different party combinations. If you like strategy role-playing games, but don't give a rip about Suikoden, you should still check this game out. If you happen to be a Suikoden fan, that's all the better.

See more CNET content tagged:

battle,

character,

skill,

Konami Corp.,

attack

Where to buy

Suikoden Tactics (PlayStation 2): $24.56 - $28.99

store	price	in stock?	rating
	$24.56	Yes
	$28.99	Yes

see prices from 2 stores

Compare prices for Suikoden Tactics

	Amazon.com	$24.56
	Deep Discount.com	$28.99