Before Final Fantasy VII took RPGs as a whole into the mainstream, Suikoden made its mark as one of the first quality role-playing titles released outside of Japan on PlayStation. The game’s main conceit was based loosely on the Chinese literary classic The Water Margin: A young outcast and his friends gather up companions to form the 108 Stars of Destiny, building a magnificent rebel outpost and eventually toppling a wicked empire. Suikoden’s success would inspire multiple sequels, including immediate follow-up Suikoden II, regarded by many as a shining gem in the PS1’s RPG library.
With fame and acclaim, however, comes a price tag: Original copies of Suikoden II run in the hundreds of dollars, and that’s even with several well-known, game-breaking bugs that were inadvertently introduced in the English version. Here’s where Konami seemingly swoops in to the rescue, offering both Suikoden I and II together for a low price and promising beautiful new HD graphics and bonus features. This was announced back in 2022, and now, two and a half years later due to delays, we finally have Suikoden I&II HD Remaster–and I’m left wondering just how all that time this remaster spent cooking in the oven was spent.
First, let’s talk a bit about the games themselves. I first played both of these titles back on the PS1 many years ago. The original Suikoden was the game I was most excited to revisit, as it had been well over two decades since I’d last played it, and I’d forgotten so much about it. I was pleased to rediscover a pleasant, breezy RPG with a fast-paced story, smooth turn-based combat, and a charming sense of humor. It’s quite short, and with the lack of load times and addition of battle speed-up options, you can easily finish it in around 15-20 hours doing all of the optional content.
Even though Suikoden is a high-quality outing on its own, it still comes up short in ways: The breakneck pace of the plot leaves a lot of story and character development feeling rushed (and the shocking-twists almost comically pre-choreographed), and the big rebel-versus-empire army clashes at big story points come off as half-baked. Suikoden II is a bigger and better game in many ways, not least of which is the storytelling: Characters and plotlines generally get a lot more time to breathe and develop, making the stakes feel higher and giving the twists much more impact–plus you get to see and learn more about many characters from the first game. With 108 characters to recruit in each title, there are some folks on the team who aren’t going to get as much screen time, but Suikoden II does a much better job of making everyone in your army feel important. It’s also a longer game, as you can expect your play time to run roughly 30-40 hours from start to finish. It was one of my favorites on the PS1 back during its release, and it remains excellent to this day.
As with most HD remasters, the big upfront selling point is HD visuals: high-res 2D graphics and widescreen environments. The environments and character portraits got a big makeover, with the backgrounds looking incredibly sharp and detailed, while the portraits were redrawn and recolored by original artists Junko Kawano and Fumi Ishikawa. This is the first major stumbling point for this collection, however, as some questionable decisions were made when redoing the graphics.
While some elements look fantastic, the actual sprites didn’t get the same treatment. They’re the same as the original, just with a sharper for HD displays. There’s no extra effort or graphical trickery like in Square-Enix’s HD-2D titles to make these pixel sprites blend together with the detailed backgrounds, so you wind up with characters made of razor-sharp pixels constantly clashing with very finely detailed backgrounds in a way that consistently looks awkward and distracting. The asset mismatch is especially noticeable in battles where camera pans and zooms are common. I know Suikoden has a lot of characters and that redrawing all the sprites in HD could be a lot of work, but the approach used here means the characters and backgrounds don’t come together naturally.
Beyond the graphics, however, what sort of upgrades can you expect from these remasters? Unfortunately, not much of note. Some of the additions–such as the in-game gallery and game-specific adjustments like faster and freer movement in Suikoden I–were already present in the PSP re-releases that never made it out of Japan. The only big changes to this version, beyond the visual update, are a battle speed-up option, a dialogue log going back up to 100 text boxes, fast-to-nonexistent load times, and numerous bug fixes across both games.
These certainly aren’t bad additions, but they are the absolute bare-minimum inclusions you’d expect from a remaster. Some very obvious quality-of-life changes have gone completely unaddressed.
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For example, Suikoden I’s item management is notoriously awful–you can’t see if a person can equip gear when giving it to them or taking it out of storage, you can’t exchange items with a character holding the maximum amount, and you can’t deposit or withdraw multiple items from storage at once. These are the sort of conveniences you take for granted in modern RPGs but weren’t standardized in 1996. When you’ve got dozens of characters with separate inventories to manage, this gets very messy, very quickly. Was this changed in any meaningful way? Well, one important item (the fast-travel Blinking Mirror) was moved from taking up a character’s inventory space to being in your plot items bag–that’s it. There are other gripes besides that, too. Why do I have to re-adjust my battle speed from the default during every single fight? Where’s all the extra content from the Suikoden I release on the Japanese Sega Saturn? The whole package just has an aura of missed opportunity, which is especially disappointing to me given its years of delay.
As it stands, this is a package of two great games that is serviceable. Outside of some interface issues that are mostly artifacts of the games’ age, there’s nothing wrong with Suikoden I and II–in fact, they remain as excellent as ever. But it’s hard to get rid of the nagging feeling that this remaster feels uneven between the weirdly contrasting visuals and the general lack of quality-of-life improvements beyond the bare minimum. Suikoden is a phenomenal series that deserves all the love it can get, and with how expensive the original titles have become, any way to let people enjoy them is welcome–but these two games really deserve to be reintroduced with the red carpet, not the tacky doormat.
