Retronauts - 696: Suikoden, Revisited

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Kevin Bunch, and Nadia Oxford may not be able to change fate, but they can certainly weigh in on Konami's PS1 RPG classic Suikoden and its place in history after revisiting the game through the recent HD remaster. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This weekend, Retronauts, Suki, I love you. Suki-odin, Suki, Suki. No, that was a true blood reference, but it works because there are vampires and Swaykoden. Well, there is a vampire. No, actually, Sierra is a vampire, too. It's Neklord and Sierra. So see, see, forbidden love. There's probably like a Bayou era area somewhere in the world of Svikidun, somewhere in the empire.

So it all kind of comes together. Hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish, linking long ago, forgotten. And shockingly bad but sexy HBO stories, too. Sweenedin, the RPG by Konami, recently reissued in high definition, but not really, but kind of. Who else is here talking about vampires in high definition? I am here. I am Nadia Oxford. I am with retronauts as well as acts of the blood gut.

And I am also part of the Dragon Clan, which means I'm just going to rip off Per and call it a day. Yeah, pretty much. Would you consider yourself Fuch? God, no. No, I do so much better. I can't believe that they named a character. Although I guess at the time, Fuch did not mean anything, but... I know someone who was recently playing the game for the first time,

and all they gave was, like, a screenshot. So what the fuck? It got on, Blitz, Guy. Yeah, pretty much. It was definitely a choice, and they chose not to relocalize that name for the rematch. They sure did. God bless them. And who else do we have here?

We have Kevin Bunch, the fastest elf alive. Wow. Templeton, how you doing? No, no, sorry, that was Stallion. Stallion, yeah. Imagine being an elf named Stallion. I mean, Templeton's also a weird name for an elf. Actually, there's a lot of weird names in this, and we'll talk about that.

Like, sometimes I wonder, are these names significant? And sometimes I think they probably just had a hat of Western names and just reached in and were like, Okay, here's a word, stallion. We'll call, that'll be an elf. Sure, why not? Everyone loves that. We'll get to it, name as a nomenclature, but I feel like there are instances where they knew exactly what they were doing. I find it extremely interesting.

I want you to talk about those. Actually, I want anyone to talk about those. But anyway, Sweenedin, the original Sweekitin, we were going to make this about Svikidin one and two, because they're both part of the remaster. But then I put together notes and realized, let's not force the issue. We've never actually talked about just Sweenedin. We've done a Svigodin one and two episode before. It was about eight years ago. And then we had also done one back in the one-up run of Retronauts.

So this is our third time visiting this. But as so often happens these days, we are revisiting an older topic in the context of, hey, you know, you can play it again. and going into greater detail, greater depth than we have in the past. That is kind of the retronauts remit these days is really kind of, you know, downshift to like second gear and take it slow and enjoy the windy road, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what we're going to do. And in fact, I want to kick this episode off by talking about not Swigodon, but sort of laying the groundwork for it within the context of Konami. But as so often happens on Retronauts, I have to ask.

the two of you. Nadia, were you actually on the previous Swickenin episode? I feel like you were not. Probably not. Swiquin two is definitely my specialty because I bought that, whereas Swikin, I only recently, like, well, recently, a friend of mine gave me a copy, and I kind of played through that. Plus, I played it on the PSP, and then I think I dabbled in the remake, but as I said, I think I prefer to, but Swikiden is still such a great game because of, as I'll get into, like, it represents at crossroads that RPGs were at the time and which direction it went down.

That was the road less taken, sadly. It certainly was, but we'll get to that, I'm sure. But my experience to Sweenekanin, actually, I don't even if you remember this, or if you were even there. Oh, you know, I didn't even put forward the question, and yet you knew where I was going. Go for it. I've been podcasting for way too long. Oh, God, this is my job now. I don't know if you remember this, but literal decades ago, the reason I even got into Swaykidon is because

a friend of mine's, friends of mine were gathering on something called the Swickening guest book, which was what we did back in the day before there was anything close to like really sturdy, reliable message boards. We just had a guest book and we'd like, a friend of mine set it up who I still talk to. And everyone had the little portraits and they had like, you know, the portraits of the, I remember they had the first 108 stars and they added the second round when Swigenden 2 came out because I was always Genen. So yeah, that was kind of where I started my love affair with Swikinen was also where I met some of my earliest internet friends.

I think you were there once or twice. I don't remember exactly, but I feel like you were there. I don't think I was, but I certainly remember. I never really socialized through guest books. I was always a forum kid from the early days. But, you know, I'm sure there were other places where our paths crossed in those primal days of the web. Oh, absolutely. Now that you're mentioning this guest book, I vaguely recall that.

Like, I also don't think I ever messed with it, but I do remember it existing. It was quite a community. Of course, it wasn't just Sweetin. It was like just RPDs in general. And yeah, it was early 2000s, late 90s. That's pretty much where I was at the time. Yeah. So your online Swikiden persona was Gingin, the grammatically challenged Cobold.

The Cobold, who I love Sweeney, and Cobold. I think they're so much better than like with Dungeons and Drag. against lizard cobalt. Nah, no. There is a moment, I can't remember if it's Swigodon 1 or 2, but there's like Cobol's training outside, and you talk to them, their war cry is just barking,

barking and growling, and it's so cute. And the fact that like another another Cobold was like a Mastiff, whereas his son was a Borzoi, it was a completely made no sense whatsoever. Great race. A plus.

Kevin, I have to ask you what's your experience with Swikodon 1 and also who is your preferred in-game avatar? Oh, geez. So I remember going way back to high school. I got in fairly early on Sweet Codin 1. I talked about previously I was not a huge RPG kid at the time until around the mid-90s when I started trying out like Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, that sort of thing.

But one of my best friends in school was a huge RPG nerd. And when we got a PlayStation at home, he had a stack of games to bring by. So we messed with, like, Azure Dreams and Wild Arms and Suicode. And that was one of the ones that really stuck with me. And he ended up lending it to me. I ended up getting my own copy of it not long after. But, yeah, I played through this one a few times way back in the day. And once Sweet Codin 2 came out, I picked up, like, the last copy at the local Meyer.

Nice. They probably only got one copy. They probably only got one or two. too, yeah. But huge fan of these games. Haven't played them in so long, so I really need to check out that remaster. Oh, yeah.

Favorite Avatar character. You know, I was a nerd of a certain type at the time, so I had to throw in my lot with Pismurga a fair bit. Is he the one that has the sword named after King Crimson?

Oh, geez. You know, that sounds right. It's been a while He's the one I remember I'm speaking in two Because he was a powerhouse And he was the one you wanted in your party Yeah that's the King Crimson dude Of course he was pretty great

Like I still remember like my big team Towards the end of the game involved him And like Tengar I think was in there Because she's a powerhouse Yeah Ronnie Bell's a powerhouse So you know Since you go by euberus online

I figured you were going to say Uber but no. Pesmerga? Were they comrades, though? They were nemesies. Like, Pismurgo was hunting Uber. Okay. That's right.

What's funny, that nickname does not actually come from this game. That comes from someone else completely mispronouncing the handle I was using online at the time. And I'm like, you know what? Let's roll with that. That's funny. Why not? Yeah. So I was pretty much in on the ground floor with Svigodin.

I'm sure I've told this story before, but I bought it. Nintendo 64 on launch day and played the hell out of Mario 64 and Wave Race. And then Mario Kart 64 came out. And after about a month of that, I was like, there's not much else for this console. So I sold it to a friend and used the money to buy a PlayStation with Mega Man 8, Tomb Raider, and Swikiden. And Swikiden, I really enjoyed. There was something really interesting about it because, you know, people were saying, oh, it felt like a throwback. It's, you know, technologically primitive. And it, you know, visually it was.

But it also felt like this was a thing you could not have done on Super NES for so many reasons. So I really enjoyed it. And as my in-game avatar, I probably have to go with the professor who reluctantly kills people and be Matthew Silverberg. I feel like that's probably my internet persona, too. Matthew Silverberg who kills people? I mean, not directly by his own hand, but he's responsible for the deaths of many. But, you know, that's what he's commissioned to do. And it's all for a good cause, keeping the emperor from emperoring for his lady Wendy or whatever.

I don't know. Anyway, the point is the professor. That's what everyone calls me anyway. Not everyone, but some people. So, yes. So, let's, let's, let's, let's take. So, let's, let's, let's, let's take this history lesson back into the past and talk a little bit about what Konami had done in terms of role-playing games before they got around to creating Sweikin. Because Konami was kind of in, they were also in on the ground floor when it came to sort of exploring ideas for

role-playing games on consoles, which kind of exploded in Japan in the mid-80s. But they didn't make a lot of traditional role-playing games. Mostly what they did was create action RPGs. They said, how can we take all these elements that are circulating in the RPG sphere and make them something that works better with our console audience? So, I mean, if you look at their lineup in the late 80s, early 90s, but especially the late 80s for Famicom and MSX, you have games like Nightmare 2, The Maze of Galleas, which is, Have either of you ever played that one, kind of a proto-metroredvania? I haven't played the maze of galleus.

I've played La Milana, which is basically Maze of Galleus. Oh, I played that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Maze of Galleus is more of a traditional, like, role-playing aspect to it. You have two characters that you can play as, and they're largely identical. They have slightly different abilities, like the female night. They look identical because they're wearing armor, but the female night. night. I can't remember her name. She, I think, gets better prices at shops and is a little faster. And I think the mail night can swim better. So there's like these minor differences that

you swap between them as you need to. But it just has that kind of run around, explore, get stronger, buy stuff, et cetera, you know, find your way around, find the keys. Came out around the same time as the Goonies 2, which is also, you know, it's an action game. Definitely. There's not even an economy in the game. You don't buy stuff. It's just like random old people living in caves are like, hey, kid, have some flippers. I don't need them anymore. I'm a fish man. I'm living a cave. Right? It's the style at the time. It's me, the Eskimo, living in Oregon. You can have this ladder. Why not? Okay, thanks, buddy. But yeah, it does have like a combination adventure game and action game and action RPG style to it. And really, adventure games and

RPGs are just two branches of the same lineage. So, yeah, some of the goymon sequels went actually really pretty deeply into the role-playing vibe. You look at Vampire Killer, Castlevania, too. Those have economies and equipment. They have NPCs. that you talk to. They have exploration and gating with different abilities and items. So they're very much in

the RPG mold. Metal Gear is the legend of Zelda but with machine guns. And you know, it's extremely an action RPG even if it looks like it's, you know, a military shooter. It's not. It's something totally different. You've got the Y, Y, Y

World games, which are not as nonlinear as the Goonies 2. but you can play as Mikey from the Goonies, too. And it's about, you know, kind of finding other characters and learning their skills and gaining weapons for them and burning all of your money, reviving your dead characters, kind of imbalanced games, not actually that fun, but great ideas. How many of these have either of you played? Obviously, Castlevania and Metal Gear.

Yeah. I actually didn't play much in the way of Metal Gear, but Castlevania was definitely my gem, especially Castlevania 2, which, as you say, it was kind of a proto-RP in that you collected money. You collected money to buy items that you would use to power up and you'd have to find certain NPCs that would exchange items with these to get ahead. It was very RPG coded. I think one of the things I liked most, ironically, was talking to the villagers, and of course I say utter nonsense, but that was part of the fun of it. but when I think about how much of a traditional RPG

enjoyer I was at the time Konami just never really entered my POV very often. When I thought RPGs, I would think, oh, this Enix game or oh, this square game. But if I bought anything from Konami or played anything from Konami, I was never really looking for RPGs.

So most of those, I just kind of went by the Y-Y Wayside. I do like that name. That's good. It's good. Thank you. Tip your waitress. Yeah, I mean, I played Metal Gear. I played Castlevania, too, a little bit of Goonies, too.

I didn't really dig into the MSX stuff for obvious reasons back in the day. But I have played a bit of Y, Y, Y World. And, yeah, you know, it's funny. They are kind of action RPGs, but I never really, like, think about them as such. Kind of like the same way I don't really think of something like Kid Dracula as being. Super RPG or elements to it. Yeah, I mean, Kid Dracula is basically Mega Man. Yeah.

Dracula as a baby. But yeah. It's very cute. It's like a weird, I don't know, those sort of sorts of elements were really creeping into a lot of games at the time. Konami really like just sort of slipping them in wherever. So, yeah, yeah, I could see that. I can see that being part of this lineage.

God, Kings Valley, that one feels familiar. Was that on one of their, like, MSX collections that they put? I'm pretty sure that it was an MSX-1 game that showed up on Saturn, is my guess. Yeah, I think I've played that one a bit on Saturn. That one, yeah, I don't have any experience with that one. I also forgot to mention Esper Dream, which is kind of like Star Tropic's, but with nicer graphics. Yeah, so Konami definitely kind of dabbled in that, but they did eventually start to move more into pure adventure and role-playing games, kind of in the 90s, really. I would say their first big one was Snatcher, which, you know, kind of makes sense coming from the same guy who made Metal Gear.

And it is like a pure adventure game kind of done in the Japanese style where it's a lot of menus and dialogues and things like that. That then led to Toki Meiki Memorial and police knots. So they were kind of plying that side of the story-driven adventure game. But on the role-playing side, pure role-playing, they did, you know, kind of make a standout entry. I think their first pure role-playing game ever was also one of the high points of Famicom technology. We've talked about it here before, Lagrange Point for Famicom, which had the VRC-7 audio chip in it. So it was basically like the master system FM unit built into the cartridge. It's very much a traditional, you know, kind of Dragon Quest type game with top-down exploration and first-person perspective in the battles.

But it sounds really cool. It's got a sci-fi theme. It looks cool. And then they followed that with the Madara series, which I haven't really played that much of. But I think it's kind of leaning more toward a sort of Eastern Asian feel to it. And I feel like that's kind of the point where you sort of get the inflection. for what we see in Sweekedin, which is based on a classic Chinese novel, one of the oldest works of literature in the world, but doesn't really feel like it.

You would not look at the town of Gregminster and Commander Craze and General McDole and think, ah, yes, classics of Chinese literature. They were not bound by the source material, is what I'm saying. Yeah, it's got a real, like, fusion between being, you know, based on this Chinese legend and, like, European aspects here and there. But it doesn't, like, fully lean into either. Like, it really just sort of melds them together very effectively. I was going to say, the beginning of the game, the story reminds me of, God help me, Shira, if you grew up with the story of, like, you know, the he man tie in with Shira. and Shira goes out and she sees, you know, she's raised by the Horde, and the horse's like,

we're the good guys. Or Shira, you can count on us. Then she just goes out two steps outside of her castle and says, what the hell are you talking about? I'm talking to me like, crap. So that's basically what happens in the opening for Swaykinen. Yeah, which, you know, very well maintained in the Shira reboot, which means we just need a Suikoden reboot that is 90% gayer. Yeah.

I mean, if you really love. look at the subtext in Sweekitin. It was pretty gay. It is. There's definitely some, some things that could be read as representation there. You know, the protagonist and Ted and Gremio, his relationships there, you know, the Victor and Flick. Oh, man, they're married. I was there in the late 90s, and I do remember a lot of slash fanfic revolving around Sweenedin. It was very popular. So I would say really to make Swickenin more gay, you just make the subtext text. But it doesn't require, I would say it's not a heavy lift. Need more.

And I, you know, I feel like a big part of that is also from the portraiture in the game, which has a very kind of delicate watercolor watercolor style. I'm sad that even though it's the same artist who created the new portraits for the remaster, It's much more of a concrete, you know, commercial illustration style, and everything has more solid lines and solid colors. And I do miss that sort of ethereal quality that was present in the original Swikodon. Not that we saw that, you know, on the American box art, but it was very much a part of the marketing and the packaging in Japan. And, sorry, her name was Junco Kowano. And her art, I think, really, it really established a tone for the game, I think, that allowed

people to read what they wanted to into some of the relationships. You know, I'd say it was a lot of things all working together. So I do think that was a big part of, you know, kind of what made Sweet Good and Popular. I feel like people who want to read that sort of thing into fiction, it invited that. And people responded positively and said, all right, thank you. More of that, please. It's got the same fan base as a mobile suit Gundam did when it first debut, truly. It's the Gundam wing of RPGs.

But no, actually, it's good. So it's not a good comparison. I was going with 0079, you know, which was saved by people who just really loved all of the pretty men in it. And boys, yes. But it's not until, what, Zeta Gundam that you... Oh, no, no, it's Gundam Wing, where you get Quadro Begina? No, that was Zeta. Oh, was it Zeta?

Was that Char's alias? Yes. I just watched it a couple weeks ago. And never stopped being silly. God bless. Anyway, so I just wanted to say that we mentioned briefly the MSX computer. And I feel like, you know, we've talked about this on the show before, but Konami, more than any other publisher or developer, loved the MSX home computer. They published a shit ton of stuff for Famicom, but then, like, twice that much stuff showed up from them on MSX and MSX too, because they were just, that, that studio was amazing.

They were so prolific, and they didn't really outsource that much. Like, they were doing stuff internally, and it was such good quality. And, you know, they just needed that release valve for the MSX. But the, you know, the nature of the MSX as a home computer that's kind of a console, I think, bled into their actual console games. And so a lot of what you saw from them on Famicom NES got its start on MSX in a more traditional computer-oriented aspect. And they retooled it to be console-friendly. but it still retained a lot of the trappings and the design thought of computer games of the era.

And so I think basically all of this is to say that Konami had a really strong grounding in what makes a great RPG experience, even if they had only made a couple, like two or three proper true RPGs by the time Sweakadin came out in the mid-90s, which really that kind of puts them way behind the curve for other Japanese developers, but especially one as prolific as they

were. Oh, we can't forget Cave Noir, the Game Boy Rogue like. What a great idea that was. Like, I'm not being ironic there. That was a great idea. It's a really cool game. I'm always pushing for us to license that, to talk Konami and to reissuing it at Limited Run, but I think it might be a little too far into the weeds, although we did do. Ninja 5-0, so in my opinion, anything's possible. There you go. That's the attitude. So Sweenekin and debuted in Japan in December 1995.

It wouldn't come to the U.S. for another year after that, December 96. but, you know, December 95 puts it pretty early on in the 16, or the, sorry, the 32-bit era, the PlayStation had been around for a year at that point. And really, if you look at the early days of the PlayStation in Japan, that first year, it was pretty slow to get started because Sony was this sort of new presence in the industry. They weren't, they weren't really, I mean, they published software, and they had been there as kind of like, you know, sort of on the business side, the multimedia side, but here you have a company that didn't really have much of a presence in gaming outside of their bad

image soft games, and also some MSX computers that they created in the 80s, but who didn't create an MSX computer in the 80s, you know, they were kind of unproven, and they were going up against Nintendo and Sega and Hudson and a few other companies, all jockeying for position and dominance in this new era. So as exciting as PlayStation was, I think it took a little while before developers and publishers really kind of signed on and said, all right, we believe in this. And so again, that first year, 1995 on PlayStation in Japan, is pretty light in terms of content. There's some good stuff, but it's not like, you know, what we associate with PlayStation 1999 or something, where it's just this, you know, massive onslaught of great

games coming out every single week. So Sweenan was one of the first, not the first, but one of the first true RPGs on PlayStation, one of the first true RPGs of the 32-bit era. And that's actually kind of bold of Konami, a company that had barely made any role-playing games, true role-playing games to this point, to say, let's dip our toes into this new technology, this new console, with a huge RPG that has more playable characters than anyone's ever seen in a role-playing game before. Let's go with that. But they did it. God bless them. So we should talk a little bit about who the people were who made that mad decision. And And Konami has had, I don't know if it's still the case, but the way they designate roles in their game development structure is not the way we think of like a producer and director.

For them, a director is actually more like a producer, and a producer is kind of a more nebulous role. And usually what we think of as a director is called a designer. So with that in mind, the producer on Swikiden was Kazumi Kituay, and he had been with the company since about 1990 or so. He worked on Twin Bee Game Boy and Super Castlevania 4. That's pretty good stuff to have in your background. Yeah. The supervisor, which is more like what we think of the producer, I believe, was Masaki Yonioka, who, according to Moby Games, had only recently been hired at Konami. So you have relatively new newcomers to the business, but that's especially true of the people

who were sort of the core design team. And they belonged to, according to the credits, an organization or a group called Usagi-san team or Mr. Rabbit team. And I can't find any information online what Usagi-san team means or was. Like, I thought Sweenekid and fans were just obsessive sickos who documented every single thing. But I can't find where some, you know, some like super hardcore Swikid and loving nerd has said, all right, guys, I figured it out. Here's everything. I mean, as much as people obsess over Team Silent, you'd think, here's another opportunity.

Team Mr. Rabbit. Let's go. But no. Makes me wonder if it has anything to do. with Rabbit and Bear Studios, which made you in Chronicles many years afterwards. Hmm. Yes. So.

Who's the bear? That's the next question. You know, Konami has just, like, had a very long and terrible tradition of burying its credits for games and, and, you know, who actually worked on what. Like, I know recently I was trying to dig into, like, Frogger. you know, really popular game who made it? Who knows? Someone at Konami. One person has come forward

and said that they did the splash sound effect as like one of their first jobs at the company. And that's it. Beyond that, who could say? So, Usaki-san team, probably the same sort of thing, like Konami begrudgingly let this number of people have their names in the credits and everyone else is like,

well, tough. We don't want you being poached or anything. We know Capcom is like sniffing for blood. There is that. Oh, okay. So, in any case, the head of Usagi-san team was a guy named Yoshitaka Morada. And sadly, he passed away about a year and a half ago.

So we'll never be able to ask him what Usagi-san team was. And unfortunately, I think with his passing, any hope for, you know, a true continuation of Sweikiden, let's not count that mobile game that came out recently. I think any prospect of a true continuation of the saga that, you know, explores the stars of destiny and more importantly, the story of the true ruins, my understanding was there were supposed to be 10, 10 stories or 10 volumes in the Suikidan series when they got up to five. Yeah, halfway. So Murata was the head of Usagi-san team, and he appears to have been the main driver behind the game's story. and its overall kind of structure and world. And he worked on the sequel, so we get in two, and several spinoffs for PlayStation and Game Boy Advance.

There was a card game on Game Boy Advance, and there were two, you know, just classic adventure games on more like visual novels, really, on PlayStation called Suiko Guidon. And then he, I guess, left Konami as so often happens with Konami. And he did oversee the development of Auddin Chronicle, which is the story of seasons to Swikiden's Harvest Moon. It's, you know, the same thing, but with the serial numbers rubbed off and kind of starting over from scratch. But sadly, that will probably never continue with, you know, true to his vision either. So it's very unfortunate. He died very young.

and, you know, because he was, he was a brand new hire at the time that Swigodan went in to develop. So he's probably about our age, is my goodness. Oh, boy. So, I mean, it's just, it's really unfortunate that. Yeah, he really is. He passed so young. I don't know exactly what the circumstances were, but he had, you know, a huge vision for a series, for a tale, and began to explore that in video game form. and some people kind of took up the reins after he left, but, you know, I don't think we'll

ever know exactly what his vision was and, you know, what the hell is the deal with look and what's up with all the true runes and that sort of thing. But nevertheless, Konami did say, let's give this pioneering work of video game design, this important, crucial early PlayStation release to a bunch of newcomers, which I think game developers and studios did that back in the day. They don't do that so much now. But back in the day, yes. Back in the day, they just kind of slung projects at groups of people and say,

look, make this happen. And sometimes they did. You know, I feel that because this was a PlayStation game, and it was on the CD-ROM format, and Sony's cut was going to be noticeably smaller than Nintendo's. I wonder if that was a factor as well. Oh, good point. Like, you know, this is going to be cheaper to produce, even though we're going to be spending all this money on sprite art and everything. So maybe it's okay if, like, these relative newcomers come in, because if they make something, like, well, first, this is an early game, so it's probably going to sell because there's not much else to compete with it.

And at the same time, like, if it comes out, kind of crazy. from me, at least our investment is not that huge in it. That's a good point, yeah. That's possible. So another newcomer at the company who worked with Murata was Junco Coano. I mentioned her earlier. She was the illustrator. She illustrated the new artwork in the HD remaster.

And after Murata left Konami, she took up the reins of the Konami, sorry, of the Suikiden series and kind of oversaw its continuation. So she was the lead writer and producer in addition to artist for some of the later Sweikiden games. So, you know, I feel like there might have been a torch passing there. So even though Morada was no longer involved with Swikiden, it seems like just, you know, from what I know of Japanese business culture and protocol, like there was probably a sort of a nod given. Like, I'm cool with you carrying on. I trust you. You've got this. Go for it. Which, you know, a lot of times, if that weren't the case, you would not have seen a continuation. But yeah, both of them were fresh faced college

graduates and put together a really cool game. Although it doesn't hurt that the music was provided as with all Konami games by Konami Kukaya Club. In this case, you know, that's just the blanket term that Konami uses because they don't like to give individual credits. But in this case, known contributors are Miki Higashino, who created music for Life Force, Contra 3, and the TMNT game in the arcades, and Tappy Iwasse, who had worked on police knots and Snatcher and would go on to compose for Metal Gear Solid.

So some pretty solid bona fides, and that is why the music sounds good. And also, that's why the samples and digital instruments sound a lot like the ones in police knots. It's actually a little uncanny. There's like this reverb on some of the synthetic horns and stuff that were just like, oh, like this has the exact same timber and quality as speaking in the police house. So I haven't played police knots, but I know it.

Yeah, there's a bit of that reverb going on. I haven't played it, but I have the soundtrack. And listening to the soundtrack, I was like, wow, this is, this is Sweenekidens music, but like with sleazy jazz, or sleazy sax jazz. It's kind of like how if you play late stage S&S games from Capcom. In fact, my husband was just playing, I think it was like Mega, Mega, Man 7, that's right. So we were playing Megamon 7, Mega X3, and Breath of Fire 2. And those all came out around the same time. And I don't know if they had the same design, the same sound design team or what, but they all kind of have that same very hard driving S&S guitar.

This is the end of the console system. Who cares anymore? Just break out the guitars. And they did. Capcom loved their their crunchy butt rock super envious guitars. Yeah. People get mad when I said butt rock, but that's what it is, folks. It's butt rock.

I like butt rock. It's all right. When you hear that music, the only term you can use. to describe it is butt rock. It just it sounds like they're rocking some butts. It's not derogatory. No. It's good. It's good. Get your butt out of the chair

and rock. I was going to say butt rock, but you beat me to it. So, you know, we're all on the same page here. Yep. Mm-hmm. As our, everyone who should be listening to this and Mega Man 7. Yeah. So that's, that's the background of this podcast. Now, for the second half of this podcast, let's actually talk about the game.

So there are some things that I want to highlight that make Swigodon unusual for an RPG of its era. You know, I mentioned that it has more playable characters than any RPG before it. I think that's true. But one thing that I do want to call out is the fact that even though the cast is huge, the game itself feels much smaller than usual. You're not facing like an existential threat to all reality. You're not stopping the end of the world. There is no apocalyptic cataclysm about to happen. If you don't win, the worse it's going to happen is the guy who's currently ruling over an empire is just going to rule more angrily and meanly.

But it's already in pretty bad shape and people are already suffering. So it kind of seems like all you're doing is disrupting the status quo ultimately. And there is this kind of plot in the background that is not clear and obvious in the first game and has kind of come out through subsequent games, which involves the 27 true runes, of which the emperor Barbarossa holds one, the protagonist holds one, several other characters hold a true ruin. And there is a scheme, evidently, by some people to bring all the true runes together because they created the world. And if you bring them back together, then they will cause reality to cease to exist. I don't know why some people want that, but, you know, as, as Alfred said, some men just want to see the world burn. Yeah, indeed. Got to have your doomsday cults.

Or not even burn. Just turn into a gray nothing. If I'm remembering, oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry about that. I was just going to say, one thing that struck me, especially when I played Sweetin II again, was I was like, wow, it's actually kind of nice to have a, kind of medieval political story that's not frigging a song of fire and ice all over again, a song of ice and fire again, because that happened a lot back then and still does. Although, I will say there are some bits in here.

What was it? I called it out in the notes. Oh, let's see. Yes, the relationship between Barbarossa and Theo McDowell, his general, is very much like Robert Barathean and Ned Stark. So, like, he even sends, he even sends. sends Tio to put down a revolt in the north, just like Ned Stark goes off to live it. Well, I mean, he's, you know, king of the north, basically. I might stand corrected then.

But this game came out a year before A Song of Ice and Fire, the first volume. So this is once again, George R.R. Martin stealing from everyone else. He already stole Onion Knights from Final Fantasy 3. Is there no end to this man's shameful theft? He's still onion knight? There's a character in Game of Thrones whose nickname is the Onion Knight because he broke the enemy lines.

There was a siege, and he brought onions and some other very kind of low-grade food stock into the castle and help the holdout survive. So he was knighted and also punished because he was working for Stanis Barathean, who's lawful good, stick in the mud, stick up his ass. It was like, thanks for saving our lives.

I'm cutting off your finger because you stole some stuff. Just a cool guy all around. Anyway, yes, so he was nicknamed the Onion Knight. But, you know, of course, Onion Night with Four fingers. Final Fantasy 3. Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure the ones in Final Fantasy 3 also had four fingers because they're cartoon characters. That checks out.

I was going to say two things that spring to mind is I want to say like the true runes have some sort of like sentience to them and like they influence events because they also want to all come together and ruin everything like the rings I guess yeah kind of like yeah yeah I wonder where they got it from yeah for the most part they they seem to be sort of exerting their influence indirectly yeah like definitely like the rings the true rings although I'm pretty sure that Victor's sword is a true ruin and it talks to him The sword right of the sword, yeah. Yeah.

It's an asshole. It's never actually, I don't think it's explained in the game text. Is the sword the ruin, or is it just like a manifestation of the ruin that is, you know, enchanted in some other way and holds the ruin? But it does talk to Victor. And yes, it is a dick. But it kills, it kills vampires. So, you know, you take the good with the bad. Yeah.

But my other thought is that this. this game does something that I really appreciated about the original Star Wars movie, and that is that it's telling this very, like, tight, specific story, but there's enough hints to, like, the broader world that it never really delves into. It explains that it, like, it holds your interest. It makes this feel like an actual place where there's other things happening outside of your characters, which, you know, the sequels get into and show you some of those other things that are happening. But it's very refreshing at the time.

Yeah, it feels like one of those games where, you know, it was written by someone who maybe took their D&D campaign or something or their series of light novels and did a lot of homework in advance. And all of that does not come out in the game necessarily, but because they did create this framework, and really I'm speaking of Marauda here, Because this framework exists, he's able to draw in references and talk about history and other lands and that sort of thing in a way that feels authentic and meaningful, but isn't just, you know, like holding your face in it and rubbing your nose against it. So, yeah, it's the good kind of lore where it enriches the world as opposed to like, all right, we're going to stop for 20 minutes and do a lore dump. That's a different guy at Konami who likes to do that. Sure is. Okay, so, yeah, it is a small-scale story. You can actually finish the game in 15 to 20 hours.

Kind of feels like this is building on the strengths of chrono-trigger in a lot of ways. It's compact, but substantial. There's a lot of stuff to do that's not made. mandatory for the game, but to kind of get the most out of the game, you want to do it. Also, there are combo attacks. So it's chrono trigger two, which has never actually happened. There was Crono Cross, but no Crono Trigger 2. So in a way, couldn't we consider this Crono Trigger 2?

Although, actually, this came out in Japan like four or five months after Crono Trigger. Wow. Or maybe like a year. But in any case, it was kind of happening at the same time. There's some, there's some rumors that this game started life as a superfamacom project. I don't know if that's true or not. I've never seen any substantiation to that. And the best I can find in terms of online resources to back it up are a one-up.com article saying,

rumor says that, you know, it started as a superfamacom game, which is probably something I wrote 15 or 20 years ago. So that doesn't do a, that does no good. to anyone whatsoever. But no, there was like a magazine in Japan at the time that listed Swigodon as an upcoming Super Famicom game, but maybe they just misunderstood. Who knows? In any case, oh, go ahead. Oh, it's extremely possible. By the end of the Super Famicom's life, you had some, just some crazy RPGs that should not have been possible. Like, Swigenden Tattoo three was so packed that it couldn't even hope for an English release. least because it just did not have the space for the English text.

See, what was Tales of Fantasia. That was, had actual, honest to God, voice acting and a whole pop song in there as well. Star Ocean also. Star Ocean, yep. So, of course, these are ones that just never even came to the, to North America. And we had Chrono Trigger, which was in itself a miracle. So it feels like it was possible, but maybe it was getting to the point where these chips are just too insane because that's the way that they were able to do them in the

first place. So, I think I see what you mean in a way that, like, in a way that Swickening could be an evolution of Krono Trigger in the fact that, well, these games, these final games on the Super Famicom had beautiful sprite work, which carried over to Swikinen, where it's like, okay, not only is it quite nice looking, but you have all these characters, all these different animations, and you can have six of them in your party at once, and it just feels like party sizes went down for a very long time, like Final Fantasy 7 made three, the standards, Final Fantasy 9 brought back forward to the detriment of the PlayStation

which just screamed for help every time you try to play that game. So I can see very early on them saying you know, the S&ES or the Super Famcom is a safe sale, but PlayStation is definitely the safer development risk, something Kevin kind of talked about earlier.

Yeah, because what, there's like 50, 60 characters you can actually have in your party. And I know that they don't have, you know, massive numbers or massive number of animations per character, but still that's a lot of characters, and that's a lot of animation. You would need a very chunky cartridge, which again, yeah, like you were saying, if this was a project from newcomers, maybe that's not where you want to spend your money.

Yeah, so we're kind of going on the technical side of things here. So we're kind of going on the technical side of things here. So let's jump ahead in the notes that I put together and talk about how Sweenedin, you know, we look at it now with the HD version and it's kind of this 2D game. It looks pretty simple. It's not a huge game. There's a lot, a lot to do. But I feel like it was a really fantastic realization of what the PlayStation could be for a certain kind of game. And I guess they could have done this on Saturn too.

And actually they did. They did convert this game to Saturn later and added a little bit of new content to it. But, you know, it feels like they said, well, we have this system. much more powerful, has much more storage capacity, has a lot more RAM than the 16-bit consoles. So let's explore that. The system can do 3D, but maybe we can't do 3D. I think it's good that they knew their limits, because if they had tried to make, you know, 108 recruitable characters plus NPCs and everyone was polygons, in addition to that being

just impossibly expensive, everything would have looked terrible. Like 1995 era PlayStation 3D, not the kind of thing that's held up well. Whereas I would say Swigodon looks as good now as it did in 1996, which is not the case for a lot of 1995-96 games that went full 3D. It's aged a little better than Wild Arms, which was not all 3D. I agree. I love Wild Arms, though. But you do have those very simple-looking character animations when you get to these battle scenes and the kind of like chunky polygons that served as enemies and as summons. Like you want to go back and look at summons before Final Fantasy 7 changed everything. There's wild arms for you.

But that was a bit of a... And everything's super floaty. It has no sense of weight or mass. There's no weight. Everyone kind of jumps like Superman darting for the first time. Just, yeah, I see you're coming from. But it was definitely the smarter choice to go full polyg—not, not polygons, full sprites the whole way for Swicken. Yeah.

One thing that also impresses me is—impresses upon me, technical-wise. So Azure Dreams was another Konami game. That's from, what, 97, 98? And that also has that sort of same consideration, like, all the characters are sprites. And it's just the tower itself that is 3D polygons, if I remember, incorrect. So, Konami was very comfortable, just, like, focusing in a lot of their efforts on sprite art and then using, you know, the polygons for background elements. Maybe not, maybe just to keep the PlayStation from, you know, overheating on us, to speak. I mean, this was the same Konami that gave us Symphony of the Night.

And Swigodend does, it kind of takes the same approach to graphics as Symphony of the Night, which is, it's mostly pixel art, mostly 2D. hand-drawn graphics. And there are some 3D elements, but they're used very sparingly and just as embellishments. So you have like some spell effects, you know, like spheres of fire or something that explode outward. And those are made of polygons. The one that sent out to me is in the library, there's a fake bookshelf that spins on his access when you push it and get into a secret room. And that always stuck with me because it looks really natural until you push on it. Right. And, you know, at the same time, when you enter battle, there is this kind of 3D element to it. They probably could have done this on Super NES, which maybe is why people

think this started as a Super Famicom RPG, where you've got this kind of mode 7 tilt to it. And, you know, they put the hand-drawn sprites on there. So you have a team of six heroes facing off against anywhere from like one to half a dozen monsters. And by putting them onto this sort of tilted 3D plane without trying to make everything actually 3D, it allows them to, one, put some pretty dramatic camera pans and zooms into action. So there's, you know, the camera's always kind of moving around, not so much that it makes you sick, but it just kind of emphasizes what's happening. When your team goes in for a strong attack or something, the camera zooms in on them because

it's like, check it out. you are kicking ass and you know there's a little bit of a tilt to kind of say you know here's kind of what the emphasis of battle is right now but you know again because it's not polygon models and there's a limited number of characters you can have at once everything can be stored in memory in RAM and that means when battles transition from the overworld to the combat screen it takes like two seconds to give you control over your team. And that is not how RPG combat in most 32-bit RPGs worked. You got the, you know, the Final Fantasy thing where it's like,

dun-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-you- have like Nobuamatsu doing like four measures of music. And those four measures indicate like, here's the discloading. Now you get to fight. You know, it doesn't have that. And on top of that, because everything is so simple, it allows you to control your team, you know, to input commands by turns or by sides. So instead of commanding characters individually like active time battle, you're just saying like, okay, this turn, everyone's going to do these things.

And then you hit go and everyone just, you know, there's like a fracas. There's this whole melee where everyone's jumping back and forth between the battle lines, characters, their actions are overlapping, and it just makes everything feel so fast and so energetic. It makes battles exciting, you know, even the really boring, tedious battles where you can crush those in a second, you just hit auto battle, and it does that for you. And it's over painlessly, you know, like a battle can be five or ten seconds long. And like, that's an economy and a respect for players' time that you just did not see in that era. and on top of that, it looks cool.

Like, it never gets boring to see three characters team up and jump across the line and perform a combo attack on enemies and just, like, clobber the shit out of someone and then jump back and the camera zooms back again. It's just, it's so satisfying. It's such a great, thoughtful approach to combat design. I love it. It is. I feel like one of the things we really got with 32-bit RPGs, no matter if we look at

polygons or sprites was a battle camera. Because before, uh, RPG battles were generally one screen and you had your little guys on the right and you had your big guys on the left and that was it. But yeah, Sweekin really gives you like, it kind of pans around. It does pan around the battles feel like the way so many RPGs did in those days. But I don't know the technicalities behind it. You mentioned it was loaded in the RAM or something like that. Because I know that, yeah, I guess Final Fantasy 7 is reading off the disc and every time he got into a battle, you had the smeary kind of, you know, transition, then slow, da, da, da, da, and that got way worse than Final Fantasy Nine. Sorry to keep dragging Final Fantasy Nine here.

No, I mean, it deserves it. Like, four characters was just too much for that poor system to handle. Yeah, it tried. God bless it, it tried. But the only way you were getting six characters on the screen like that was with a spright-based game, which is the way that was the way kind of only went, which is probably the smarter way. You know what I'm going to be. Thank you.

So I sat down and tried to look and see what 32-bit RPGs had arrived on the scene before December 1995, and there weren't very many. And all of them were either hand-drawn 2D entirely. So you have Arc the Lad, Shining Wisdom, Magic Night Ray Earth for Saturn, or if they had 3D, it was for first-person dungeon crawling, very simplistic. So you had, I guess, the virtual hide light is third person dungeon crawling, but that's also, that's a weird implementation of 3D. I don't know what we call that one. It's a choice. But you had, you know, at Shin Megamay Tensi, Devil Summoner, which was kind of 2D characters, but then a 3D dungeon. And, of course, you had King's Quest and the mind-boggling effects the PlayStation could create.

But, you know, that's a first-person viewpoint also. So it's one or the other. And there hadn't really, as far as I can tell, been a hybrid like Svekoden. So even though, you know, it aged pretty quickly and looked pretty dated once Final Fantasy 7 came out a year and a half later, it was pretty impressive for the time. It was really, you know, them thinking, let's go someplace with this. Let's do something new and exciting. So they were pushing the bounds of technology.

in terms of game presentation in a fun and interesting way. It's just, you know, technology would, not even technology, but people's familiarity with the PlayStation and their understanding of how to make the hardware do crazy things would quickly advance beyond this.

But for the time, like, I don't think we should overlook the fact that, wow, this was a standout release. This was very, very cool. Yeah, absolutely. It strikes me as very, influential in that sort of technical regard, because you had games like Grandia or A Thousand Arms, like these, I guess, I'd hesitate to call them B-list RPGs, but they

kind of were compared to what Square was doing. But they have the same sort of visual thought process, like, okay, here's our 2D characters, here's our 3D spaces where we need them, and it'll look pretty good, and it'll load up reasonably fast. So, yeah. It almost feels like a junction for RPGs, really. Like, we go down the idea of here's, we're still doing sprites, but a lot more of them. Or we're doing less polygons, but they look cooler and faster. Because, I mean, Final Fantasy 7 at the time, it did look freaking mind-blowing. Yeah, and another great thing that Swigodon does with the technology is it gives you a home base.

It gives you an enormous number of characters that you can recruit to be part of the army that you build. You can recruit 108 characters, actually, kind of more than that. It just depends on how you parse it. But there's 108 stars of destiny. Those are the characters who are part of your army. And as you find them in the world and, you know, complete the conditions necessary to bring them into your team, once you fight through the haunted castle and kill all the ghosts and take over the castle for yourself, they all kind of use that as their base of operations.

And as, you know, as you find more and more people and make advances, the castle itself evolves. And there's a lot you can do within the castle. And, you know, this kind of builds on what your favorite, Nadia, Breath of Fire 2's township. But I would say it's much bigger and more expansive. And, you know, having 108 characters who not only. can, you know, many of them serve a combat role, but also have a function within the castle as like armorers or the laundry lady. There's a lady that you can recruit and all she does. I mean, she's pretty much a mandatory recruit, but like she's just there in the castle to

help out with laundry. It's what she loves to do. And she's like, wow, an entire army for me to launder for? I love it. Give it to me. There's a kid you can recruit and all he does is stand at the sign to your castle and says, welcome to Torin Castle. I feel so good. That's it. That's all he does. He just tells you where you are. I like the person you can recruit whose whole thing is just like changing out windows.

Yeah. Like, not even windows on the castle. No, ostensibly windows on the castle, but like the window for your text boxes. It's like, oh, please recruit me. I can do this for it. But you're right. That's actually an extension of Breath of Fire 2's township where you were recruiting people

to serve functions within your town. You can recruit an armorer and an item shop person and a fisherman and a huntsman and a lot of stuff you could do to break the game by recruiting the right people there. But thinking about it, town building slash castle building is in a lot of games these days. And it was kind of new, even when Suikiden brought it in.

But gosh, even before that, I'm trying to think, was there like games that let you build a town outside of, say, like, you know, Harvest Moon or something from the whole point was to build a town. Something that really made it part of the gameplay, the way Brath the Fire, too, did. I think Harvest Moon, didn't Harvest Moon come out after Swaykoden? It was a very late release. It's all I remember. I thought to myself, who the hell is going to want to play this?

I thought that came to the U.S. in 1997. It was late. I remember playing an emulation, oh, my God, because I was like, I'm not buying this. I'm spending all my money on N.S.C.4 games and trying to justify this purchase. Yeah, actually, Harvest Moon's first release. lease in Japan was August 96. So it stole all of that from Swigodon, like George R.R. R. Martin, just pilfering, pilfering Sween. Very quickly. So shameless. So fast that his pen was igniting. Yes. He's like, I must write this down. Where's that

translation of the original Chinese book, too? I might need to pull from that. But the point being, that really does give your real sense of place. Like, everyone kind of hate the Schumacher version of Phantom the Opera. I adore it because in the intro, you see what goes in, or what went into maintaining an opera house in the 1800s. And you just see like everything from the laundromers, the sculptors, the horses who are making the gears turn. Like, I love stuff like that. And that's what the castle functions as basically in Sukiden, especially Sukiden 2. Here's your people who are, basically a war is not just all about the front lines. It's who's on the back lines, who's cooking, who's laundering, who's, you know,

repairing stuff, who's making stuff. So I'm glad that it really does address that because it makes it feel so much more like this is a war you're fighting against an empire. Yeah, and there's lots of opportunities for fun little Easter eggs and things like that. Like, you know, there's the bathhouse where Sasuke maintains the bathhouse and different groups go into, you know, like your team will go in and recover in the baths and there's the male side, the female side. But, you know, you can put little decorations up, urns and things like that if you find find cursed tiki idols or something, and you fill your bathhouse with those, the music changes and it turns ominous and dark. It doesn't do anything to your team, I don't think. I don't

think it gives you like bad luck or anything. It's just, it turns it creepy. And, you know, who would say, oh, I've got a bunch of cursed items. I'm going to put them in the bathhouse. No one. It's just there as a fun little like, guess what you can do. Yeah. I love that. It's great. Someone in the game, someone saying, hey, you know what be kind of funny? What if we did this. Like, maybe someone will find it and it'll be funny if they do. You know, you already chased the ghosts out of the castle once. You know, if they come back from these cursed objects, you can just do it again. It's fine. That's true. That's true. It's like, would you, uh, asking for trouble? When you buy a piece of, like, wood for your, uh, aquarium

and a, uh, mantis shrimp hitches on it and goodbye to your aquarium. That kind of thing. Does that ever happen to you? No, but I read about it once and it seemed very interesting. Yeah. So, you know, we mentioned the large recruitable cast. And I think the game makes some smart choices by sort of minimizing the amount of maintenance you have to do with your team. Everyone has to get like armor upgrades and everyone can equip runes and have things attached to their weapons that, you know, supplement them elementally or whatever. But you don't have to buy weapons for everyone. Everyone has a weapon, and they like that weapon, and they stick with that weapon. And that's the only weapon they use. But they can get stronger. You just have to find the right smiths. And so there's like a team of blacksmiths.

There's like five blacksmiths you can recruit in the world, each progressively more powerful than the other. It's like moose and mees and mace and I can't remember what all their names are. It's a little goofy, but it's fun. And, you know, as you recruit the, the, the more skilled blacksmiths, then the max level you can hone your weapon to goes up. And of course, you can go into combat with all five blacksmiths, and they have a special blacksmith attack, which is absolutely not worth taking them into battle for because they're not

that great at combat. They're pretty good fighters, but limited in terms of, you know, magic spells and things like that. But if you want to do that, you could theoretically take on the final boss and have a whole bunch of blacksmiths smack them at the same time with hammers. So that's, that's fun. You can also recruit, maybe that's in the second game, the chipmunks or the squirrels. Those are in the second game. The second one, Muku, Muku, I think they're called. Yeah, so we won't talk about them yet. But I think every game kind of has, it's like, here's the joke characters who, by the way, have a really cool, powerful attack if you want to drag them all into battle. Did, did Sweeniken in

the original, like, I know Sviken and two had, like, you can recruit a freaking unicorn and a Krakken. Could you do that in the first one? I don't remember if there's anything really big. No, there's, there's, um, cobalds. You can recruit some elves, cobalds. Um, I don't think there's anything like wildly, uh, you know, non-humanoid. Yeah. Not until two.

I think they saved that for two, yeah. I don't think I recruited a unicorn or a crack in two. Wow. Oh, I do. Are those mandatory? Oh, no. They're mostly hidden. I just remember the unicorn was named, um, Sigfried.

I think... He's also a Griffin. I think the unicorn and, like, one other animal occupied the same, like, star of destiny, so you get, like, one or the other. Got it. Yeah, yeah. I think it was the unicorn or Kraken. I think you're right. Always go unicorn.

It's just cooler. So we should talk about the stars of destiny and the story, really. Like, what's this whole thing about? So, Sweenekiden is based on a, like I mentioned earlier, a very old, Chinese novel called the Water Margin, which is the story of a group of outlaws who band together and kind of fight a rebellion to bring justice to a corrupt kingdom. And that is the story of Spikodin. Obviously, the Chinese novel takes place in China. And, you know, it was written, no one's actually sure when it was written and first committed to paper. But it was

either the 14th or 15th century, it's very old. It's also very long. Yeah, it's like a hundred chapters in each chat. Yeah, I've tried reading some of the, like the classic Chinese novels, like translations of them, and they are so ponderously huge. It's a me failing. Like, just can I get into them? And they are so massive.

Someday, though, someday. I had a friend years ago who borrowed the Perless book, translation of this. I think it was All Met Our Brothers with the title, and it was like the 70 chapter version. And that thing was still thicker than a Bible, and it had like four columns of text on the pages. It was, it was long. And he managed to get through it after like four months with that book. I'm impressed. And that is why they invented the printing press, because trying to transcribe that thing by hand, no thanks. No, thank you. That's why they invented Sue Kodin. So now we could just play this streamline version, that's only 20 hours.

It's only 20 hours. Where's the coal bolts in this? And also, Swigodin, is that the bandit army consisted of 108 heroes. And, you know, this is all lore and fiction. But 108 is a significant number in Buddhist practice. Buddhist, I don't want to say religion, because it's more like thinking. Philosophy, maybe. Yes, philosophy.

But it represents a few different things, but perhaps most importantly, the 108 temptations that a person must face in their life. It's, you know, just kind of the path to betterment. So it's a very significant spiritual number in Buddhism. And that is a thing that is consistent throughout the Swikiden Games is 108 stars of destiny. There are many more characters beyond that. Sometimes you can recruit characters who are not stars of destiny, But the thing is that, you know, the main members of your army, the core cast, the folks that you have to team up with to fight your rebellion against the corrupt empire, they are stars of destiny, which means that their names are inscribed on a stone tablet. And if you find all 108, then something important happens, something magical. Usually it means a tragedy is reversed.

And that begins with the first game, where spoilers, early on in the game, kind of like a third of the way into it, the protagonists, what would you call Grimio? Like, his... His Butler? Not quite a Butler, not a manservant. Just his kind of like... Is Alfred Penning? You know what? He is the Samwise Gamji to his proto-Vaghan.

He's the working class guy who just like, he's your best friend. He makes stews. He worries and fusses over young Master McDowell. He's a few years older. Has, you know, like long hair and he's got a mysterious scar on his cheek. It's a cross or an X-shaped scar. You never hear where that came from. So he's clearly someone who has life experience, but he's devoted himself to the son of General McDowell.

And, you know, is determined to. help give him a good upbringing. And actually, you have several people who are kind of in your initial circle, who kind of initially form your army, who are part of your father's household, your father being one of the great generals, one of the sixth great generals, reduced to five great generals of the empire, who helped bring peace, you know, back when Robert Barathean fought the, the Targaryans and so on and so forth. So there's kind of these older characters, probably in their 20s versus the protagonist who's a teen, who sort of look over him and are concerned for him, but also, you know, as you stray from the lawful good path to chaotic good, I guess, to into rebellion, that doesn't always sit well with some of them. So, you know, that creates some of the drama between Pawn and Cleo.

But anyway, Gremio is the name of your most loyal assistant, vassal, I don't know. And about the third of the way through the game, he dies horribly. You don't see it, but it's brutal. He's like calling out, calling out as he's devoured by living carnivorous spores from this weird guy's castle. And he talks about how he's going blind. And then, you know, when you finally open the door, it's one of those like, I will save you, you know, I'll bar the door and no one can stop you. Kind of doing the Hodor thing. Again, George R.R. Martin. Terrible. You go and there's just all of this left is his cape and his axe. So if you find all the other stars of destiny before

embarking on the final battle, then you can recover, you can, you know, resurrect Gremio. through the ginkie dama or whatever. Just like everyone's belief and the power of destiny brings him back. And the loving. Yeah. So, you know, it's very moving. Like, he's such a great character and he's so loyal and so devoted to making sure that McDowell is safe the entire time, that you feel it when you lose him.

And you feel it when he comes back. And it's like a great motivation beyond just completeism. to find all the stars of destiny because you can bring Gremio back. You've got to bring Gremio back. We love Gremio. So it's good. It's funny because they have like a lot of these stars of destiny are very hidden.

And then they have others that are likely to die unless you know how to specifically keep them from dying. And I think that really helps with the length of the game being so short because it really encourages you to replay it and like find the missing characters and figure out how to keep. keep everyone alive. Yes, it's probably worth mentioning that this is a multimodal combat game. Although most battles play out with a six-person team against monsters or bosses or whatever, there are some alternate battles. And some of those battles, actually, both of those alternate battle types can be very fraught because you can permanently lose members of your army in these battles.

And it's a little frustrating with the army battles because it's not always obvious what you need to do. And it's not always obvious when a character is going to die. And it does make you want to reload your game if something goes horribly wrong through really no fault of your own. You're kind of playing a little bit of guesswork. And sometimes going back to a save means you have to fight through a boss and then enter into the Army battle again. So I don't love that part of Swigodon. But the army battles are

really interesting because it's like a very simplified it's more like rock paper scissors than real tactics. But you know, you do start to amass this army and the more stars of destiny you have at your command, the more followers they have.

And so the larger your army becomes. So the larger you're able to, the greater group you're able to field against enemy armies. So it behooves you to find as many stars of destiny as possible. But then once you actually enter those battles, you're given the opportunity to do melee, to do range combat, you know, to do like a cavalry charge, to have the mages cast spells at a distance. And, you know, there's a little bit of luck involved there. Like, you can cast magic spells,

and those are good against, you know, a cavalry charge. But if they, you know, send their archers after you, the archers are just going to wipe out your mages. So those are very, very tense and very challenging. But when you do come out ahead and win, it feels very, very good and very satisfying. And the entire time, Matthew, one of the main characters, who really is kind of the one who kicks off the move into the proper army phase of the game where you start building a castle. He's giving you advice and taking your command. the entire time. And so, like, the sight of Matthew can be a little triggering, I think.

It's like, oh, God, who's going to die now? Matthew demands blood. The other type of combat is the duel, one-on-one battles. And these are usually, actually, are they always against the generals? Are there any one-on-one duels? Oh, yeah, pawn. That's the other one. So it's almost always against the generals of the emperor's army, and there's one or two others.

And you have to really think about how you approach because, one, you can lose these battles, but also, two, if you do really well, you will kill the other person. And that means you lose a star of destiny. What you want to do is find the sweet spot where you can fight them to a standstill, defeat them, but not kill them, and then recruit them into your army. And... Like Pokemon. Pretty much like Pokemon. Yeah. They don't hurt themselves in their confusion, though.

Oh, wait, actually... That'd be funny. McDowell doesn't fight Pond, right? It's, Pond is like the one... Yeah, it's the one battle that is... Is it automated? It's been a while since I've played through that part of the game. It's not automated.

You actually control it. It's Pond. It's Pond versus McDoll's dad, you know, the general that you can't actually recruit. But, you know, Pons make... this play is like he's buying you time, he's going to like sacrifice himself. And typically when you play the game, he does get his butt kicked and die really brutally because the general is such a higher level than he is. But if you like sit down, give him the best equipment you have, if you like max out his weapons like level rating to the extent that you can at that point

and you like give him, you used him enough to get him up to a decent enough level, he can survive it. and it's really funny when he does because the general finally leaves because the people he's been chasing after got far enough away and Pond just sort of sits there, he's like, wow, I'm still alive, huh? I better go catch up with everyone. Well, the thing about duels is that they're much less random,

I feel, the outcomes than the army battles. Because before every turn, your opponent will say something. And you can usually judge what action, not always, but usually judge what action they're going to take based on what they say. Like, they'll make, you know, a bold proclamation. And you know, they're probably going to attack. And so there's also kind of a rock paper scissors thing here, too, where if you attack and they attack, kind of the person who is standing their ground has initiative, you know, they have the stronger position. But if someone attacks you and you defend or vice versa, um, they, they, they have the stronger position.

then the attacker takes damage because, you know, they're being defended against and then countered. So you can learn what McDowell says and based on his tells, you know, like when he's going to defend, when he's going to stand neutral, when he's going to attack. And, yeah, that becomes important. But that is a very, that is a very harrowing battle. And, yeah, I think it's the one battle. where you don't control Tirmicdoll, you control someone else.

But it's, you know, they throw these in. And sometimes you can tell when they're coming, but that one just comes out of nowhere. And yes, definitely the first time I played it, Pawn was just like a red stain on the floor by the end. It was very sad. All right, being pizza. Yeah.

So it really encourages you to kind of have an optimal play strategy. It's a game about replay. Like you play through once and say, oh, I did this, but now I could get the best ending by replaying and approaching certain things differently and preparing myself, which, you know, I don't know if that's necessarily the best game design, but it is a 15 to 20 hour RPG. So it's not like, you know, a 90 to 100 hour RPG where you're like, oh, you want me to play that again just so I can get a different outcome? Maybe not.

Crow trigger. I was going to say, I would be more prone to replay. something like Baldersgate 3 if it wasn't, you know, a hundred hours long to see a different outcome. Yeah, Corona Trigger, I feel like the whole idea was to replay it over and over to see all the endings, but that gave you the New Game Plus, which became like a game mechanic in itself. I'm sure it existed before, but the term New Game Plus is just such an, is part of the gaming vernacular now. And I don't think you had that option in Swigodon, did you?

No, you did not. Yeah. But you could save your data and carry your memory. card across to Swigodden 2 and bring in McDowell or, you know, whatever glitchy name they gave him. There were a lot of problems with Sweetkin 2. McDowell and some of those other folks. It was pretty cool. Thank you. Anyway, so we kind of sidetrack from talking about the story.

So you play as Tier McDole or whatever. choose to call him. I always went with Dyske for some reason. I don't know why. But Tier McGole, he's a son of a great general. And the game begins with him having an audience with the emperor and the emperor and his consort, Wendy, Lady Windy, say, oh, you seem like a good kid. We're going to start your training to make you, you know, a great part of the empire, you know, let you follow in your father's footsteps. And so you team up with your friend Ted. You walk over to the next town, gamble, do the, you know, the shell game for a while, load up on money, max out your armor and stuff, and then go off on a adventure and discover, whoa, the emperor, he's got some really

shitty deputies here who are terrible human beings. Oh, Hordex sucks. Yeah. Commander Craze and his little toady minions, like they are, they are just abusing rights and suppressing people. And it's really horrible. And the more time you spend out in the world, the worst things get. And at some point, someone realizes, hey, this Ted kid, he's got something we want.

He is now a wanted man. And we want to bring him in. So that starts you and Ted on the run from the empire. And, of course, you bring along your retinue of pawn and Cleo and Gremoe and you try to escape, make your way out of the world. As you venture out, you kind of fall into the circle of a rebellion group, and they, you know, they don't know if they trust you entirely because you are the son of one of the emperor's top generals. But a lady named Odessa Silverberg says, you know what, this kid's all right. So they bring you in, something terrible happens.

Odessa dies and says, all right, you have natural leadership. You've got Moxie. You're now the boss of the rebellion, which is a lot to put on a kid's shoulders. I just got here. Pretty much. It's my first day. But all of a sudden, you become the leader of the rebellion, which is very small at the time. But she sends you to meet with her brother, a teacher in a nearby town named Matthew.

And you meet him. And he's like, please get away. I don't want anything to do with armies and violence and rebels. like Odessa has a good heart, but I don't want any part of what she does. But then he sees all this violence and in front of a children. And he says, okay, the empire is bad. I will return to service. As it turns out, I was a great tactician in the war.

And I know how to kill lots of people en masse with the power of my brain. So he advises your army. You take over a castle, launch your. sorties into the empire from there, steadily taking down or recruiting the generals, but also completing various tasks like going to a weird puzzle dungeon by dwarves or preventing the cobald forest from burning and that sort of thing, so that you can add these groups to your side and eventually amass enough power to take on the emperor and stop him. Along the way, you also are given a magic run called the soul eater, which is called that because people keep dying and that charges up your soul eater ruin, it devours their soul and makes you stronger, which is a pretty bleak way to ascend to power.

But ultimately, you got to do it. And in order to take on the emperor, you have to let people die, including your friend Ted, who powers up the soul leader, and Odessa Silverberg, who powers up the soul leader. and also your dad, who you kill in combat. He's very disappointed in you, but he powers up the soul eater. So at least he had some function at the end. And Grammy, you, of course. Yeah, so there's that. But anyway, that's pretty much the bulk of the game is just building this army and eventually...

Eating souls. Yes, eating souls. They're delicious. One thing I do enjoy, you know, this is just a sidebar, but this game does that thing where you fight a... boss early in the game, it kicks your ass, and you only win because your friend Ted, who currently possesses the soul leader, steps in, and it's like, yeah, I'm just vanishing, vanquishing this guy to the void, the giant ant thing. And it disappears. And you're like, whoa, that was weird. That was like crazy magic. It sounded like Saturday morning cartoon spells.

And later in the game, you go back up to that mountain pass. And those guys are just common enemies, and rabble, and you just wipe the floor with them. It's always so satisfying when there's, like, an impossible battle at the beginning of the game, and then later in the game, you're just like, oh, yeah, I remember you by. But you freak out at first because, like, oh, God, this is something that killed me. Then he killed it, and you're like, yeah, justice. Now I have the magic spell that will wipe the floor with you. Now I have the soul leader.

So anyway, that's the high-level story for the plot. the, you know, it does a good job of humanizing all the people you battle. There are a few just like, this guy is an asshole, like craze. But even, even, what's his face, Milik, the general who has the bizarre flower castle that kills Gremio, you can recruit him. And he's not a horrible human. He's just really weird. He's just a guy who has mad eating sports in his castle. Yeah.

It's a hobby. That's weird, but he's good in battle. And he's not like, he doesn't seem evil. He's just got, like, you know, he's really, really obsessed with fashion. He has a house in the capital that is just outfits so he can look foppish every day in a different way. And he's got a castle with really shrill accordion music and man-eating spores all over. Have you ever seen a Gretaicco? Yes.

I've seen a couple of episodes. Have you, so, Kevin, you know, the out-of-pocket prince, aka the space cadet? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a character in Ed Retziko who wants to, who Retziko starts dating because, of course, everyone's on her ass about having babies, blah, blah, blah. So they set her up with this real, like, square, just a guy who has no idea what's going on all the time. And it doesn't work out for obvious reasons. And you think this guy's a complete dumbass. And at the very end of the episode, you just see him walk into this.

apartment full of beautifully tended plants and flowers and stuff like that and he's like, I'm home. And it's just, there he is. That's the manifestation of the out-of-pocket prince. This guy who became a fop and has these spore castles that eat people. I believe it.

He loves, like, one very specific thing, and he's just doing this army. Two. Okay, two very specific things. And deadly flowers. He's just doing this, he's just doing this military thing to fund his hobbies. And I think we can all relate, even if not to his, you know, mad-eating spores.

Maybe cut down on the mad-eating spores. No, they stay. Okay, fine. Maybe you just have half the number of mad-eating spores. But even the final boss, Barbarossa, the emperor, who possesses the sovereign ruin, even he turns into a three-headed dragon at the end and you kill him. It's wild, but he doesn't seem like a bad person. He seems like someone who lost his way with grief.

when his wife died and allowed himself to be just, you know, let astray into not even like evil or power, hunger or anything like that, just not really caring that much about what happened in his domain and allowing, you know, these bad seeds to take root and, you know, abuses to happen to the people. So it's not that he's a horrible, evil, power hungry. human. He is just basically a lost soul. And in the end, you don't feel great about defeating him. Like, he needs to go, clearly. He needs to get Luigi'd. But it's not like something you celebrate. You're not like, yeah, we sure showed that guy who's sad about losing his wife. But at the same time, you know, lots of people lose their wives and they don't let their kingdoms fall into ruin and slavery. So, who's to say?

In any case, yeah, it does a good job of kind of providing human context for everyone in the war. And you often don't feel great about your victories. And there's a lot of, you know, this kind of Pyrrhic element to it. I mean, you can't beat the game without killing the main character's father. He refuses to back down because he is, you know, very lawful, very good. and resolute in his determination that he took a vow, you know, the vow of knighthood. It's lawful good in the traditional D&D sense. Lawful stupid, in other words.

Yeah, kind of, yeah. But, you know, the Tactics Oger version of Lawful Good. And I think that game also came out in 1995, did it not? Yeah, sounds like that right. Yeah. So that was, it was something in the air. But you have to kill him. He won't budge.

He won't stand down. He will fight you to the death, his own son, because you have betrayed the kingdom, the empire. So, yeah, there's just a lot of, like, downbeat moments in this game. And you can avoid some of them and you can reverse one of them. But ultimately, like, to make good things happen, you have to do bad stuff. And it's a pretty good look at, you know, the realities of war in a sort of cartoony, sort of sense. Yeah.

That takes place in a land where there's a talking dogmen. For sure. I think Sweetin 2 does the war angle a little better, but it was still a bit of a revolutionary story at the time because even Final Fantasy 6 was like, okay, well, at the very end, like, yes, you had this empire, but the empire were kind of full of assholes, first of all, and they got supplanted by someone who was even worse, and Kepka is just straight evil. Lavo's, same thing. He's a parasite. He has to go. He has no thought other than I must consume this place. So here is a story that I'm not saying it was impossible in the

SNAS. Of course, we had an ogre battle, as you said, but it wasn't very common in most RPGs at that point. And just the idea of going up against an empire that wasn't thoroughly bad, but was certainly bad enough that something had to change. But it had its reasons for being as bad as it is. Tactics Oger debuted in October 1995, two months before Swigden. So, yeah, it was definitely something in the water. Everyone has something to say at a specific time. Yeah.

I really like the pacing of this game, too, in the way that they do the story, because fighting the generals, like each of those feels like its own sort of self-contained scenario. The opening is kind of its own thing, getting the castle, etc. I think it's a little silly to claim that it has kind of like a 90s anime pacing, but it kind of does. Yeah, yeah. And I kind of like that because it gives you very specific stopping points if you were me and you stayed up way too late playing this game. You're like, okay, well, I just finished this bit.

That's a good place to finally go to bed. I got to go to school in three hours. I better stop. Got to go to school and talk about this game. with my friends in math class. Oh, that's awesome. As you do. Yeah.

Those are the good old days. Yeah. And, you know, going back to the, like, original work, uh, talking about how it's kind of downbeat, like, the original water margin book ends with, like, two thirds of these stars of destiny dying in war. And the remaining third just be like, all right, uh, let's, let's just quit it and go do something else now. We're done.

So, you know, if you're pulling from the legend, uh, The Legend of the Water Margin, you might as well, like, get the tone of it down, too, while you're at it. I agree. So speaking of the water margin legend, I mentioned earlier that, even though this is based on a Chinese novel that was set in China 800 years ago or whatever, this game is definitely not set in 15th century China. It might be 15th century just in terms of technology. But it's set in the Scarlet Moon Empire ranges, it covers quite a spread of areas in terms of ethnicity and tone. There is a port town that does feel very Chinese in nature, like the names and the just kind of the overall look like a very rural Chinese fishing village. But at the same time, you know, Scarlatica Castle where Millick lives, it feels like France.

There's a lot of European influence. The main city is called Gregminster. You have kind of generic towns like Rockland. You have the elf forest and the dwarf kingdom. You've got a hidden village of Ninja. So I don't think you actually go to the hidden village of Ninja here. It's just like they send emissaries, Kagay and Kasumi. to team up with you. So you don't actually know where they are. But basically, even though this

isn't a huge land, it covers quite the ethnological spread. Maybe it's like Central Europe or something. So you get a little of Western Europe, a little bit of East Asia, and it's just kind of right there. But I do want to ask, like there are a few characters where you stop and sort of notice their names or surnames. And Nadia, I want to ask you, like, the Silverbergs. Like, is that significant in some way? You know a lot more about Jewish culture and heritage than I do. And I've always wondered, like, that doesn't seem to be an incidental choice, but I don't know if there's, like, historical significance to it. I've kind of only come to some conclusions that I can come to by myself. Like, one thing I've noticed that's interesting is, yeah, you have Silverberg. I think

there's also an Oppenheimer and or is at least mentioned. And these are names that show up in Metal Gear as well. Um, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, is an Arnhimer and Merrill is the Silverberg. And, uh, if you actually look in Wikipedia at the list of Jewish characters and video games, it's better than it was, but it's still kind of looking at like that leaflet and airplane, the Jewish athletes, uh, which would actually be significantly beefier if included wrestlers, but anyway, uh, so here's the thing. It's, it could be an instance of a Japanese person to, a Jewish name because it sounds cool which happens all the time

or they could have known what they were doing and there's one reason I'm going to say it was the latter because of the fact that in the Suiko-Gaden series which we mentioned briefly you work with you play with Nash who showed up I think in Swigden 2 I can't remember which I think it or if he's

a character on his own but anyways a character named Nash he's from a royal fan he's from a family of nobles and his surname which he kind of drops because it tells you who he is, his surname is Latka, swear to God, which is the potato pancake, you eat a Hanukkah. And here's what kills me about that. They included the J that technically could be in the anglification of this word and is proper to be there, but nobody uses. So it tells me that they knew exactly what they're doing, but why? Why? But yes, I would, I think that Jews have claimed the Silverberg family. A friend of mine always said, like the great. thing on earth, there'd be a Seder with the Silverberg family. Just everyone arguing tactics at the table. I'm trying to talk about the four questions.

Shut up. We're trying to do the four questions. Then we'd be like my Seder is when I was a kid. Shut up. We're reading this. Agada. So do you think it's significant that the first Silverberg you meet is Odessa, who takes her name from a city in Ukraine?

Because there's a lot of history with Russian Jews and, you know, Russian adjacent spaces and just the plight of the Jewish community there. Oh, absolutely. It seems like having a woman who is fighting against injustice and against imperialism named, you know, in a sort of clumsy maybe way for a Russian Jew. Like, that doesn't seem accidental at all to me. It seems to, you know, kind of be saying, like, here is a proxy, an envoy for oppressed peoples, and that is what she represents. And you are taking up a cause that has, you know, much greater cultural and historic heft than you would, you know, just assume as a kid wandering into a battle. I feel like that's a way to kind of give it some subtext that adds more gravity to the nature of the revolution.

Yeah, it's actually funny. I never grew up with any Odessa's, but I did grow up alongside a lot of Russian Jews who came to Canada as refugees. And, yeah, I never even thought about the connection between Odessa and the Jewish community, but that's a good shout. And I think, yeah, I'm comfortable with saying, yes, they actually meant this to be an analog. Because, of course, Japanese people, they know about the Holocaust and whatnot, like I'm assuming they learn about it. And also Valkyr Chronicles, which comes some years later, actually did a really good job with Jewish representation in that game as well. So it's certainly possible. And I believe that Suikinen generally is a well-written series.

And I think they made a good use of the representation. The idea of someone who would maybe represent an oppressed people being at the machinations. saying, okay, well, we're going to strategize our own survival here, and they do. So to bring it back to something I just mentioned a little while ago, Tactics Oger is specifically about balkanization and is built around, you know, all of that. So, again, it seems to be something that was in the air at the time for developers who wanted to tackle something more serious in video games than, like, let's go fight, you know, the elf god or whatever.

Yeah. I think that video games, like, as they kind of increased in space and gave developers more space to eff around with, is extremely likely that said, well, I want to tell a serious story. I want to, you know, do for video games what's already been done for books and movies. Why not? And, indeed, why not? I was also going to say that, you know, Japan does have a familiarity with, you know, Russian history, of course, because Russia's right next to are. And, you know, one of the early, like, luminaries in, you know, Japanese video games was Michael Kogan, who founded Taito, and he was from Odessa in Ukraine.

And his family escaped the Russian Revolution. They traveled to Manchuria when, you know, Japan had taken control of it. And, like, he was sort of looped in with the folks who were working. on the Fugu plan to sort of move European Jews into Japanese control territory. So like that history was there.

It was floating around in the gaming industry over there. I don't know how directly any of the folks who worked on this game might have been aware of that, but it might have been something they'd heard about. Interesting. Yeah, actually, that was just something that I hadn't really thought about too much

and just wanted to, you know, see what Nadia, if she had put any thought into it and just some kind of observations evolved here on everyone's side. So it's not the subtext I really had thought much about before with Swigodon, but it does seem like, you know, this was an attempt to embrace a lot of historic and cultural influences to tell a pretty serious war story in video game. form. And yes, it is a video game war story where you can put cursed idols in your bathhouse and it turns the water murky. And there is, you know, a dog person who speaks broken English at you and a really, really fast elf named Stallion. But at the same time, there's a lot of conflict,

a lot of, you know, people with legitimate grievances, legitimate ambitions, no one is, almost no one is really evil. And then there is kind of like the bigger fictional meta story with the true runes and Look and Wendy and Lady Lechnot that, you know, is just barely hinted at here. You have no real reason to think that they are something more significant than just, you know, some characters in this game. But as the sequels evolve, they continue to play bigger and bigger roles. So, yeah, some interesting seeds planted here. But also, I think a game that stands really well on its own merits.

And like I mentioned earlier, there is a remaster out for HD consoles. It came out just a few months ago. And by all accounts, has sold really well. So, you know, even though the original

visionary behind the series is no longer with us, maybe he did pass his plans for the saga of the true runes along to someone who who he trusted, who can shepherd future installments of the story and finally help us figure out what's going on with those true runes. And if not, maybe we'll see a remake of Swigodin 3 that cuts down the load times. Oh, boy. That's hope so. That was a game that I definitely

want to give another try to because I actually tried it right after playing Dragon Quest 8. I said, oh, no. Goodbye. We're going to be able to be. Any final thoughts on Swigodon 1? I think it is absolutely a must-play, even though I think that one, sorry, that two improves upon it exponentially in many ways. One is certainly worth a sample, if nothing else to see. Basically, that arm of RPG evolution that unfortunately fizzled out and gave way to polygons. That's not just, you know, dis-polygons.

I absolutely love Final Fantasy 7, but it was, it seemed like the most obvious place where RPG's going for the time and it took a just veered to the other's direction entirely. So it's a certainly, it's a great piece of history, a great piece of storytelling. As we were talking about here, it really gives you a sense for when games are trying to get a little bit deeper with their content. And of course, Final Fantasy 6 was a great start, but this, uh, games like Sweak it in 1 and 2 really took that and ran with it. So, uh, absolutely a landmark game. I would certainly check it out. It's easier than ever with the remit with the revisions, of course.

Kevin? You know, this was one of my favorite RPGs at the time, and, you know, talking about it here, it kind of reminds me why I liked it so much, and I really need to replay it now. So thank you for that. Yeah, I really, I like how much it respects the player's time, you know, having the short load times being a fairly breezy play-through. And, yeah, Suicodin-2 does a lot of the elements better. I feel like it even looks prettier

like they put even more into the Spritework there. But, you know, this isn't really much of a slouch and the fact that Sweet Kodin 2 also links into story elements if you have a save file from the first game. That's pretty cool. Like, that is extremely cool and it kind of adds

a little more reason to check this out if you want to try the second game, especially now that they're bundled together. Like, there's no reason not to try them both, right? You know, I've never tried the Saturn version or the Windows 95 port. Oh, I got to play that. I guess it's got to be trash.

I think Ray Barnholt found a copy and put it on archive or something. Somebody did. So it's floating around. It's got to be interesting. But, like, yeah, play the new version. It's probably much easier. There's a real time in retro game history when everything was being ported to Windows for the first time and with varying results.

I'm sure this just got trashed in magazines at the time, PC magazines. It's just, it's not, it's not the right fit for the audience at all. Now, we got Sprite's cooties. But, you know, it was, I don't think it ever came out here in Windows 95. I think I might have just been in Japan, which they might have been a little friendlier to it. Yeah. But still, yeah, this is a, this is a really good one, like, great characters. Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know what else to say about it. It's just a fantastic game and, yeah, highly recommend it. Yeah, the remake. a remaster, I guess, is pretty reasonably priced. It's accessible and available on pretty much any platform right now. I highly

recommend it. It doesn't make a lot of changes to tweak it in one. It doesn't backport any of the Saturn content, really. But it does give you, like, the expanded screen perspective, screen ratio of the PSP remaster from

almost 20 years ago that never came to the U.S. I think kind of the big advantage of it is that it's an affordable version of Sweekitin 2 that also has the glitches and the bugs and the translation problems and all of that stuff ironed out

from what I understand. I haven't played that part of the remaster yet, but yeah, it makes some changes to the first game, mostly aesthetic, but the original Svikidin is not that complex a game, so they didn't need to do a lot of

surgery to get it kind of bound back together. So it's a good time. And again, it's a compact game. Like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 4, you can clear it in less than 20 hours. And, you know, use a guide and you can see what you need to do to get through all the don't lose your Stars of Destiny sticking points, not have to replay it. There's no shame in it. We're not young anymore. We don't have the amount of time we used to. There used to be like 10 games released a year. Now it's 10 games released an hour. There's just more choice. So, so, yeah, do what you need to to get the most out of this game. But do play it because even though we've talked a lot about spoilers and story twists and

things like that, talking about something is one thing, but experiencing it is another. You can't spoil the experience, only the story. So go experience it. That's what I'm saying. All right. Thank you, Kevin and Nadia, for. your time and for doing a proper deep dive for the first time into Swaykoden 1. And we will. We should get back together and talk Swaykiden 2 at some point. I'll be here. Yeah.

Okay. Please, please be there. In the meantime, that's Retronauts. And if you want to hear other podcasts that we have created, including another one about Sviken, but not as in-depth as this one, you can go to any of your favorite podcast delivery services except Spotify and YouTube, I guess, and find retronauts and listen to so many episodes. And if you really, really enjoy to want to go extra level deep and extra level deep, you can subscribe on Patreon. Not only will you get

every episode a week early without advertisements and at a higher bit rate quality to tickle your ears, you can subscribe at the $5 a month level, which becomes an increasingly good deal with each year and each bump of inflation. $5 get you exclusive episodes every other Friday, plus exclusive columns every weekend by Diamond Fight, plus Discord access where we do things like play Metroidvania games together. It's really great. You should become a Patreon subscriber, patreon.com slash retronauts. That's our only sales pitch.

That's, you know, it's a pretty low, low, low, uh, what will be, we'll be. What would you call it? Low Pressure kind of podcast. Yeah. Subscribe to us. If you don't, if you don't have the money, understandable. Listen to us for free. There's still lots of great stuff.

In any case, that's it, retronauts. Nadia, where can we find you on the internet? I am all over the internets. I am the co-host of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast. We cover RPG's old and new Eastern and Western. And actually, we've been doing a lot of streaming and writing. And our Discord is just hop in. bumpin. If you want to support us

and learn how to join our Discord, just go to Patreon.com forward slash blood god pod. And please support us there. We are all independent. Kevin Bunch. You can find me on blue sky at Atari Archive.org, which is also my web address. I have a website

and a related YouTube series and a book. All of those are Atari Archive. You can learn about the early history of video games through the lens of the Atari 2,600 library. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, here at Retronauts, many, many weeks out of the month. You can find me at Limited Run Games, making stuff for our cool collector's editions,

and also publishing books like Atari Archive by Kevin. And also the books that I create, like the upcoming Ineus Era books, which are very big and extensive and the print proofs just came in for those. I'm very excited to see those. It's been a long weekend, uh, holiday weekend where I haven't been able to see them, but I'm going to go check them out tomorrow. Uh, you can also find me on YouTube as get this Jeremy Parrish, uh, where I cover video games with a video every week. And you can find me on social media, blue sky, specifically as jperish. BluSkyy. And I do have a Patreon, but if you're interested in supporting yet another Patreon,

you can find the information for that all over my content creation stuff, my videos and books and so forth. So I won't push it. I will just say, go play Sweak it in. It's so good. And it still holds up almost 30 years later. Wow. Don't like that.

Nope. No, sir. I don't like it. We're going to be able to be. Thank you.