How's the writing in this game?
Something I don't like about a lot of Japanese games and anime is that the writing comes off as very juvenile.
For context. One of the worst games I played in this regard was Tails Daybreak. The writing was probably one of the worst I've ever played. I could only get about 5-6 hours in because I had to put it down for good.

>>3788507 (OP)
Toothless Suikoden.
The setting is not expanded enough to be interesting with less interesting hooks than Suiko 1 even, the political conflict, alliances you make etc feel like they try to hit certain checkpoints than make it actually work, there is no gracity or consequences in most scenes with like 2 exceptions in the whole game, and few standout characters to actually drive the plot.
Bae building is pretty basic and the 100+ recruits, while they cannot be all fully realzied characters, few actually add to the world and perspectives.
And antagonists are retarded.
You only play this if you need a new suikoden in your lfie , but since you did not reference it once, this is not for you

>>3788507 (OP)
the only japanese rpgs that would serve your needs as not coming off as "very juvenile" are japanese-exclusive rpg maker 2000 games written by people who legitimately haven't gone outside in 10+ years and have severe schizophrenia.

>>3788509
I think the problem was they tried to cram in too much so everything is diluted. People forget S1 wasn't that heavy on the world itself. That came from multiple games taking place in it. Eiyuden tried to do too much from the get-go.

>>3788507 (OP)
>How's the writing in this game?
GOD AWFUL. I honestly can't even begin to describe how bad it is. There is zero weight or tension or consequences to anything. Characters, important main characters have no plot or character. You don't even know what's so important about the central plot macguffin. Like in Suikoden 1 you know why Windy wanted the Soul Eater and you knew why it was important in the mythology of the world and the plot of the game. EC makes a big deal about Runes and Rune Barrows and this special one but why's it important? Don't know!

The frustrating part though is that, as mentioned above, the plot is completely toothless. There's a part early on where the MC's home village gets burned down, as so often happens, but nobody dies. At all. They're all back to playing retarded top spinning games immediately. There's a tone that gets invaded by zombies but you can run right into any shop and it's still open for business without so much as a grumble.

The main character has no purpose in the plot. He's not the son of some general that comes at odds with his empire, he's not some victim of destiny reenacting a previous tragedy, he's not nobody. He does nothing. The dude in blue in the OP image ALMOST feels like he'd have an arc, he's at odds with his own empire but it gets next to NO screen time so we can focus on fishhook there. And I don't want to start a /pol/ tier digression but the brown girl REALLY does feel tacked on. Honestly just thinking about how bad this game turned out gives me a headache.

>>3788509
>antagonists are retarded.
I swear i feels like here's ALMOST a scene were you think someone's about to pull an Odessa but he just lets her walk away. Scott Free. For no reason. Then there's the mysterious villains who just exist to be mysterious. The women in the fox mask just goes LOL SEE YOU IN THE SEQUEL and the Vampire is just a neclord reference for the sake of it.

Suikoden 4 was better than this. And not just barely

I'll give you an example of how boring it is.

At one point the childhood friend's hometown is burned down in what is supposed to be a shocking false flag twist to show how evil the villains are however it's quickly revealed that everyone got out fine and no one wants hurt.

>>3788513
The only thing Eiyuden tried to do was pander to nostalgia and it failed. They couldn't even tell a basic plot. I'm not kidding when I say Suikoden 4 was better. That game was a piece but you could at least see the ideas. You could understand why the villain did what he was doing. You got why the Rune of Punishment was important. There was stakes and consequences to the actions that took place. A former holder of a true run tries to ditch it only for it to go to his son whom perishes using it, he now tries to recapture it to reclaim part of his son. That's a motivation. The story was told crap but this was clear. You know what the badguy in EC's motivation was? Like magics not fair and shit. That's it. And do we see any examples of this? OF COURSE WE DON'T! OH BUT WE GOT THE FUCKING COOKING GAME!

>>3788519
Oh god that's fucking lame.

Fuck it. I'm mad now. Let's shit on the recrutiable characters too. So you know how Suikoden is based on pic related? And how not every character goes through a huge arc because the whole point is regular people joining together as part of the forces of destiny? But even with that there was still a lot of people who were central to the story. Flik and Viktor and the leaders of the liberation army. People who do have strong connections to the runes and the empires and yadda yadda. Well nobody in EC does that at all. All the central characters are as flat as the most random recruit. You don't learn secrets were one of your characters was a former soldier, saw a loved one die and wants revenge. Pretty much everyone in your core team suddenly just gets together and decides Eh the bad guy is a doody head. Hell shit only really gets bad because one of your benefactors decides to run her damn mouth during a peace negotiation which by the way she was only meant to sit there and watch because she's a nobody!

And on top of that there's the matter of character design. So Suikoden always had some weirdo in the game right? But mostly your characters were farmers, soldiers, merchants etc. Well it feels like EVERY GODDAMN CHARACTER is a walking MEME! Like every fucking character wanted to stand out as the LOL WACKY one so most of the characters (there are some okay ones) all feel like they exist in different games. There's no cohesion or thought to anything!

>>3788518
>>3788521
>>3788527
>mfw I got the game from Humble Choice and now I'm too afraid to play it
Also, DLC.

Also here's something. There's a part in the game where one of the generals decides he wants to be Super Hitler and start persecuting all the non human races. Now, having paid attention to my psychotic rambling how do you think the game handles this? Do they

A) Have a sequence where you must jail brake the enslaved people who are being forced to build something evil against their will?

B) DO FUCKING NOTHING AND LEAVE AT MOUTH SERVICE TO SUCH AN EXTENT I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF IT WAS SOMETHING THE ENGLISH RELEASE ADDED IN BY ITSELF!!!

Oh and let's not forget the quality of the English release. The voice acting is comically bad across the board but even if you could play in Japanese the actual text is butchered to shit anyways, full of shitty jokes and memes.

But doubling back. So you remember Suikoden 1, You had to win over the dwarves and elves and shit and get them to stop fighting each other to become aware of a common enemy that threatens them both? Well in this one you do go on a mission to recruit the shark people. And to win them over you need to win their boat race contest. Which by itself might be an interest event. Except no, The only reason the sharks join is because LOL IT'S FUN! WE LIKE WAR FOR WAR!! Never even addressing the fact that the bad guys could have possibly recruited them.

I know shitting on the localization is boring at this point, but it really bothers me.
And I will not post the usual suspects for this game.
I will post one that bothers me personally.
The chef's somewhat generic line in cooking battles changed to 'Get ready for some mean cuisine!'.

There was no rhyming nor pun that they had to localize. It was all original attempt at flavor.
All I could hear was Macho Man Randy Savage

>>3788530
Since you mentioned elves, THEIR RECRUITMENT HAPPENS OFF SCREEN!
YOU NEVER VISIT ELF LANDS, NOR LEARN HOW THEY WERE TRULY AFFECTED!
What was the point of them existing? Well, suikoden has them

>>3788532
A lot of shit happens off screen. Brown girl makes a robot friend she discovered in the dungeons. Do we explore this? Do we have any idea what any of this means?! NO! The fact that we have a robot we discovered never comes up again. She's not tied to the runes or anything.

>>3788513
wasn't rising supposed to be the appetizer?

You know shit is dire when the MC feels more passionate and emotionally invested in the Beigoma sidequest.
Like, he gets angrier at a bad Beyblade villain than the main villain that torched his village.
Maybe because hedid it so ineffectually and nobody died

>>3788524
It really is.

>go back into village immediately
>the houses were "burned"
>you can still go inside them and the interior looks like nothing even happened

OH! And I'm sure some people are asking, well forget the plot. How's the game play? JUST AS FUCKING AWFUL! I don't know if shit's been patched since release but combat is broken as fuck! Your damage dealers all hit like a wet noodle! Magic us useless! I don't know how I even got through shit.

>What about duels?
DUELS SUCK! There's no way of telling if you're winning or losing till it's over! The whole thing just feels like one of those old newground sprite fight animations. I swear I go through one of them, loose, and oh it turns out that's supposed to happen. They make no sense.

>War? Good god! What is it go for?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! War is the most broken I've seen in any of these games. And the war battles weren't always good. 2's were actually fucking broken and basically cut scene engines and they were still better than this. This are just a 3x3 square were units move slowly at each other with no distinction or strategy and you have to SLOWLY watch numbers tick down. It's awful.

This game is so bad I can't see straight!

>>3788539
LETS GOOOOO

>>3788507 (OP)
how's that retranslation project coming along?

>>3788539
I will find one thing to go for.

Theater productions.
ALL characters in the game have voice lines for every role and narration.
And many veer off the script.
It's a near endless amount of combinations.

So if you watch anime and want to see many of your favorites VAs go silly, there is that.

It's definitely not worth playing the game for that, but I found some fun doing this. I actually never did the last dungeon cause I uninstalled the game after doing a couple hundred theater productions.

I also liked the cardgame, cause I am addicted to them in general

>>3788542
Yes because that's the part of the game they should fucking care about! Theater! You know it's not like I had unrealistic expectations for this game to live up to. I didn't. Truthfully I was expecting simple bootleg suikoden. But they couldn't even achieve that. All of this fails on the most fundamental base line level. This couldn't even achieve a level of mediocrity. Calling this BAD is being too generous. Suikoden 4 is bad but it understood the minimum. This is the feces of when shame overeats on stupidity.

>>3788548
It's funny how I would actually suggest Tierkreis over this

What Suikoden game do you guys think has the best writing, considering how were measuring this game against the original series?
I only played I-III so far. I would be tempted to say that III was the best if it didnt suffer from the 'scripted loss to show how cool the antagonist is' or the 'win in gameplay but lose in a cutscene' issues so much. Its truly egregious how many times the antagonists have the main characters lives in the palm of their hands and then do nothing to kill them even though theyve proven themselves to be a major obstacle to their goals. The end goal of the antagonists ultimately results in everyone on the continent getting killed, so I can barely see a reason on why they would pull their punches so much. I swear it happens almost every time you run into them, it was so common I lost count.

>>3788765
2
Pilika's amulet full of fireflies is top 5 JRPG kino

>>3788768
I've played suikoden 2 two times on psx and finished the remastered version less than a week ago and I completely missed that was Pilika's medallion. I'm stupid and you are right, that's top kino revenge.

>>3788930
It gets better. Evidently it was based on a real battle in Chinese history. Sun Pin once once set up an ambush by carving "The enemy general (I forgot his name) dies by this tree" so when he lit a light to read what it said he got arrowed to fuck as the archers were told to fire at the light they saw. This also paints in my mind a funny image of Sun Pin carving messages into multiple trees just to cover his bases.