ULTIMATE Suikoden

A VANGUARD FOR THE FIRST ERA OF 32-BIT RPGS, YOSHITAKA MURAYAMA AND JUNKO KAWANO'S SUIKODEN PROVED THE STRONG FOUNDATION ESTABLISHED BY POPULAR 16-BIT CONSOLE RPGS AND BOLSTERED IT WITH NEW METHODS OF COMBAT, A STRIKING POLITICALLY DRIVEN NARRATIVE, AND AN ARMY'S WORTH OF RECRUITABLE CHARACTERS

- AIDAN MOHER

When young game designer Yoshitaka Murayama walked into his boss's office at Konami in the early Nineties, he planned to pitch a game inspired by popular football manga, Captain Tsubasa. He loved the way that series used its huge, memorable cast of supporting characters to create depth and breadth beyond what a single character can accomplish. Murayama knew, however, that his boss disliked manga, so, instead, he conjured a more palatable comparable for the game he wanted to make: Shi Nai’an’s classic Ming Dynasty novel Water Margin. Or, as it's known in Japanese, Suikoden.

Murayama charged into the meeting full of enthusiasm, but, to his chagrin, pitched the idea too well. “[My boss] asked me what kind of story it was going to be,” Murayama explained in a 1999 interview featured in the Gensou Suikoden II 108 Stars Character Guide. He explained that “it's going to have a lot of characters” and likened it to Water Margin. His boss replied, “Well, let's do that,” to the concept of a Suikoden game, complete with a huge cast of outlaws and a rebellious storyline. It wasn’t what Murayama had in mind, but his boss was convinced. “So we decided to make it,” Murayama laughed. “It turned out to be a challenging task."

A couple years before Suikoden, Squaresoft's classic Final Fantasy VI wowed players with its 14 main party members, and a handful of other playable characters. Compared to contemporaries like Chrono Trigger (seven), Final Fantasy V (five), and Lufia II: Rise Of The Sinistrals (four), 14 was an impressive number that allowed for great player agency and unique multiparty dungeon designs. Suikoden, on the other hand, hit 14 recruitable characters before breakfast.