Few series continue to influence entire industries three decades down the line – fewer still if we’re talking about relatively obscure Japanese role-playing games. Suikoden, however, fits that bill. The recently-remastered JRPGs in which you’re able to recruit 108 characters to your cause are about far more than collecting ‘em all. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, Aidan Moher, freelance writer and author of upcoming book Suikoden 1 & 2, takes us to class.
We begin by discussing the many reasons why Moher felt these games in particular were worthy of an entire book, including their pre-9/11 historical context and the specific team-based nature of their development. Then we discuss news from the eye of the pre-GDC storm: Next week, thousands of game developers will convene in San Francisco to network and exchange knowledge, but a growing number of non-US-based devs are dropping out due to Trump’s hostile policies and erratic governance.
After that we talk about Sony and Microsoft both introducing new unwanted AI features in the same week. Whose is worse? We’ll let you decide. Lastly, we design the one product that should include generative AI: a fucked-up private jet for rich people that definitely works just fine.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can eventually hire exactly 108 writers, reporters, and heck, maybe even some kind of battle chef to work at Aftermath.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Aidan: [The book talks about] how these things were important in the mid-90s as we were entering into a period of geo-political turmoil. We were only a few years away from 9/11 and everything that entailed. And so looking at the series contextually, we were able to have that conversation with the context of being adults who understand all of that better than we did when we first played it.
Nathan: As somebody who hasn’t really played these games, I know them as the series where you can collect 108 potential party members. How does that tie into what you’ve been talking about so far: these themes of war and how it impacts people?
Aidan: I think there’s two interesting angles on that: The first is that Suikoden bucked the trend of so many RPGs that look at exceptional people doing exceptional things. You’ll go in, and it’ll be princesses or brilliant scientists or knights who get turned into frogs; I’m describing Chrono Trigger. I think Suikoden is so remarkable because it does something the original Star Wars movies did really well, which is showing normal people doing exceptional things.
With a huge cast of 108 recruitable characters, not all of them have a big impact on the story. Not all of them are usable in combat. But they all fill a role in this community that you build. And so you have people who are rising up. They’re sort of powerless. There’s one woman you recruit sorta late into the game, and she’s in a poor town. She just washes clothes. She’s a washer woman. But she joins your party because she recognizes she can bring something to the community that does not exist. So she’s there with former generals of the enemy, powerful magic users – everybody across that gamut.
That is what war is, that is what conflict is in societies: Everybody has a role to play, everybody can bring something to that. You couldn’t do that with just a cast of nine people. You’d have to give them each a defined role in the game.
Chris: I think what the Final Fantasies of the world do is, they get you really invested in your main character. You have this sunk cost fallacy of “Well, if my main character’s in there, he’s the important one. He’s where I put all my gear, all my stuff, all my things.” It gets in the way of storytelling, I find. In Live A Live, you get a completely different perspective because they don’t give you enough time to have that sense of possession over your character. Saga Frontier is like a bunch of little eight-hour RPGs that all intersect with each other. Oh, Chrono Cross! That has 49 characters in it. It’s not the same [as Suikoden], but you get a lot of perspective.
I think there’s something powerful about this thing that really limits a lot of RPG storytelling, which is “You’re the special boy.” It makes the investment in a character hurt more, like with Aerith [from Final Fantasy VII], but it also means you can’t have characters really die or live. Final Fantasy VI, in the second act, whether or not you get those characters [after the world ends] is one of the reasons why it’s one of my favorites. Final Fantasy Tactics – all these things. There’s a malleability to RPGs that you don’t usually see. Suikoden is weird, and I like a weird game.
Aidan: It is a weird game, and it allows you to have that sort of agency within that experience, because it’s weird. It allows you to explore war in the way that you want to or what makes sense to you. That’s how you construct your party. A lot of people nowadays get caught up in the idea that there’s 108 characters, and you’ve gotta get all of them, and the only correct way to play the game is to collect every character.
Nathan: The Pokemon mentality.
Aidan: Exactly. And you get a special ending if you collect all 108 characters; there’s incentive for it. But [creator] Yoshitaka Murayama’s intent was always for people to go through the game and miss characters. So Nathan, you, Chris, and me would all end up with a different assortment of community – a different community we built up around ourselves. That was always the intent. Conflict and community is what you build up around yourself.
Secondarily to that, and kind of getting back to what Chris was talking about with scope, Jason [Schreier] likes to liken Suikoden to Game of Thrones, the Game of Thrones of JRPGs. But Suikoden actually predates the first Game of Thrones book, which I think is really remarkable. And I think it speaks to a lot of what was going on not just in video games, but epic fantasy at the time – that we were seeing this big explosion of scope where bringing in many, many viewpoints and looking at conflict through many eyes became important to fantasy.
In the ‘80s we saw a lot of sword and sorcery-style adventure fantasy. Raymond Feist, Terry Brooks. And then in the ‘90s we started to get the Wheel of Times and Game of Thrones that tried to do the same thing Suikoden was doing, which was [to] show that this is complex. There are many, many different sides and motivations. Sometimes they’re at odds. Sometimes they cross over. Sometimes they cross over for a little bit, and then they get pulled apart. I think that holds up really well in these games – even now, even though they’re 30 years old.
