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Episode 696: Suikoden, Revisited (Patreon)

Published:
2025-06-09 11:00:10
Imported:
2026-08
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Jeremy: We have, admittedly, talked about Suikoden in the past. Twice, actually—once almost a decade ago, and once back before that in the forbidden 1UP.com era. Nevertheless, here we speak about the game once again, and in a way that (I would like to think) reflects our growth as podcast people. The original 1UP episode was enthusiastic and fun, but quite breezy; the middle episode was a more buttoned-down revisiting of the initial conversation; and this new episode is, well, entirely different.

For starters, it's just about Suikoden. The first one. Just the first one. Not a combination conversation about both Suikoden I & II at once! We combined the two PlayStation games into one episode in our previous efforts, but this time around we take a much more in-depth look at the initial game in order to paint a clearer picture of just what made it so remarkable at the time of its debut and why it still plays so well. Suikoden is one of those rare works that legitimately pushed the cutting edge of game tech in 1996 but doesn't come off as hopelessly dated and clumsy today. Konami's dev team ("Usagi-san Team") made some incredibly canny design and technology choices with the first Suikoden, and the game's lessons were largely forgotten in the years after, to the medium's detriment. And it paired those elements with interesting characters and a sweeping (yet realistically scaled) narrative that feels remarkably prescient debuting mere months before the first volume of A Song of Ice and Fire and a few years before Lord of the Rings made this kind of political warfare fantasy a mainstream pop culture favorite.

And it's more readily available now through the HD Remaster than ever before. There's never been a better time to play Suikoden than today. Especially if you want to get ahead of the frank spoilers that appear throughout this podcast. Hurry!

Edits by Greg Leahy. Art by Nick Wanserski.

10:42 - Royal Palace Consultation

25:15 - Cave Noire: BGM 1 | Beginning Theme

38:49 - Mega Man 7: Wily Stage 1

49:23 - Tiny Characters in a Huge World

57:43 - Confrontation with Monsters | Main Theme Arrange ~ Guitar Ver.

1:11:34 - Gathering of Warriors

1:24:55 - Theme of the Advancing Army | Forgotten Days

1:38:59 - Peaceful People

1:49:53 - Avertuneiro Antes Lance Mao

Closing - Into a World of Illusion

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Comments

K-S-O

I shall look forward to the eventual Suikoden II episode. I hope you guys do not overlook the PS2 games. I think Suikoden III is a good game with huge flaws that are difficult to deal with. Suikoden V is legitimately great and almost equal to II. I think Suikoden IV is better than its reputation, but I will not be upset if you skip it.

Christopher McDougall

Great episode as always. Suikoden 1-3 have a special place in my heart. When Jeremy mentioned the similarities of the runes to the Rings of Power, I couldn’t help but remember a lesser known fantasy series by Fred Saberhagen called the Books of Swords. In it there are 12 swords each with a very specialized ability. And like the True Runes, they have a lot of influence in the world. They are alluded to as subtly sentient and don’t necessarily get along with each other. Granted, I doubt Suikoden was influenced by the Books of Swords, but the books were written in the 80s so who knows? Either way I had a lot of fun reading the series when I was younger. A lot of the books were about how a sword’s wielder could master the sword and figure out how to use it in creative ways.

CitizenMeh

One great thing about Suikoden is that two party members join you purely out of spite- Kreutz, a loyalist of Emperor Barbarossa's even more evil predecessor and Sonia, who just wants to watch you die. I approve of that energy.

littleterr0r

King's Quest? Jeremy, you meant King's Field, but I'd love to hear more about both.

Project Goemon

I enjoyed listening to this episode, but there was one thing that bothered me a little about how Konami’s RPG lineup was framed. I agree with the broad strokes—despite having a large library, Konami never fully committed to RPGs in the 1980s, preferring instead to borrow concepts and mechanics from RPGs for their action games. However, the RPG situation was a bit more complex. Developers at Konami did want to make RPGs. Games such as Dragon Scroll, both Esper Dream games, the Ganbare Goemon Gaiden RPGs, and God Medicine on the Game Boy were all attempts to do something unique within the genre. In particular, the producer and scriptwriter of Goemon Gaiden, Kazuhiro Aoyama and Keita Kawaminami, expressed their desire to create an RPG after the success of Dragon Quest. Many teams also experimented with RPG- or adventure-adjacent games such as Meikyū Jiin Dababa, Ai Senshi Nicol, and Risa no Yōsei Densetsu. The issue was that RPGs didn’t align well with Konami’s business plans or financial strategy. In 1987, then-CEO Kagemasa Kōzuki handed the reins to Fumihiro Hishikawa, who had a broader, more ambitious vision for the company. From that point on—especially thanks to the success of TMNT and other licenses—Konami began looking more toward markets outside Japan, particularly the US. At the same time, they invested in numerous side projects, including the Circo Porto arcade resorts in Japan and their unannounced portable console that was seemingly never completed. And, given the general sentiment in the Japanese market at the time that RPGs wouldn’t sell well overseas, it’s no surprise that Konami chose not to invest heavily in the genre. That said, Hishikawa clearly had ambitions in the RPG space. He understood the genre’s popularity in Japan but tried to approach it with a “blockbuster” mindset. The reason why Konami developed the VRC-7 for Lagrange Point (and why it had such great music) was because it was positioned as an ambitious multimedia project produced in collaboration with Family Computer Magazine as part of its 100th issue celebration. Under the project Geimu Kōbō (“Game Workshop”), readers were invited to submit ideas for enemy characters, the story, BGM, the title logo, and more. The scenario was also at least partially written by a manga author. Similarly, Mōryō Senki Madara 1 and 2 were high-profile game adaptations of the manga of the same name. Lagrange Point was not a success, critically or financially, but the Madara games were. It's possible Konami could have gone the route of more high-profile multimedia RPG projects, but they couldn't afford it. Although some of these ventures found a degree of success, Kōzuki, still chairman at the time, discovered around 1991 that Konami was in a precarious financial position. Hishikawa had centralized control, requiring all departments and branches to report to him, and his ambitions had outpaced the company’s means. While the first TMNT arcade game had been a major hit, Konami reportedly misjudged demand, and arcade operators took advantage of the situation. The company also lost money on several other ventures, and by the end of 1991 or early 1992, Kōzuki concluded that Konami had accumulated a debt of 60 billion yen. He dismissed Hishikawa and brought in Yasuo Nishimura, a CEO from the banking sector, to help turn the company around—and they did, eventually, but it wasn’t an immediate fix. Konami’s relatively sparse output (given their size) during the 16-bit era reflected this period of financial difficulty and restructuring, even as development for new platforms was underway. 1992-1994 were tough years at Konami, and just as the company was bouncing back it suffered a lot of damage in the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake. Konami's output on the PlayStation was arguably a result of many crises that led both management and developers to try out new ideas, such as Suikoden. Arguably, it was Tokimeki Memorial that revived Konami, although games such as Suikoden would make it a different company given that the once-prominent Nintendo divisions were demoted.