Suikoden 3, is a good game(because I love Suikoden series), but when compared to the first two, it's not all that great. If you've played the first 2 I suggest you play this one and see for yourself what I'm about to explain. If you've never played a Suikoden game don't start with this game!
They broke down the formations to have more individuality, but it fails to do this. As in you can only select one option for 2 people, where as in the other games everyone had an option of what they were going to do. So if you wanted to cast magic you could only do so with one person. The person you didn't select to do anything would attack by default(if they could reach the enemy). On a side note walking from place to place is absolutely tedious and after awhile down right annoying.
The battles are judged on how fast(depending on skill rank)you can cast magic and attack. It doesn't even take into account the characters speed (which doesn't exist in 3). I partially like being able to learn different skills for characters, but I've found these hardly affect what you do in battle, besides being able to cast magic faster or hit the enemies a bunch of times in a row. I also found I was just putting the same skill on every character because I had to find a way to increase there defense, magic defense, accuracy, and amount of times they hit the enemy(swing). The one thing that drives me insane is that a character has to be able to walk(depending on how far they can actually walk) up to the enemy in order to attack and some characters don't move all that great at all. Also when you cast magic you can hit your allies which is just plain stupid. If I wanted to smack my allies around I would chose to do so.(Like you can do in Final Fantasy's). Then the major/full scale battles (where you have all your people in a group as one entity) is ridiculously hard. The battles you have to win are damn near impossible because instead of just a ton of little people running & attacking (like in 1 & 2) you have to fight it like a regular battle. Except you don't get any control over who the characters attack or how they attack which is again stupid. When I say it's impossible to beat I mean the enemies you fight are like supercharged up & your characters can only take 1 or 2 hits & then die or when your characters attack the amount of damage they inflict is pathetic. Of course to counter act this you have to level up characters and their weapons and get the best armor but it will take you forever(no exaggeration) to try & get on par with the enemies.
Buying armor and items in this game is absolutely insane. You have to have an enormous amount of money(potch)just to buy equipment or items that are average. Also there was really no need to make a ton of different medicine's that heal different amounts of HP I just use Medicine D throughout the game because I'm not going to worry about how much a certain medicine heals. Where as in 1 & 2 you just had medicine that healed like 100 HP & Mega Medicine that healed like 250...simple.
The triple story line (Trinity site) whatever you want to call it is not at all impressive. You end up watching the same scene and battles over & over & over & over again and there's no difference between seeing it from one person and seeing it from another, other than you get a bunch of dialogue that you wouldn't have seen from the other character. :O ! There's also not really a set path of what you have to do in terms of like having to fight a boss to save someone or a boss that tries to stop you from moving on in the story or even how to effectively(if this is possible) switch from main character to main character.
The story is very odd to me. From playing Suikoden I & II (more times than anyone could possibly count) the story in 3 is far-fetched. You have a character becoming very uncharacteristically different from who he is. It's hard for me to believe he would act the way he does in 3 and join up with one character that we have no background on but have seen from 1 & 2 but that we know is bad.
The game doesn't have anything to do with anything in the Suikoden universe except introduce 5 more True Runes and why the True Runes are so important. It lacks many things that 1 & 2 have(I could go on but this is enough and I got everything I wanted to say) and the fact that it is unrelated to the first 2 is very disappointing.
