Ranking moments with multiple parties

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ChikouStar
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Ranking moments with multiple parties

Post by ChikouStar »

How would you rank the different moments in the series where you're forced to use multiple parties? These are often big climactic battles, so I thought it would be fun to discuss which were the best and the worst, based on both gameplay and the story aspect. Off the top of my head, there are five: the Night Raid in SII, the Ceremonial Battle in SIII, the Raid on Fort El-Eal in SIV, and the New Queen's Campaign and the Ashtwal Mountains in SV.

I think the Night Raid is obviously ahead based on the challenge of Luca Blight's fights, and how they've built up to him as a villain so well to this point in the game. I'd probably put the Ashtwal Mountains and El-Eal after, just because as final dungeons, they provided good challenge, and it was definitely fun to use some of the different characters you had collected up to that point.

I'd put the Ceremonial Battle after that, which for me, wasn't as great as it could've been, although it was fun as well. The New Queen's Campaign comes last because while I get the idea of what they were going for, the fights were definitely too easy, and SV's overall graphics just couldn't make the moment seem as epic as it should've been.
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wataru14
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Re: Ranking moments with multiple parties

Post by wataru14 »

The Night Raid is the most fun for me because of A) the sheer number of people you need to bring and B) not a lot of people are sufficiently leveled. You have to prepare and I get a real sense of achievement trying to win each of the three legs of the battle (only Riou's squad needs to beat Luca, the others can lose and the story still continues).
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gildedtalon
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Re: Ranking moments with multiple parties

Post by gildedtalon »

Luca fight can be glitched with solo Riou
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sticky-runes
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Re: Ranking moments with multiple parties

Post by sticky-runes »

the fight with Luca is the best one for me. Like Wataru mentioned, it is still fairly early (maybe halfway) in the game when this occurs and so it feels a lot more desperate. You feel that a lot more hinges on winning this fight, as opposed to it being the big battle at the end where you've pretty much beaten most of the bad guys and united the whole country and practically won the war any way. And I love all those arrows flying at Luca. It was just a relentless onslaught against the main villain that I was not expecting out of a Suikoden game.

I think S5 tried to recreate the Luca battle with the Queen's Campaign - you create three different parties to take on the queen's knights, but it didn't quite make the same impact. The dialogue was very good, but we didn't get to see all of our chosen characters standing alongside each other (like in S2 when you see Flik and Viktor with their arranged parties standing beside them) that would have made things a lot more dramatic.

The Ashtwal Mountains was more like a revisit to the final dungeon of S3, but in S3 we took on major villains like Yuber and Sarah. S5 had us fighting random weird robot creatures, so again, it wasn't as dramatic. It did make a nice change to control characters besides the prince, though.

S4's dispatch mission wasn't terribly exciting, I think I mentioned in another thread that Cray should have had some tough soldiers fighting alongside him. Plus we had to go all the way back up there with Lazlo to get the key and go all the way back to enter the tower, so it was kind of frustrating. What was good about it was playing as Eleanor during that sequence, rather than it just being two tacticians talking to each other after a battle. It made me feel a bit more involved with her personal confrontation with Cray.

Don't forget S4 also lets us arrange three parties for when we're traveling the seas, which is useful for fighting large monsters like the land shells. It would have been good if there was a fight like that at the end.
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