The Suikoden series has gone through some bizarre changes over the course of its lifespan. After the first two, fairly modest games, a plan was hatched to make the third game an ambitious fantasy epic, with sweeping changes to gameplay and, for the first time, full 3D graphics. Suikoden III was both a success and a failure; the story was groundbreaking and riveting, but elsewhere the game lagged. Sensing fans longed for a return to form, Konami tapped Junko Kawano, the creator of the first game in the series, to helm the latest installment. The result is, sadly, less than compelling.

The game starts simply. The main character, whom you name, is a young knight trainee on the small island of Razril. As always with Suikoden, the important factors of the story are both political and personal -- there's a grasping wannabe empire on the horizon, but you also have to deal with the ambitions and incompetence of your best friend, Snowe Vingerhut. For the first time in the series, the characters are fully voiced, and the quality is very competent, which helps the story immensely. But in a misguided about-face from the last game, the developers have decided once again to make the hero silent, as the heroes of Suikoden and Suikoden II were. This was much more plausible in the era of small, 2D characters. It doesn't work very well this time around.

The story revolves around one of the True Runes, magical symbols which become embedded in the hands of characters throughout Suikoden's world. The Rune of Punishment, a particularly dark and powerful one, becomes grafted to the hand of our lead character, and in the process he's outcast from his home on Razril and estranged from his pal Snowe. Of course, it's your job to take your rune and your wits and build an army capable of defending the nations under attack by your avaricious enemies.


Instead of a traditional field map with a few continents, Suikoden IV takes place in a very small chain of islands. Hey -- that's different; that's cool. But, unfortunately, there are problems. Vast stretches of ocean lie between the different locales, and between the unbelievably faulty ship navigation and the endless, frequent, simplistic and unchallenging random battles, you're in for a world of tedium (until you recruit the teleporter chick Viki, anyway).

Suikoden III tried hard (but ultimately failed) to inject some interesting strategy into the series' creaky battle system. Suikoden IV is, as ever, back to basics -- and how basic it is. More basic, in fact, than 1996's Suikoden. You have fewer characters to work with -- just four -- and there's not much to do besides attack and use a few spells. With last year's crop of games all showing off interesting twists in battling -- Shadow Hearts: Covenant's Judgment Ring and combo attacks; Star Ocean's action-packed melees; Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne's brutal Press Turn battles -- there's something incredibly stultifying about this game's complete lack of strategy or difficulty in the battling sphere. The sole consolation? They're over quickly.