Retrospective: The Five Secrets of Suikoden’s Success

Suikoden’s simple formula for a great RPG has seemingly been lost to the ages.

By: Jeremy Parish
December 17, 2011

In December 1996, Konami did something unprecedented, at least for them: They released a role-playing game in the U.S. The company was no stranger to the RPG genre, with both traditional variants (Super Famicom’s Madara) and action-based iterations (King Kong for Famicom) under its belt, but those games had never escaped the irresistible gravity of the Japanese market. This new effort, Suikoden, was the company’s bid to develop an international RPG presence. Launched in the early days of the PlayStation, Suikoden arrived in the fallow period between the Super NES’s RPG pinnacle and Final Fantasy VII‘s explosive debut.

While Suikoden wasn’t a runaway hit, it did well enough that Konami turned it into a steady franchise, releasing four direct sequels and almost half a dozen spin-offs over the following decade. Its sweeping sense of history and enormous cast of characters earned the series a modest but passionate fanbase. Though the series has become something of a footnote these days — a PSP spin-off is due in Japan in 2012, though its prospects for Western localization are grim due to the platform’s effective demise here — the games still command a loyal fan base who look back at Suikoden’s heyday and remember all it did right. On the occasion of the original game’s 15th anniversary, let’s look back at what made Suikoden both great and unique among its peers.