I am going to go out on a limb here and state outright that I assume no developers set out to make a mediocre game on purpose.  This is a bold claim, I know, but I’m going to stick by it.  The thing is, there are many choices a designer can make that, individually, don’t seem very critical, but when added together as a whole can water down an entire experience.  Add to this the comfortable ease in sticking with the tropes well-established in a particular genre, and before you know you end up with a final product that doesn’t really excel at anything it does, but doesn’t do anything that poorly, either.

When Suikoden Tierkreis was released a few months ago, I was a little trepeditious about picking it up, having no past experience with the series.  Sure, I could do some light reading on the internet to try and catch up, but that’s really not the same.  The thing is, I kept hearing good things about the game, from the general buzz of lots of people playing it, to a lot of very positive reviews (including Famitsu, who stated it was “a game with no noticeable flaws”).  Deciding to give it a closer look, it turned out that Tierkreis was a Suikoden spin-off, as opposed to a sequel, and had almost nothing to do with the core series itself.  Intrigued enough, I picked up a copy.

TELL ME A STORY

The game, to give you the simplest overview, is built on your standard JRPG frame.  An overworld map chock full of towns and caves and such, lots of dungeons chock full of random encounters, and a turn-based combat system replete with character-combo attacks.  The game begins in the quiet village of Citro, somewhere in the gently rolling plains of this unnamed world.  The player, as main character, is a plucky fifteen-year-old in the village, who along with your group of other plucky fifteen-year-old friends is tasked with heading to the nearby hills to beat some pesky vermin to death.

While heading home, your weapons soaked in the blood of every poor creature that stumbled across your path, some MYSTERIOUS RUINS suddenly appear near the village.  Stopping to explore, the group finds a STRANGE ARTIFACT that, when they touch, causes intense visions and grants the teens INCREDIBLE POWERS.

Stop me if you’ve heard this set-up before.

Yes, there is no denying that the opening of Tierkreis is ripped directly from any number of “RPG Cliche” lists out there.  Playing for a while after the introductory scenes, though, reveals a much more interesting story, and that is a fact that proves vital when considering what seem to be the designers intentions for the game.  It is a long and weaving tale that comes down to a fundamental battle between those who believe that we all should have the freedom to make our own choices in life, and those that believe that all is predetermined and there’s really nothing we can do about it.  It deals with a reality where stepping from one dimension to the next is as easy as knowing the right person, and where entire worlds themselves can be wiped from existence, with no one remembering they were ever there in the first place.

INNOVATION  AND NARRATION

In regard to gameplay, Tierkreis brings absolutely nothing new to the table.  Turn-based combat proceeds exactly as it has for countless JRPGs over the last two decades, and your character options and system menus hold absolutely no surprises beyond your normal “Equip, Item, Save” options.

I am not someone who demands that every game bring innovation with it, though I will certainly not complain when it arises.  However, if a game offers nothing new, it should at least do what has been done before as best as it can.  Tierkreis does not, on the gameplay side of things, excel at really much of anything.  The interesting thing is that, playing through the game, I feel this was a purposeful decision.

The creators of Tierkreis had a story to tell, and they have created a game in which in can be conveyed with minimal distraction.  A player will spend far more time reading dialogue than they will possibly spend doing “game” activities.  The game is more or less a series of performed scenes punctuated by boss battles every so often.  Dungeons are short, with a smattering of random encounters, but you are just as likely to be interrupted by an NPC’s rambling monologue as you are by some formless demon.

The game is incredibly linear; there is little in the way of choice for the player.  What dialogue choices do pop up lead to the exact same results, and the side quests offered up as workable missions have no impact on the overall flow of the story.  Again, this linearity shows that the designers had a singular narrative, and it was to be presented exactly as they had planned.  Reinforcing that is the fact that the game is actually incredibly easy; not a single time during the entire game, save for the final boss, did I feel in any danger of actually having my party wiped out.  You characters (mercifully) level very quickly, and the player always seems to have the natural advantage over any enemies encountered.  To me, this also says that this is a story not to be interrupted by petty annoyances such as losing, and that the story can be enjoyed in a continuous fashion.

#99, YOU’RE UP!

Fortunately, the designers of Tierkreis do have an interesting story to tell, enough so that I was willing to play through 40-odd hours of it just to reach the conclusion.  Where they do falter, from a narrative standpoint, is with the development of individual party members.  One of the key themes of the Suikoden series is the “108 Stars of Destiny.”  These are the people, in each game, who come together to battle whatever evil it is that needs to be faced down. In Tierkreis, there are 108 characters available to be recruited, with almost all of them being playable as members of your party.

Many of these characters join your party as part of the main story line, but many more can be recruited either through side missions or simply through talking to the right people at the right time.  This does provide a sort of collection aspect to the game, but does also lead to a lot of running around and trying to talk to different people in different places with different combinations of party members to see what gets triggered.  All of these non-story-critical characters come with a little introductory storytelling to explain who they are and why they may be willing to join your cause, but once you’ve recruited them, any semblance of narrative relevance is lost; they don’t participate in the main story, they receive no further personal development, and outside of a few lines here and there in your home base, they don’t say anything much at all; they just become another interchangeable cog in your ever-expanding military machine.

I say interchangeable because, in addition to their lack of character development (not to mention the difficulty in managing the equipment and spells of 100-odd characters), they have no distinct gameplay features to separate them from one another.  Some have healing spells, some have attack spells; that’s pretty much the big difference.  In a narrative-driven game such as this, it would seem better to err on the side of quality vs. quantity in terms of character, but perhaps the designers felt it was critical to stick with the Suikoden ideal.

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING…

In what perhaps was an attempt to again further their aims of delivering a compelling story, the designers made the decision to include full voice acting for almost all the story scenes in the game.  While this is commonplace in most console RPGs these days, it is still somewhat of a novelty on the DS.  While I am not a programmer, I will assume this is because of space reasons on DS carts.  My assumption here seems to be reinforced by the fact that most of the voice acting in Tierkreis sounds as if it were piped in across a tin horn.  In the opening scenes of the game, especially, the voices sound highly compressed; speaking quickly and at a high pitch.  It is undeniably grating, and I found myself turning off the sound and sticking to good old fashioned reading.

The game also makes an important art choice (perhaps inspired by Squeenix’s Final Fantasy remakes), opting to go with 3d models for all of the characters instead of sticking with 2d artwork.  This, I feel, is unfortunate, because while the 2d pictures of your characters and the 2d backgrounds you travel through are all lush and detailed, the 3d character and monster models are very plain and very blocky.  Many of your 108 party members end up looking very similar, and many of the monster models are simply palette-swaps that appear over and over again.  For a game with such a narrative focus, I think it would have been better served sticking with a more enticing visual style to really draw the player into the world.

OVERALL

While there is plenty of room to argue the merits of narrative-driven games vs. gameplay-driven games, the crucial thing to note is that, in either circumstance, there is still a game to be played.  Suikoden Tierkreis weaves an interesting tale; of that there is little question.  Unfortunately, the designers seem to have made the critical decision to focus purely on delivering a narrative at the cost of developing any sort of solid gameplay.  The meat of the story is rich, but the bones of the gameplay are thin and brittle.  The Metal Gear Solid series shows us that a strong narrative can certainly be kept interesting by meshing it with interesting and varied gameplay.  A little more time spent developing a more varied combat system, or even simply figuring out something more to do with your cast of 108 characters, and the game could have been a much fuller experience.  As it currently stands, Tierkreis comes across as a half-fulfilled package.