As a teenager, I was a member of an Internet forum filled with some of the web’s biggest nerds, losers, social outcasts and shut-ins. Among our unwashed, sunlight-deprived numbers was a particularly persistent troll – or annoying online personality for those who don’t know their Internet jargon – who always liked to call us out on how pathetic we were. On Saturday nights, she would frequently point out that we were virgins because we were at home watching anime instead of actually socializing. She would constantly remind us of how ugly we were. She would burst into topics discussing social etiquette and explain that we were “doing it wrong” (she was right on that count usually). I would say that this troll was all-around a very abrasive person.

While this troll made my time spent at my nerd’s haven pretty unbearable, I’m certainly glad that she was around. For one thing, she was kind of right about us even though she was just as lonely and pitiful as the rest of us were. But this isn’t the actual reason I’m glad she was present.

In topics discussing videogame plot lines, you could always bet that she would show up and post the same thing: “All videogame storylines, including your Final Fantasies, are shit and could never be compared to those of movies and books. The only exceptions are LucasArts adventure games, Planescape: Torment and Suikoden II.” This post became like a mantra of hers which only furthered to expose her hypocrisy – what kind of ‘cool’ person is a connoisseur of video game storylines?!

Reading her constant assaults on game plots made me curious to try out her exceptions – after all, games like Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger had great plots! This was how I thought back then, anyway, and they did have great plots for videogames… but if they were, say, made into books their weak, forced storylines and cardboard cut-out characters would be exposed in all their lazily-written glory to an actually discerning audience.

So first I tried my hand at some LucasArts adventure games. These are like Saturday morning cartoons on crack, with a level of wit and humour that wouldn’t be out of place in early Simpsons episodes. The magnum opus of LucasArts adventure games would have to be Grim Fandango – my favourite game – with a film-noir style, fascinating characters, an interesting world and an epic storyline spanning four years.

Then I tried Planescape: Torment. This game was like an interactive fantasy novel. I hate reading on computer screens generally, but I read every word of this game. There are up to 800,000 words of prose in the game. I say ‘up to’ because you’ll never see it all your first time through – there are just that many different ways to get through the game. It’s addictive and completely engaging in a way that great works of fantasy are. I would say it deserves a place among J.K Rowling, Tolkein and George RR Martin… but it will be ignored just because it was expressed through the video game medium.

It was not until these summer holidays when I got to play Suikoden II for the first time. So, does it live up to the expectations that Ms. Troll set for it? Would it be worth playing purely for its storyline – if the game play were stripped away to leave only a plot, would it still be worthwhile? Read on to find out.

Suikoden II was released in 2001 in Australia, on a very limited run. Because it didn’t sell very well, no other copies were ever produced – making it extraordinarily rare. Try searching for it on eBay now, and you’ll see copies selling for up to $400. I can tell you right now that while the game is great, it’s not $400 great… but then, how many things are?

The moment the game begins, JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) veterans will feel as though they are in comfortingly familiar territory. You play as a character who you name yourself who carries a pair of sticks which he uses as a weapon – I rather creatively named him ‘Sticks’ – and his tale begins in an encampment as a member of some Youth Soldiers. A war has just ended, with a peace treaty between your nation and the opposing nation having just been signed, and you’re on your way home when *gasp* there’s an attack! Naturally, everyone except for the main character and his step-brother are killed.

This is all fairly predictable territory so far – but suppress your yawn! This attack was led by Prince Luca Blight… the prince of your own country, and one of the most infamous villains in gaming history. Yes, the game begins with your own country, royalty nonetheless, attacking your encampment for seemingly no reason.

What unfolds from here is an interesting tale in which we become more familiar with Luca Blight’s plans. Unfortunately, the plan he intends to carry out is a giant cliché and nothing new for RPG players. Fortunately, there’s much more to the plot than Luca’s plan and these other plot elements are so engrossing that it makes the game difficult to put down.

Luca Blight himself is a great character who has been written as “pure evil” rather than “evil, but really cool nonetheless” – a serious problem in JRPGS in which you can tell the writers have tried too hard to make the villain likeable. A scene early in the game shows his army ransacking a village, with Luca holding a woman at sword point. “If you act like a dog, I’ll spare your life,” he demands. The woman complies, and then Luca kills her anyway – saying that it was no big deal as he has only killed a dog.

We also meet plenty of other characters – one hundred and eight of which can join your party – each of which have their own unique story and background. Some of the characters are actually quite likeable and memorable – we have the genius strategist who is able to turn the tides of war against overwhelming odds, a private eye who seems to know everything and has his own detective movie-style theme music and a vampire hunter whose family has been hunting this one elusive vampire, Neclord, for generations.

The villains can be brilliant, too. Luca Blight is great because he’s just so evil – but the really effective villains are those that aren’t evil at all. There are a few antagonists, and one in particular, who are genuinely good people – I would go so far as to say that they are more virtuous and caring than the main character – it’s just that you are forced to fight against them due to the war and circumstances beyond either of your control. I would say that including “good” villains is the true masterstroke of this game. Eventually, the true enemy in the game becomes, in the players’ mind, not any particular villain but rather the hopeless, everybody-loses nature of the war itself.

The game play is your standard turn-based JRPG stuff. You have a party of up to six, you can have standard attacks and magic, some characters make excellent mages and healers, others are better for brute force, blah, blah, blah. I can’t say anything special about the game play. You’ve seen the battle system before, you’ve seen character customization before and you’ve seen the walk-around-towns-talking-to-people thing before that is always used outside of battles. The only game play element that is that worthy of comment would be the magic system – certain types of magic, called runes, are equippable and the type of magic your characters are able to use depends on the runes that they have equipped. The higher your characters magic stat, the more powerful the magic. I certainly prefer this system over being forced to learn certain types of magic, but there are still many other games that do it better.

Oh, and there is also the occasional SRPG section to mix up the game play a little. (SRPGs, for those who don’t know, are games in which you have a bunch of units that take turns attacking each other and moving over a grid. It’s sort of like chess.) These parts are stupid and are like extremely stripped down versions of real SRPGs. If it weren’t for the plot revelations that occur during these parts they would be very boring indeed.

The graphics are passable, and I’d prefer if the music were a little catchier, but the aesthetic stuff does the job.

So the game play is good, but generic – which means that the game’s saving grace would have to be its storyline. As explained above, the game does have a great story, the best I’ve ever played in a JRPG. Interesting characters, and plot twists which sometimes come as such a surprise that you may have to briefly stop playing just so that you can absorb the shock. As the troll mentioned at the start of this review stated, it is certainly better than the routine storyline of a Final Fantasy game.

But could the plot be transplanted beyond its medium? Would people watch a Suikoden II movie?

No. Never – characters join up with the main character and fight to the death for him for no apparent reason, and the main character is often forced to go through lengthy series’ of passageways in which he must battle monsters with poorly explained reasons to thrust him there. These are elements that we as gamers are more than willing to forgive, and even have come to expect, in an RPG – which would make no sense at all in any other medium.

So while the plot of the game is first-rate for a videogame, it would never translate well into, say, a film or a novel. But who cares? While Ms. Troll may have been wrong about this one (despite being very right about LucasArts adventure games and Planescape: Torment) Suikoden II is still well worth playing if you can get it for less than $400. The plot will still keep you motivated to play through the game, and the game play is adequate.

I’m certainly glad I listened to the troll on this one… despite ignoring her attacks on our lack of socializing and refusal to go outside. Incidentally, I played through most of this 40-hour game in a single week. While on holiday at the Gold Coast.

Score: 8/10