Phoenixsong

Looks like we're matched up for the semi-finals in the 2009 tournament! Hard to imagine a more dramatic way to break that 1-1 tie between us (except in the finals but oh well). Good luck to you and see you in a week~

I second the motion for Uguutina.

giratina must make a substitute, it must. we will all be very disappoint if we never get an uguutina.

*To Giratina* Try ketchup next time.

Aaaaa such a lovely crossover idea! Thanks for sharing.

Make it mutual, then.

Now that nidoroyalty battle is looking more like an opponent eating contest.

Now I'm glad there's no feasible way a Nidoking would manage to eat a Nidoqueen.

The only time Cecile is remotely creepy is in her bath scene with Chris where she ends up talking about Chris's, and I quote, 'boobies'. And even there she's going like I WANT TO GROW UP TO BE PRETTY AND AWESOME LIKE YOU. Usually she's just badass if a little prone to making snap decisions (CHAAAAAAAARGE) without thinking about it. And also to yelling things like GREEDY WINDBAG! IF YOU COME BACK, THE ONLY THING YOU'LL GET IS MY WEAPON IN YOUR REAR END! I love her; she is great.

Also this is the best physical attacker in the game. Without me having put any of the particularly minmaxy runes on her, I consistently see her do around 2500 damage a round. Everyone else is doing maybe 1000. :D

The battle system's a bit different in III from the rest (instead of commanding each party member, you have three pairs who you tell what to do, and depending on what skills you've raised up on them, they'll react differently. So if you have a Knight (mixed defence and attack) paired with someone who's casting, the knight will make sure nothing interrupts your caster and then kick ass) but it's mostly the same but with confusing whirlwind of viewpoints. Also you can play through all of one character's chapters in a row if you want, though that's really only a good idea with Thomas's chapters since they're mostly irrelevant. With everyone else, it's more fun to have the background of who's doing what and why. :3

I do like things being pretty! :|a going to have to figure out how to acquire a copy, though.

Well, Hugo, Chris, and Geddoe are the main protags, and Thomas has two chapters devoted to him trying to get Budehuc Castle slightly out of debt (or at least out of debt enough that they don't need to fire their castle guard (why yes, that is a twelve year old girl, and Cecile has the highest strength and skill growth in the game, so she is a twelve year old girl you should not make angry), and Koroku is completely and utterly skippable, and Luc's chapter is postgame and takes about an hour, maybe an hour and a half if you're me and talk to absolutely everyone. SuikoIII has this thing where there are a billion different factions and it changes viewpoint so everyone looks like an asshole at least some of the time. There's Grassland (team Hugo) and the Zexen Knights (team Chris) and the Harmonian Southern Defence Force (team Geddoe) and the Destroyers (team Luc) and Harmonia (team Sasarai) and Budehuc Castle (team Thomas) and the rest of Zexen (team Thomas's dad, who is named but fuck if I can remember it. ... Councilman Lowma! Nevermind, I did remember it) and Le Buque (team Franz). Is that everyone? Well, that's everyone if you don't count Apple and Caesar as their own faction which they sort of are and if you count Albert (Luc's strategist) as part of team Luc or team Sasarai rather than on his own side. Oh, and Tinto (team Lilly), though Lilly doesn't get involved with the politicking during III. And that's assuming that you consider all of Grassland as one entity instead of six and a half.

Did I mention III has a lot of factions? ... I have this strange feeling I'm forgetting someone.

But anyway III has this thing where it is a huge clusterfuck and like half of the game is OKAY EITHER SOMETHING FISHY IS GOING ON OR SOME OF MY STARS OF DESTINY ARE LYING TO ME OR BOTH (it's both) and only Salome (Chris's strategist) and Geddoe have a clue why everyone's doing what they're doing, and half of Salome's clue is because he's in touch with Geddoe. And of course whenever Chris and Lucia (Hugo's mum, who's the real head of their faction) are in the same place they're too busy with the whole ... war ... thing to compare stories to make sure they're currently trying to kill each other for things the other person actually did. And their respective tendencies to problem solve by lighting shit on fire means that even if they DID compare stories and figured out how much of their grievances are accurate, they'd still have plenty of reasons to try to kill each other. Somehow I think "I TOLD ALL OF MY MINIONS TO NOT HURT ANYONE WHILE THEY BURNED DOWN YOUR VILLAGE" is not an acceptable excuse.

It's pretty awesome, but I can definitely see why they only did it that way for one game. Particularly since the game ends with everyone's armies teaming up to go beat up four people and then GAME OVER; WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEIR POLITICKING NEEDS A RESOLUTION? Well, there's no real resolution if you picked Hugo as your main main character; if you picked Chris, Chris and Lucia are like ":Db you're pretty cool and I look forward to meeting you again, whether it be at the next attempt at a peace treaty or on the battlefield. GOOD LUCK WITH EVERYTHING. I ENJOY TRYING TO KILL YOU". I haven't seen the ending for Geddoe yet. I suspect it'll involve Sasarai being very friendly about the fact that half of the mercenaries under his command left to go defend everyone else from Harmonia.

So like, III is the game taking place last in the timeline and I bet that's probably because there's no way in hell that they're not going to repeat at least half of the everyone being at war with everyone else thing in the near future. Except this time, Sasarai'll know exactly who to send his spies/assassins after. GJ EVERYONE


I definitely leaned on the Tower of Valni and the skirmishes :< But haaaa I adored the support convos. They are great. ... The Suikoden series tends to have ridiculous bath sequences between characters with goodwill for each other (there aren't any in I, and only three in II, but III-V have a bunch and they're almost all hilarious), but Rhapsodia actually has goodwill conversations that work a loooooot like FE's support conversations except you don't have a five points per character cap. :D Complete with the stat boosts (well, increased chance of your goodwill partners popping in to do combo attacks or halve damage received) as you level up the convos! And ... I'd like to say a lot of them are ridiculous, but IV (and by extension Rhapsodia) has a bunch of nothing characters so sadly there's only so much they can do, but enough of them are funny.

I'll try FE7 sometime, though! :D


Sigh. Maybe they had a new person do the models for the horses!

SuikoI has way fewer little random details than the rest of the series. I sort of wonder what you've noticed that I didn't comment about! But you probably don't remember.

I love all of the protags in this series. Tir doesn't have many memorable dialogue options, but Riou does things like try to make friends by throwing rocks at people's heads, and the gang in III are all special in their own little ways (Hugo ... isn't that memorable, really, but I love his mum so much; Chris solves her problems by lighting things on fire and does things like challenge her father to a duel to the death for the crime of ... killing her father ...; Geddoe alternates between being a deadpan snarker and sitting in an empty bar in the dark all alone staring at the wall; Thomas says "Ladders aren't my strong point..."; Koroku ... is a dog ...; and Luc honestly doesn't seem to understand why trying to destroy the world makes people not like him very much. He also doesn't have time for ladders.), and Lazlo seems to like his tiny island in the middle of nowhere enough that "No, really! A beach house would be nice!" is a bad ending line for him, and Kyril's mum is a goat, and Frey claims to have gotten something at the 'magic bust shop', and Sieg ... "I need a rope!" Oh, and Nash travels wherever the sneeze takes him. (Tir is I, Riou is II, Nash is gaidens, Hugo/Chris/Geddoe/Thomas/Koroku/Luc are III, Lazlo is IV, Kyril is Rhapsodia, Frey is V, Sieg is Tierkreis. Out of them, Tir, Riou, Lazlo, and Frey are silent protagonists, sort of; Riou and Frey have a ton of small talk dialogue options.)

I had a lot of trouble with FE8 :< I mean, it was yeaaaaaars ago, but still. I am slightly concerned about that possibly being the easiest game in the series.

Aggggh, horses with the legs bending the wrong way! Suikoden has spoiled me; they tend to pay absurd attention to detail at times. Like, say, when you play as Chris and have her run, she keeps moving for a step or two after you let go of the controls to have her stop, because she's in a ton of armour. If she's currently not wearing her armour, though, she can stop on a dime like everyone else.


I can wall of text at people about Suikoden for hours, particularly now that I've actually played the whole series. I'm hardly going to take offence at Fire Emblem walls of text.

I'm divided on whether to get Valeria or Kasumi this SuikoII playthrough. On one hand, Valeria can break the damage limit. On the other hand, getting Kasumi lets you recruit the other ninjas earlier, and if you have her with you while doing Tir's sidequest, she and Tir have a conversation. Well. I say conversation. Kasumi tries to talk to him about how everyone's doing after the war and he stares blankly and eventually she apologises for bothering him and leaves. I have no idea why there are people who ship them seriously; they are never going to get anywhere ever and if they do, Kasumi will probably die horribly. But Kasumi's attempts are hilarious and she's apparently gotten far enough that they eat lunch together awkwardly.

I sort of love that in II Tir is no longer completely silent. He tends to go like "... ... ... Let's go..." while buildings are collapsing around him and the rest of your party's like WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!! He just ... doesn't seem to give a shit. He still has Lassie-like telepathy, though; he just talks occasionally.

Meanwhile the protagonist in IV, Lazlo, talks in Rhapsodia if you loaded a good ending IV file in the beginning of the game and he, like, uses complete sentences and everything. He's also incredibly weird. YES, LAZLO, TWO CRABS TWICE AS TALL AS YOU ARE AND A BUNCH OF 8' TALL FROG MONSTERS TOTALLY QUALIFY AS 'DINNER'. Eh, it's more normal than dropping buckets of water or pianos or confetti on his stars of destiny depending on his mood as they confess their sins. ... Which is an actual minigame in IV.

Suikoden IV is the only game I can think of where having your protagonist declare he wants a beach house means you get a bad ending.


I got through SuikoII in about forty hours both of my previous playthroughs. This one's at like 30 hours already but I'm leaving it running while I do other things a lot and doing an lp seems to at least triple my playtime anyway. 16 hours is doable, though, and 20 hours upper limit is required for Clive Quest unless you're going to be like me and edit saves or use gameshark codes or something to drop the play time low enough for Clive Quest.


Try FFX sometime, then! Especially with running commentary.

Ahhhhh I should play more Fire Emblem. Only game I've played is Sacred Stones, which I enjoyed but I've heard it's one of the worse ones?

I'm not fluent but I have all of the art and can puzzle through the script eventually. Also there are vague plot summaries for all but the Elza and Viki arcs. For some reason, whoever did the summaries (HowlingVoice I think is their handle) didn't bother with those. :( But thankfully Viki arc is really easy to follow: it is a series of random events with no real meaning, because Viki keeps sneezing and travelling through time by accident. It's got things like Tir and Kasumi on a date. ... Their date consists of Kasumi trying to start up conversation while Tir stares at a fishing pole and occasionally comments about Ted. Tir and Kasumi's romantic subplot makes me laugh; they're completely inept at it. I don't know what the hell happened in Elza arc, though.

Yeah, I think SuikoIII and V are probably about that long. V's longer than III probably but III has a lot more dungeons to waste time in. I think I finished III in about 90 hours? I'm not sure what my V playtime is: I played a new game+ so it's hard to tell.

Haha, Final Fantasy games are pretty bad. They're entertainingly corny, but they're not ... actually good.... I often enjoy them, but pretty much entirely because I'm playing it with my mum and possibly some friends running commentary. Good gameplay, fucking terrible writing. I quite liked FFTA.

If you don't end up liking the main series gameplay, you should totally try Rhapsodia/Suikoden Tactics. :Db

Well, if you're going to play the gaidens, or more accurately (given that afaik you're not fluent in Japanese) look at the pretty pictures and some people's plot summaries, it's good to have II fresh in your mind given that Suikogaiden I takes place during II and Suikogaiden II takes place ... one year? I think? after II. And Rhapsodia is a few years before and after IV.

Play Rhapsodia right after playing IV; IV is not really a finished game and it doesn't actually make much sense or have much in the way of characterisation without Rhapsodia as context. (Rhapsodia's English title is Suikoden Tactics, but Rhapsodia is a better name.) Gamestop has Rhapsodia for $5, so it's dirt cheap, too.

I've never played Tales of Symphonia! My frames of reference for really long games are SuikoIII, SuikoV, FFX, and FFXII. I don't know how they compare, particularly since for III I spent hoooooours wandering around looking for loot. ... And checking to see what everyone's thoughts on ladders and on looting corpses are.

Ladders. My, aren't humans helpless.

pcsxr, 32 bit .deb for psxfin (and here is where I got it), Windows psxfin, european suikoI, PSX bios, aaaaaand I'd offer a link to european suikoII but I don't have a convenient download link.

Yeah, I've only been using Chakra since ... Wednesday.... I find it kind of interesting? I don't know. I haven't really decided my thoughts on it yet.

... Chronological order is first two hours of Tactics/Rhapsodia -> IV -> rest of Tactics/Rhapsodia -> V -> I -> II -> gaidens (no english release and about a third of them's been translated, but not much important happens other than what's up with Jowy during a significant bit of II being explained and there're at least two offhand mentions to Suikogaiden events in SuikoIII) -> III. Tactics and IV don't really have much to do with anything other than V, though, and even there the only real relationship between them is there's a puppet show in V about the plot of IV. Their irrelevance is probably because IV takes place 150 years before I, so the only recurring characters are Ted and Leknaat and Jeane and Viki. And as far as the Ted bits go, it just reveals that he spent a sizable length of time angsting in an illusory ship populated almost entirely by skeletons and zombie dildo monsters while wearing this. Oh, Ted. Oh, and he also collected a creepy stalker who then died in a 'mysterious accident' (opinions vary on whether Ted decided he liked him and then Aldo dies because Soul Eater or Ted got fed up with the weird clingy guy following him around everywhere and accidentally, idk, shot him in the back 27 times.). ... IV really isn't relevant to anything other than Rhapsodia. Rhapsodia's pretty awesome though.

II and V are the games that stand up best by themselves, though, so if you only feel like actually playing one game, pick II. V's very good, but it's long as hell; II is beatable in around 16 hours, while V is ... V probably has at least that many hours of cutscene. I would not be surprised. It's not a movie or anything -- there is a lot of gameplay in between cutscenes -- but V is really long. Like ... holy shit that is a long game.

I use psxfin! It works pretty well. I've tried pcsx, too, but I don't like it as much. I think ePSX is the one people recommend most often? But afaik ePSX doesn't have any linux builds, while pcsx runs fine on both my laptop running Ubuntu 10.10 and my Chakra desktop, and psxfin runs fine on my laptop. psxfin is finicky as hell, though, and doesn't work in 11.04 and later, but I like it a lot more than pcsx. If you need me to procure download links for you, I can do that. Note that I and II can run faster than full speed on both of the computers I have easy access to and their specs are ... not very good. 1.6 GHz cpus and 2 GB ram. SuikoII is a much better game than SuikoI; note that I have links to my memory card file in my lp thread somewhere so if you want to just start with II and load save data from I, you can totally do that. Though Tir'd be named a series of stars so people will keep referring to LORD [STARS] or [STARS] MCDOHL.

I have PCSX2 installed to emulate SuikoIII-V at some point (I do own physical copies and have a ps2 about five feet from me, but I very much want to take screencaps and I kind of want to do a suikoIII lp after finishing II if I somehow get a computer that can run it), but note that suikoIII is fucking hard to emulate. IV, Tactics, and V are all doable without amazing hardware, but III needs a 4 GHz cpu to run at full speed.

(I'd not recommend playing III without having played I and II first; it's a direct sequel and while it'd work fine by itself, it's the last part of an arc. I -> II -> III are an arc, and IV and Rhapsodia/Tactics are an arc, and V -> II are an arc sort of (V is pretty clearly intended as a prequel to II even though they take place on opposite sides of the world) though whichever order you play those doesn't really matter. Also SuikoIII never had a European release just fyi. There's a manga adaptation that's very good except for them picking the boring protagonist to be the main protag. Even if Hugo is canonical, he is waaaaaay less interesting than Chris or Geddoe. I am disappoint.)

Playing Suikoden and ... ... ... I'll figure out something else I've been doing lately. Uh ... I set up my desktop? ... Yeah, I'm out of ideas.

Yyyyyyeah I am rather familiar with that. There are internet hugs if you want them! :Db? And -- ... ... ... I don't actually know how conversations work. It is a secret; do not tell anyone.

So what have you been doing lately, if anything?

:( I do not actually pay attention to asb really. I hope you feel better! I would say something more specific but I don't know what's up with you so I don't ... know what's appropriate...

what's up! I saw the thingy about the asb thingy and I am super intrigued but also I am bored did you know I am bored I have decided that punctuation is unnecessary
because
then
you read this like I'm talking really really fast
or possibly not very fast but without really pausing sensibly
because
I
am
bored
and
tired

SO WHAT'S UP 8D

Hi Kratos!