Suikoden V

• 1. Introduction

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  Suikoden V arrived on the Sony PlayStation 2 in 2006 as the fifth and final main installment in Konami's long-running Suikoden series. Loosely drawn from the classical Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan by Shi Nai'an, it plants the player in the Queendom of Falena, a matriarchal nation where the first-born female inherits the throne. That small detail changes everything: politics, marriage, and war all pivot around which woman holds power and who she takes as a husband.

  The game sold around 200,000 copies in Japan, a figure that tells its own story. And yet it walked away with IGN's 2006 award for Best Story on the PlayStation 2, and the Danish magazine Gamereactor named it the ninth-best game of that year. How does a title with disappointing commercial numbers earn that kind of critical recognition? The answer lies in a civil war that nobody, not even the most sympathetic character, is entirely clean in causing.

• 2. A Queendom Under Pressure

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  Queen Arshtat rules Falena alongside her husband Ferid, and their steady partnership was itself the product of crisis. Before their marriage, Arshtat's mother and aunt had fought a covert struggle over succession, and the noble houses had nearly torn the nation apart competing for Arshtat's hand. That civil war was narrowly averted only because Ferid, a neutral outsider, won the Sacred Games and earned the right to marry her.

  The Sacred Games recur a generation later for Arshtat's daughter, the ten-year-old Princess Lymsleia. Two rival houses dominate the competition: the Barows, who favor trade and reconstruction with foreign nations, and the Godwins, who believe Falena needs to centralize and expand. A recent war with the neighboring New Armes Kingdom was fought on Barows-allied lands while the Godwins sat safely in the west of Falena, which goes some way toward explaining why the Barows want no further antagonism with Armes.

  Gizel Godwin, one of the main contestants, ultimately rigs the Sacred Games. His champion Childerich defeats a drugged Belcoot, the neutral candidate the royal family quietly backed. Lord Marscal Godwin, Gizel's father, is not even pleased by this outcome; he worries that his son has made enemies of the entire royal family through his scheming. Those worries prove well-founded. The Godwins respond by launching a preemptive attack at the engagement ceremony in Sol-Falena, bringing with them the elite Nether Gate assassins, and the assault ends with Arshtat and Ferid both dead and Lymsleia taken captive.

• 3. The Sun Rune's Weight

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  Falena's national treasure, the Sun Rune, is one of the 27 True Runes that the Suikoden universe holds responsible for creating the world itself. It can bring prosperity and growth, or destruction and calamity, depending on how it is wielded. Two years before the main story begins, Arshtat took the Sun Rune upon herself after residents of Lordlake stormed the East Palace near Sol-Falena and stole the Dawn Rune, one of the Sun Rune's "child" runes.

  Lordlake had previously been considered the most loyal of all Falena's towns. The theft read to Arshtat as an act of high treason. She used the Sun Rune to scorch Lordlake's vegetation, wildlife, and river, killing the town's leader, Lord Rovere, in the process. Since then, the normally compassionate Arshtat has grown erratic: prone to mood swings and wild fits of vengeance.

  What neither Arshtat nor her government knew at the start of the game was that the Barows faction had actually engineered the theft of the Dawn Rune. When the imprisoned tactician Lucretia Merces uncovers this, the revelation gives the Prince the political leverage to peel the Barows' own allies away from them. The recovered Dawn Rune then chooses the Prince as its new bearer, even though, as a male heir in a Queendom, he can never inherit the throne.

• 4. The 108 Stars and the Art of Recruitment

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  Like every game in the series, Suikoden V asks the player to recruit 108 Stars of Destiny, a roster drawn from the tradition of Shui Hu Zhuan. Some characters join automatically as the story demands; others require the Prince to find them at a specific moment or fulfill particular conditions, and can be missed entirely if the player is not paying attention.

  Several characters bridge Suikoden V to the rest of the series in deliberate ways. Because the game takes place six years before the original Suikoden and 142 years after Suikoden IV, characters like Georg Prime and Lorelai have their Falena stories function as prequels to their later appearances. Viki, Jeane, and Leknaat maintain their run of appearing in every Suikoden game released to that point.

  The recruitment system also has direct consequences for the story's ending. If very few optional Stars are recruited, Lyon, the Prince's royal bodyguard, dies from wounds sustained during the war and the Prince wanders off alone. Recruiting most but not all Stars sends the Prince into the world with Georg. Only collecting all 108 Stars keeps Lyon alive, and choosing to have treated Lymsleia kindly throughout the game opens a further option: the Prince can remain in Falena and become Commander of the Queen's Knights.

• 5. Sialeeds and the Long Game

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  The most discussed figure in Suikoden V's plot is not the Prince but his aunt Sialeeds, and the game earns that distinction through patience. For most of the story she advises the Prince and suggests bringing in Lucretia Merces, whose intelligence network exposes the Barows conspiracy. Then, at the moment the Prince is on the verge of capturing Lymsleia and ending the civil war, Sialeeds defects to Gizel Godwin's side and spirits the young queen away, prolonging the entire conflict.

  Her motives are only explained as she expires in the final battle for Sol-Falena. If the Prince had rescued Lymsleia when he first had the chance, Sialeeds believed, everything would simply have returned to the way it was before, with the same corrupt nobility maneuvering for power. Her calculation was that the nobility had to be completely and utterly ruined for the royal family to hold Falena securely. By acting in the Godwins' name, she arranged for the Prince and Lymsleia to be rid of their enemies without being the ones to destroy them.

  Gizel, felled by the Prince in a duel, uses his final words to declare that Sialeeds was the only real winner. Lymsleia dissolves the Senate after the war, though a new representative parliament replaces it. GameSpy praised the game precisely for this kind of layered political maneuvering, writing that Suikoden V has a plot that does not telegraph every twist or conform to embarrassing clichés.

• 6. Battle Systems Old and New

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  Six-person parties return in Suikoden V after Suikoden IV controversially reduced them to four, and reviewers noticed the reversal of that widely criticized change. Each of the six characters is individually controllable in combat, a contrast to the group-command structure of Suikoden III.

  Formations add a further layer. Characters can be arranged across a roughly six-by-four grid, and each formation adjusts the party's statistics and grants a unique special attack, sometimes trading defensive bonuses for offensive ones. The game runs at 60 frames per second and introduced a camera system similar to the top-down perspective of the first two games, making it the first three-dimensional Suikoden to replicate that viewpoint.

  The strategic war battles that the series has featured since its early installments return in real time, with continuous battlefield movement rather than the hex or square grids of earlier games. Land battles, naval battles, and combinations of both are all present. The underlying logic mirrors Rock, Paper, Scissors: cavalry beats infantry, infantry beats archers, and archers beat cavalry; at sea, ram ships are strong against archery ships, infantry ships defeat rams, and archery ships beat infantry ships. Special units, including beaver units and dragon cavalry that can move on both sea and land, add variables the basic triangle cannot account for.

• 7. Music and the Royal Philharmonic

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  The score for Suikoden V was the work of four Hudson Soft composers: Yoshihiro Tsukahara, Takashi Watanabe, Kuniyuki Takahashi, and Chiharu Mukaiyama. Konami veteran Norikazu Miura directed them. The opening theme, "Wind of Phantom", stands apart from that arrangement entirely: composed by Yuji Toriyama, conducted by Robin Smith, and performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

  The complete Genso Suikoden V OST, containing all the game's music in original form, was released on the 24th of March 2006. A shorter Limited Edition demo disc with ten tracks had been made available earlier, giving listeners a preview before the full release.

• 8. Reception and Legacy

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  Japanese sales reached 194,780 copies in 2006, compared to Suikoden IV's 303,069 on the same platform. Famitsu scored it one nine, two eights, and one seven, totaling 32 out of 40. Outside Japan, Metacritic classified it as receiving generally favorable reviews.

  The criticism was largely consistent across outlets. IGN described loading times in specific terms: moving between areas meant two-to-five-second loads, initiating a battle meant seven-to-ten-second loads, and even winning a skirmish brought four-to-six-second loads afterward. Game Revolution called the army battles and in-engine cutscenes blocky and raw while reserving praise for the CGI cutscenes, towns, and condemning the dungeons as bland, maze-like nightmares.

  But the story held reviewers' attention despite those technical complaints. GameSpot singled out the series' long-standing ability to make its massive cast feel distinct through just a few exchanges of dialogue, and noted the sheer number of interesting people the player encounters. The Gamereactor award for Best Story overall, shared with IGN's equivalent PlayStation 2 prize, reflected a consensus that whatever else Suikoden V stumbled over, the political architecture built around the Queendom of Falena and the 108 Stars who inhabit it was the series at its most carefully constructed. That the director Takahiro Sakiyama drafted the scenario framework on the very day after being asked to lead the project gives that achievement an additional dimension worth sitting with.