YMMV / Suikoden

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Fire spears were a real thing.
  • To mount a naval assault, the rebels need to acquire five hundred boats impossibly fast, so they use a dragon's breath to freeze up a flotilla of skiffs from solid ice. With the apparently temperate climate around Lake Toran, this would be as far-fetched and temporary as it sounds, but it's not without a real-world counterpart: Pykrete. This mixture of water ice and sawdust was experimented with as a serious possibility for large ship hulls during WWII. The Mythbusters made a small boat hull using a modified recipe, and it worked rather well—for less than an hour.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Clive was so popular for a late-game guy with no plot relevance that the sequel gave him a vast optional (and easily missed) sub-plot to himself.
  • For someone who was offed very early in the game, Odessa Silverberg actually has a substantial fanbase. There were some extra materials to show her exploits before she bit the dust as a result.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Ho Yay: It's easy to read Gremio being this towards Tir. Almost every sentence he speaks relates in some way to the "young master". Though he claims he thinks of him as more of a son or brother.
• Moral Event Horizon: Windy crosses this either with the genocide of the elves, or the destruction of the Village of the Hidden Rune.
• Narm: Viktor says Pink Balloon during the scene where the party is discussing whether or not to execute Milich.
• Narm Charm:
  • The dragons look like dragons, act like dragons, and fly like dragons. What do they sound like when they roar? Elephants.
  • "X joins the entourage!" Sounds so much fancier than "party", don't you think?
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
• Player Punch: Quite a few, but one in particular established the Player Punch trend for future Suikodens: Gremio's Heroic Sacrifice in one of the most surreal Death Traps ever conceived.
• Polished Port: The Sega Saturn version, due to its inclusion of several new items, locations, and events, plus a new intro video.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Unlike later games in the series, you are frequently forced to use particular party members besides the Player Character in this one, usually up to two or three at a time, even for The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. This limits party customization somewhat, and gives you very few chances to recruit one late Star, as you need four free party slots, and you only occasionally get them. Suikoden II went on to address this with its convoy system.
  • The inventory system. Instead of a having a dedicated and organized party inventory, every character has its own Bag of Holding (only Plot Coupons have a separate folder) that can carry up to nine items (including gear, acessories, medicine, miscellaneous items and the Blinking Mirror that consumes a space). This became troublesome since you will be switching party members pretty often, and then lose track of who is holding what.
  • You cannot dash by default. To be able to run, you need to either have Stallion in your party or equipping an Holy Rune, which otherwise only provides low-to-mid-tier Gradual Regeneration and is often seen as a waste of a rune slot.
  • If a character joins you in the middle of the story and you're immediately thrusted into battle, you go straight to battle after dumping one of your other party members, the game won't care if this character is S-Ranged and thus is stuck at the bottom row and can't do anything except use items (This happens to Lepant and Kuromimi). Once again, Suikoden II addresses this by going straight to Formation menu after a character forcefully got themselves into the party (or failing that, allowing you to change row in the middle of battle).
• That One Boss:
  • The Zombie Dragon in Toran Castle. It has a massive amount of HP for how early you fight it, meaning it takes a long time to beat. Its attacks are also powerful, including one that hits the entire party at once. It also comes before you're able to customize your party, and while your magic options are still limited.
  • Another example is the Duel Boss against Teo, using Pahn. If you haven't been using him, (which you aren't required to after the beginning of the game), he'll be both on his own and underleveled for the fight, making it nearly impossible. While you're not required to win to continue with the game, if you lose, Pahn will die, which also locks you out of being able to get the Golden Ending. Also, the closest to the fight that you can save is before a scripted war battle, so you have to sit through that again if you want to retry the fight.
  • Neclord is incredibly tough, since you're stuck with THREE mandatory characters. Viktor might be fine since you might be using him quite a lot, but Cleo tends to be forgotten after getting your castle (which was way before), so she might be a few levels away from your main team, and then there's Hix, who's a newcomer and not exactly a stellar fighter (and he's short-ranged, so he had to be in the frontline lest he becomes The Load). Take all those and there's Neclord himself: almost all of his attacks are party-hitting attack and he tends to spam those, or if he happens to attack a single party member, it was powerful enough to bring them to critical health. And he has a crapton of HP to make this a dangerous slugfest. He's much easier in the sequel, but here, he's hard due to the primitive design of magic system and inventory management.
  • Lastly, there's Sonya Shulen. She's insanely fast so she almost always attacks first before half your party. She takes half-damage from all magic, counter attacks like crazy, and spams a powerful magic attack that can take out your melee fighters in two turns. On top of that, you have to fight her after beating the Shell Venus from the same dungeon, meaning you're likely to be low on spell casts, especially on a first playthrough.
• That One Sidequest: Recruiting Leon Silverberg. He can be easily found at Kalekka but will only join after your HQ upgrades to Level 4 (when it will have a giant flag). The problem is that you have to talk to Mathiu in the War Room to get a letter and give it him, and depending of the situation, Mathiu will be away. After you begin the invasion of Shasarazade, Mathiu will no longer be in there, making Leon impossible to recruit.
• Too Cool to Live:
  • Ted (your best friend), the original host of the Soul Eater Rune.
  • Odessa as well, although in this case dying did wonders for Flik's Character Development.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: With her rather masculine hairstyle, you'd be forgiven to mistake Cleo for male.
• The Woobie:
  • Futch after his dragon Black is killed, and he is exiled from the Dragon Knights as a result.
  • Leon Silverberg, who it seems is now content to live out his days in the ruins of a deserted village like an old hermit despite only being in his forties by the time the game starts. It gets worse when you read up on the backstory^note Leon was a famed strategist for the Scarlet Moon Empire and resorted to a False Flag Operation that destroyed the town in question with most of its inhabitants in order to inflame Imperial tensions toward a war with neighboring Jowston. This was effective but basically turned him into a pariah in the Imperial court. It seems that this fractured his relationships with his family as well. Odessa and Mathiu fell out with him and it seems that his son, George (not named in the games proper but he is the father of Albert and Caesar Silverberg) also fell out of contact with his father around this time, as Albert seems to have only met Leon once and Caesar doesn't mention remembering him at all. Considering that both his niece Odessa and nephew Mathiu die by the end of the game and that he is truly alone without his family.

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