Must Collect More Stars…

If you're not familiar with the Suikoden series, the basic overview is that you play some hero type guy and you come across some wrong in the world that needs righting (usually they're politically based storylines. Warring kingdoms, that sort of thing) and eventually stumble your way onto a castle. Then you begin to gather your army with 108 recruitable characters hidden across the game world. Some you get automatically, some you can stumble upon…others are very hard to recruit.

I've played Suikoden 1 and 5 (wish I could play 2…but that's so freaking expensive these days) and really enjoyed them. So it was to my surprise that there was a new DS game that was released in the series. I actually stumbled onto it via browsing around gamefly…

I've been playing it pretty much nonstop all weekend It's very good. It's not exactly like a main Suikoden series game in several ways, most notably all the characters are different since they consider it a spin-off game. Other differences include a story line that's tilting a little more fantasy based although not much more than a normal game really. They also chucked the large scale army battles which is understandable and got rid of the leveling up of weapons in favor of a more standard inventory system. But overall…it feels very suikoden-y.

It isn't without it's problems. Mainly the voice acting is HORRIBLE. Why do companies keep insisting on trying to put voice acting on DS games??? It's stupid, serves no purpose and is almost universally horrible!

But the story is good and engaging, the battle system is fun and I'm finding myself pulled in enough to try to find all the extra hidden quest characters and stuff on my first play-through. Definitely think I'm going to be using the keep it option on this through gamefly.