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.

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