For those of you who've never played a Japanese RPG, you may be
in for a shock.  It's less of a freeform game, like say ultima, and
more of an interactive novel.  You generally follow the timeline
set by the designers.  So the story line is very important to the
enjoyment of the overall game.  That doesn't mean you necessarily have
to play any particular bit in sequence or have any time limits.  It just
means to progress you must go through certain set pieces.  Every so
often you reach a nexus point where you are allowed to make a decision
which affects the outcome of the game, but overall there is a master
plan and you are not allowed to deviate.

The fun, for me at least, is watching the story and fighting the
battles.  It's also cool managing your characters, by upgrading them
and giving them new capabilities.  You also need to manage a castle at
one point in the game, but this involves hiring the right people and
watching what they build.

In this respect, Suikoden adds an interesting method of adding
magic powers to individual characters that I've not seen before.
In other RPGs, your characters have classes, e.g. fighter, theif,
mage, etc...  Within these rigid paths your characters improve and
gain powers as they earn experience.  This is fine, but occasionally
limiting.  The characters in Suikoden have certain innate abilities and
services they can perform but in battle they are pretty much the same. 
The differences on how play them are derived from Runes.

Suikoden adds this concept of runes to RPGs.  Think of them as plug and
play magic and special abilities.  As the game progresses you find or
buy  Crystals.  These crystals can be embedded, by a special shoppe,
within your characters giving them the crystals abilities.  For example
a thunder rune allows you characters to use weather magic, water rune
allows you to cast healing spells.  Other runes give you combat
abilities, like special attack modes.  This is neat.  What's neater is
that almost any character can be given a rune.  Only one rune can be
embedded in any one character at a time, however they can be removed and
embedded in other characters at a later date.

Like all good RPGs the weapons on each character may be "Sharpened",
by a blacksmith, increasing damage.  Additionally you can also add
runes to weapons, making them more effective.  For example, water
runes heal your character 5 points every combat round.  Fire and
Thunder runes increase damage when you attack and so on.  This is
neat and adds customization.  However, I would have liked a more
extensive weapons system.  It's good, just not great like in
Secret of Mana.

The game has all the usual arms and items shoppes, as mentioned above
you've got blacksmiths, ala Secret of Mana, and Crystal specialists.  A
new twist is an appraiser.  Sometimes you find mystery items.  They
could be junk, they could be really valuable.  If you take the item
to an appraiser for a small fee they will tell you the value.  The
neat thing is you can either sell the antique or use it in your steam
bath.  Confused ?  Well at a certain stage in the game you get your own
steam room in at HQ.  You can put choice antiques in the steam room and
look at them while your in there.  Wacky ?  Definitely.  Fun too.  You
also get special characters too, like there's this mad inventor who
installs an elevator in your castle :)

Story: 8.0
I've played through about 20 hours.  I'm not sure, but I may be
close to the end.  This seems kind of short to me.  I hope it's
not done yet.  I definitely have not found all 108 characters,
some of them require that you do things for them.  For example
in one town you can recruit a washer woman, but she needs you to get
her some soap.  To get the soap you ask some other people for
stuff and they in turn give you requests, until you find something
you can give to the first person on the chain.  It's predictable,
but enjoyable.  Other characters will not work for you until you
have enough experience or have hired a certain quota of other
characters.  It all adds to the experience.

As has been mentioned, it's a very melodramatic game, with well handled
scenes and reasonable dialog.  At these points you get to find out
other plot elements and discover more about the characters.
 The characters are interesting and have diferrent abilities, but
the real differences between characters are not that noticeable until
you get into army combat mode.

The designers have not been afraid to kill off characters and early
on you loose a bunch.  I'm not sure one can avoid these bits.  I suspect
not.  The overall game so far has been, turn your character into a hero,
lead the resistance, defeat the five generals of the emperor barbarossa,
unite the rebels and then kick the real bad girl's ass, the evil
sorceress Windy.

There may be more as I'm not done yet.

Combat System: 8.5
There are 2 combat systems in Suikoden.  One is at the party level,
and the other is at the army level.

The party combat system is rounds based.  Initiative is decided by the
speed of your characters.  Faster characters get to go first and
fast enemy's can occasionally beat your characters to the
punch.  Your party has a maximum of 6 members.  The computer tops out
at about 8 enemies I believe.  At the beginning of each round
you have to make a decision for each character.  You can either
attack with your weapon, use a rune, item or defend.  Rune combat
can either be a spell, or a special power that the rune infers such
as a specialized attack mode.

A really neat idea is the Unite mode.  Certain combinations, up to
3 according the book, can use a special unite combat mode where they
combine powers to perform a special attack.  Aside from being very
cool to look at it can do a lot of damage.  I'd like to see this
idea in more RPGs.  It's fun!

Overall the menu's are fast.  I like the free will (computer attacks
for you) mode.  It's a lazy option against weak foes.

The animation for the spells is sometimes really spectacular.  Good
use of the playstation special effects library.  Special note, in party
mode a polygon background is generated and all animation is done
using pseudo 3d sprites.  It's fun to watch.  Some of the spells use
polygons and these are really nicely done.

Load times are very very low.  Combat begins immediately by morphing
between the map screen and the party battle screen.  Very slick.
The only noticeable load times are during cut scenes where the game
loads plot and then you change characters.  Very very good management
of limited resources by Konami, they deserve kudos for handling memory
so well.

Army combat, is a variation of the classic paper, scissors, stone sort
of game. You have 3 attacks: charge, magic, bow.  As you collect
characters you also get specials, spying (find out computers next move),
dragon attack, traitor, etc...  Magic is good vs charge.  Bow vs Magic,
Charge vs Bow.  And so by matching his move you lose a certain number
of troops and he looses troops.  Additional modifiers come from
recruiting characters.  You put characters in charge of individual
attacks.  It sort of like playing "Magic: The gathering", as you match
your strongest cards against the computer.  When one of you reaches 0
troops the battle is over.  This bit's fun, but not as fun as Dragon
Force on the Saturn,  However it is still interesting to watch.  The
soldiers make mini screaming and fighting noises.  Quite cute.

Graphics: 7.5

Why so low ?  Well after seeing secret of mana and the new Final Fantasy
you have to do something spectacular to get my attention.  I think the
graphics are high quality, but not very colorful.  This has been
done to keep memory requirements down I'm sure.  Also the characters
are drawn in a tall style, rather than the SuperDeformed look popular
in many RPG's.  It certainly gives them more personality and I like it.
Kudos to the designers for drawing excellent character stills for
each of the 108 stars.  They are classic anime' style and enjoyable
to look at.

Sounds: 9.0

Best sound track I've heard on the PSX since the spot music of
Tombraider which uses CD-audio.  It's nice short pieces with
excellent samples, all run from the chip.  I'm somewhat sick of
Redbook CD.  It takes too much away from the game.  This how audio
should be done on the PSX.  Some of the samples are incredible,
especially the guitar and organ stuff.  Really kicks some bass
out too.  It would nice if you could access a Sound Menu and play
them at your leisure.  I've checked the CD, it's all data.  Awesome.
Ken Kutagari (sp ?) designed the sound chip on the NES and SNES, so
it's about time someone started taking advantage of a 3rd generation
Sony sound chip.

Overall: 8.5

This is the neatest RPG I've played in quite a while.  Secret of Mana
is still my all time favorite, but I guess that's because it was just
all so well thought out.  The manual says there are a ton of items
to find and use and I've only found a small fraction of them, so I must
be doing something wrong or making different decisions.  I've probably
recruited about 40 stars so far, so god knows where the rest are.  I
think there is some replayability so we'll have to see.  Definitely a
suprise hit from Konami, who has been rather quiet for some time.  I
think a lot of the older Japanese arcade game manufacturers are striking
out into new territory and this is good.  Capcom made the wonderful
resident evil, and they don't appear to be afraid to take an existing
idea and improve on it; how very Japanese.

If you are into RPGs go get this.  You'll love it.  If your into Ultima
you will probably be dissapointed.  If you've never played a Japanese
RPG and you like long melodramatic stories with humor then try this out,
you could do a lot worse.  Expect to be playing for at least 30 hours
though...  The combat system is definitely addictive and the rune system
is very cool.  Can't wait for the next RPG from Konami.  A sequel
perhaps ?  Suikoden 2, 3, 4...


Other:
If you have a S-Video TV, use the S-Video cable.  Some of the text
is very fine and the video quality is noticeably better for this
particular game.  Recommended.