Trouble is afoot in Two River, a town divided between three races, and only we can stop it with our undeniable charisma and charm.



Next time: Another recruitment drive. They stack up quickly in this game!

 

 

Yeah. Because of Fraps fuckery and my failure to back up my previous save game, I'm redoing the whole thing from scratch to get back to our previous point. But this does afford us a unique opportunity.




Using a save to import data from Suikoden 1, which allows us some unique bonuses much later on.

I also recruited Anita in Muse this time around. Just be nice to her and eventually you'll get a chance to ask her to join.



Tuta is also recruitable slightly earlier in Muse (just talk to him in the street), but odds are you won't be using him anyway because of his absurdly low stats, so eh.

And now, without further ado, the feature presentation. We recruit a slew of new characters and advance the story ever so slightly.

 

 

Wherein we defeat Neclord, take his castle for our own and renovate it in a surprisingly short amount of time. Then, through much effort, we recruit the master strategist Shu and begin to turn this whole ugly war around.

 

 

In which we learn that I have terrible luck with Chinchirorin. Oh, and Jowy goes turncoat on us, or something.

 

 

Highland and the Jowston City States are in all-out pitched combat now. But it looks like there's some dissent in the ranks.

 

 

The war effort against the Highland invaders finally gets under way. But things don't go well for us at first.

 

 

We make our escape from Highland with some help from Flik and Viktor, and then it's right on to the Suikoden mainstay - frequent breaks from the main plot to recruit many, many characters.

 

 

Well, I got my tax rebate, so I invested a chunk of it into a new capture card and a new monitor. Unfortunately, my second monitor stopped working for absolutely no reason, so I only got to know the wonders of an enormous dual-monitor setup for a day or two. Ah well, it was old, junky and barely functional anyway, and it gives me something to look forward to when I can afford a better one in the future.

But on the plus side, the capture card works perfectly, so we can now play Suikoden II on my Playstation 3 and capture some kickass-quality footage. That will come after work.

Hokay, things were delayed a bit further because apparently the PS3's HDMI signal is somehow "encrypted" and my capture program can't record it (but can apparently display it to the screen and take screenshots without issue... what sense does that make?). However, I did find a clever workaround - the program uses DirectDraw to draw the output singal to the screen, which means that I can record it via Fraps (and unlike all the emulators I tried, it consistently outputs data at the same rate, so I don't get wild swings in processor usage and therefore framerate drops). So I finally got part 1 recorded, rendered and uploaded for your viewing pleasure.



Once again, watch on Youtube in high quality for best results.

This game, much like the Sega CD classic Snatcher, still isn't available on PSN or in any reasonably priced format; your only choices are some price gouger on eBay or (very buggy) emulation. Apparently Konami has decided that if they never republish their good old games, people will have no choice but to buy their terrible new games like Lords of Shadow and MGS4. Seems pretty idiotic to me, but I'm not a big-name game developer, so what do I know?

 

 

Two Let's Plays at the same time? Sheer madness.

Okay, kidding aside, I've been meaning to replay Suikoden 2 for ages, so I figured I may as well record it and post it online while I'm at it. This is my favorite PS1 RPG and in fact one of my favorite RPGs of all time, plus it's horridly rare and expensive due to a limited printing run, so hell, let's make the best of it and share it with the world.

And yes, I do own a legitimate copy of the game. Proof. I just don't have a capture device that works with Windows 7, so I'm running and recording it via an emulator. So there.

Damn it all. I've spent the last three hours trying to record footage for the game, but it's consistently failed due to choppy framerates (in FRAPS), shitty emulation (pretty much every emulator I tried) or the god damn program not saving the movie file properly despite repeated attempts (Camstudio). Looks like this one is on hold for now.

In the meantime, here's the only bit of footage I could salvage from this whole mess, the introductory sequence. One of only three or four FMVs in the entire game!