Suikoden I & II HD Remaster: Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars

In terms of plot and characters, this is the greatest game I've ever played and one I would strongly recommend to anyone, especially if you like political fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire and the like. This game is a one of a kind masterpiece that should not be missed.

This review is including everything the game offers the player to experience. So from my point of view, Story wise the remaster is great, combat is fun, recruiting characters and switching to a slew of characters is nice. It offers the HD feel and the game looks beautiful. The added QOL features are a welcomed edition and makes the game more enjoyable storywise. Where was the QOL for character inventory management? It was left as is and felt disappointing as it would of made things so much easier for the user. The mini games is in my experience is what brought the average score down. The dice game in Suikoden 1 was for the most part an okay experience. I roughly won most my sets but there were moments when I had the worst rng which felt inconsistent to prior sets I've won throughout the game. That also continues in Suikoden II. When I first experienced the dice mini game again, the time and effort was not worth it at all and felt like an after thought of a mini game. The npc wins most sets and the player has a small percentage of winning, and If you win, you're not winning much. You can get more money farming monster fights faster and makes that dice npc feel worthless to engage with. The second mini game I came across, the whack a mole had a trophy tied to it upon completion of hard mode. The fact that the dev team didn't rework that mini game and left it as is, felt lazy. It's by far the worst mini game the title offers. The third mini game the rope climbing, yet another rng based mini game which is also lazy and bad game design was left as is. Leaving it up to a dice to determine your position should of been modernized or updated to the feel of a remaster. Just from encountering those mini games really hurt my experience as a player. While most of the game is awesome those areas needed improvement to make this remaster really shine but it fell flat. Konami should take notes if they ever plan on making more remasters. They should pay close attention to some of the areas players complained about and try to fix them or improve on. If they can fix/patch the glitches they could also go out of their way to improve the user experience of their mini games which should be "Fun" not a chore. Yes most of the review is about mini games well it's because I've spent most of my time resetting because of terrible game design. Overall if you love Suikoden, sure pick the remaster to get that nostalgia again. I would wait for a price dip as this doesn't feel it's worth spending the $50. If I could give it a 7.5 I would because thats were it should be, for what your getting.

Inventory management is still unnecessarily tedious. From the warehouse, a single item cannot be removed from non-party members. The only option is to strip every item from the non-party member, which includes items they have equipped.

Giving it a 3 because I liked the game as a kid. Why in the hell would I pay $50 for this when the big new spin is fast forward and a slight makeup of the graphics. $20 max. I mean, even when Naughty Dog releases their 10th remaster of the same game in as many years that no one asked for, they only charge people who already played the games $10. Remasters need to add content to the original to separate themselves. I will not buy these for that rate, I will just wait for them to eventually become free on PSN.

I am a huge fan of both games. I think they are amazing and worth playing. However, this review is as much about what was changed/added for this release, as it is about the original **** a note, I would give the original games a very high score. For a remaster, I have to lower my score a lot, as it doesn't feel like much was improved. It is almost the same as the version that was released on the PSP in 2006. As this is a remaster, you would expect some changes. However, a lot of decisions were made that make no sense. Good Points -The story is still good. There were a few small changes to mistakes in the Japanese version. The English version was cleaned up too, as some of the translations were wrong, incomplete, or missing. However, the English version still has a decent number of mistakes and typos, including not keeping the same translations across games. Some of the changes felt unnecessary. Why change names (such as characters) that have been established for almost 30 years? They added hard (and easy) mode. These games are pretty easy, from a gameplay perspective, so some people will appreciate this. The changes are pretty minor though, so maybe they were not worth the effort. Bad Points - They made minimaps. But only for the towns. The towns didn't need maps as much as dungeons. I don't know why they would only make maps for towns. It makes no sense. The graphics have been updated, but the sprites have not. They often stand out, in a bad way, on the map and in battles. The character art for Suikoden II was also upgraded with AI, and the results look slightly off. There is an autosave feature. But it only works in certain areas (where there is already a save point), so you may go 3-4 hours without the game saving. Equipping items is more difficult now in Suikoden I, and item management is even worse. Switch is only available at 30fps. Why? On larger screens, areas of towns and dungeons seem to be missing. They increased the field of view, but didn't fill it in. The water in most place in Suikoden II looks like a void. There is no texture or color difference. There are other display bugs I have seen on larger screens - white lines going across the screen for example. There is a dash feature now from the start, but you must continue holding the button. Why? Some of the other problems with the remaster as well: no convoy system in the first game, speeding up the battles will speed up the music, etc., Honestly, this feels lazy. I was really looking forward to updated versions of the games, but if this is what we can expect out of future installments, I'm not going to buy them.