Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 153: Suikoden I & II

Episode Date: May 28, 2018

Jeremy and Bob discuss the greatness of Konami's first two Suikoden RPGs, yet fail to acquire all 108 Stars of Destiny (all we recruited were Shane Bettenhausen and Shivam Bhatt). Plus: Remembering Retronauts contributor Andrew Fitch.

As we can retronauts, please tell me the answer. Is fate unchangeable? Everyone and welcome to a delightful? and downright lovable episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, who also is downright lovable. And with me are some equally cuddly people to talk about Sweikiden, one and two. So let's sound off, shall we? Hey, it's Bob Mackey, and I'm really looking forward to Konami's erotic violence, Sukkoden pinball.

Sorry, Pinchinko machine. I fucked that up. It's going to happen. That's okay. It's talking about Konami. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. I'll take both.

this is Shane Bentenhausen who's already interesting to hear how differently you guys have pronounced Swikoden and Sukhoden and is like My favorite is Sukhi Odin That's what the guys

at Babbage just called it when I was Actually the games were new And I was buying them I worked there when it came out And a guy was like He got guys get that That sounds like

That was also good Because when Swikudan 2 started to go up in price Sometimes you would go on to eBay If you did a search for Suki Odin You would find it for very cheap because no one was looking for Suki Odin.

I got some cheap copies of Sweenan too. When the first one came out and it was you got that suck it in or you got that S word game. Yeah. Suki Odin sounds like a Japanese meal. It is. It's actually a, yes. Raw fish and soup or something. Sukiyaki.

Odin. The stupid can of whatever garbage. This is Sivan, what? And I'm here to get all the squirrels. Okay. And which star of destiny are you, Shevim? Isn't this your favorite series of all time? Yeah, but there's like a hundred and eight of them.

I know, so there's a lot of choices. You can't just make one up. Was it the, no, I can't. Now I will lose my cred forever. You know what? I have failed. Wow. Okay, well, this episode's over.

I brought the heavy hitters and they blew it. Let's say the duck guy. Okay. That's the wrong thing. I thought you met the actual name of the stars, like the Torres. There's like a name for each star. I'm going to be the tin kai star, because that means outside of heaven, right? Ten kai star.

And then like this. Oh, yeah, that's me. Ten kai star and the hero. You are a hero. I'm the hero of this episode. I'm the protagonist. And if you are very, very good when you listen to the follow-up episode, you can bring me on. Wait, we're doing this.

You bring up to your save file. Do I have to do this week-in-three episode? Absolutely. Oh, my God. We've got to talk about the duck guy. Let's talk about the duck guy. Let's talk about the good episode. All right.

Anyway, so, yeah, we are going to do this video. We are going to talk about Sweekitin 1 and 2. We did an episode on the Sweekin series back during the one-up days. It's been more than a decade. Was I on that? No, but I was. No. Okay, good.

But before we start talking about Sweenitin, I do want to talk about something else very briefly. And that is paying tribute to someone who was on the original Sweekitin episode. Former One-Up and Zip Davis editor, copy editor of Andrew Fitch, was on the original Swiquidun episode. And I forgot about that until I started to do that. until I started to do research. And very sadly, Andrew recently passed away of cancer. And if I'm not mistaken, that makes him the first person to have been a somewhat regular contributor to Retronauts who is no longer with us.

And he was on many other podcasts as well. Yeah, he was. He was on like all the podcasts, basically, at various points. Even the sports one, right? Yeah. Yeah, he was a big sports fan. So he was on that a lot. And he was always giving his love advice.

Right. Well, and those of us who worked with him as if, you know, I've fondly recall editing his work and also, you know, having fun times with him in Japan and in London and yeah, he was a fan of music and the arts and film and lots of opinions. And he and his brother were really just a fun duo to hang out with back then. Yeah, they were twins and they couldn't have been more different than one other. That's true. Their personalities are so different. I never worked with Andrew at one up or anything or at Zip, but after trying to work at Zip for like three or four years, I eventually moved out to California to work at Atlas, and he was the first person I saw there. We started on the same day working on the same project. So it was weird to be a fan of all the podcasts. And on the first day, my co-worker is Andrew Fitch. And we worked together for almost a year.

So, yeah, I have a lot of good memories of that. Andrew was great because he was a very shy person, but once you, like, kind of broke through that, he was very, very outgoing and very opinionated. And he'd, like, get into these kind of frothy rants and he'd start tripping over himself. Yes. Like, he was just really fun to have conversations with him. And you mentioned going to Japan with him. And that's always something that kind of made me angry is that in 2008, he paid his own way to go help us cover Tokyo Game Show.

That sounds like the game's press. Yeah, the company wouldn't cover him. So he went on his own. And then, like, four months later, he got laid off in the big, you know, the big one-up layoffs. And that always pissed me off. I was like, someone who puts their neck out like that for the company should not get screwed over like this. But it was great hanging out with him because. he was actually very conversant with Japanese language and culture and very familiar with Japan itself.

So he was kind of like, you know, even though I'd been quite a few times at that point, I was still like learning new stuff from him. And I had a great time hanging out with him outside the show. Yeah, he was incredibly insightful and had a huge depth of knowledge. And like, you know, his localization skills were there. And more importantly, though, for me personally, he had always been really kind because I was always just a plucky intern at one-up or like, you know, freelance writer. whatnot. And he was always so helpful and so just like supportive of me as like, you know, trying to get in and stuff and just didn't need to. But he was always very, very kind to all of us. Yeah, he was, he had a sarcastic streak, but he would only be sarcastic if he knew that

you could take it. Right. Like I never saw him, you know, talking down to anyone or being meaned to anyone. It was more like, you know, someone he was, he was comfortable with and felt like, like, he can, he can take a few barbs and he'll throw a few back. Yes, very, very much, too. What's funny, my favorite memory of he and his brother was, I think it was either 2004, 2006, one of those years, we had decided he and I were both big fans of the Brit pop band Blur, who had broken up. They had broken up for, I think, at this point, almost at least five years, if not six or seven years. And they'd announced a reunion show in Hyde Park in London in the summer. and he and I bought tickets to go see this show and he and his brother

and I ended up there and we went to this concert and had an amazing time at this show super fun and then afterwards he had like found some guy off the old NeoGaf Forum and like we met up with this guy

who met on the forum and we talked about video games and we're drinking and had this great night and I just had this wonderful memory trapped in time of like this night in London with the Fitches and yeah rest and peace man

Yeah, I think, oh, sorry. In case, in case people don't know, Andrew actually worked on a localization of Suikodin 5. So you can read his text in that game. And you can also read his text in the, I think it's still running. It probably isn't actually. The Atlas Online RPG Pandora Saga is what he worked with me on. So I don't know if that's still running, but it's free. So check it out.

Yeah. So just given the coincidence, I just wanted to take a moment to stop and remember Andrew. And I think everyone who knew him or worked with him or even just listened to him on podcasts or read his writing, I think he touched everyone. So he's definitely missed. And if you are interested in hearing Andrew's opinions on the Sweekin series, since he can't be with us now, go back to archive.org and look up Retronauts episode 67 on Sweden. And he'll be there. And you can hear his kind of insider insights onto the series. That was March of 2009, in case you're wondering.

It was super fun because when he had passed, I went and looked back at that because I had also guessed it on that episode. And to hear a super young version of myself, just so excited to be in the presence of somebody who worked on one of my favorite series of all time and who, you know, I'd been a coworker. And it was just like, you can hear me tripping all over myself. And he's like, no, but chill, it's okay. I'm like, oh, but say good. So good. Ah, RIP, Mr. Fitch. Thank you.

All right, so let us move along to talk about the Swiqueton series. Well, specifically, Swaykenen 1 and 2, because those are the ones I've played the most, and they're the ones I love the most. And they are kind of a set. In fact, as I was discovering, as I discovered as I was interviewing, as I was researching this episode, Swikodon 1 and 2 really are of a pair because the writer and designers for the series, Yoshitake Mora Yama and Jungo Kowano, like, they originally conceived the game Swikidin 2. That was like the idea they had and they wanted to tell that story, but they didn't have experience creating an RPG. And so they wanted to get it right.

And instead of just like jumping, you know, feet first into this huge sprawling RPG, they said, why don't we create sort of like a prologue story? Why don't we, you know, kind of cut our teeth by creating a smaller game that explores some of the same principles and concepts, but is, you know, like a manageable process, progress. But I'll see, that plan was not apparent. That was not revealed at the time. To take the gentle listener back to 1995 and, you know, Paris, you and I were there, you didn't have a PS1 quite at launch, but you were paying attention to it, right?

And, like, I think all of us who were fans of Japanese role-playing games on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were keeping a keen eye on things like Arc the Lad, Beyond the Beyond, the first two JRPs that have been announced for this new console from Sony. And then wild arms. But here comes this one. You see a screenshot of, you know, Sweecodend. And it looks good. It looks like a traditional 2D hand-drawn J-R-PG.

It looks like Luffy or something. It was like Luffy or something. But then Konami has never made it an RPG. Like, you know, Capcom. They had, but not that it would be a... Not in America. Right. For those of us here in America, it's like, you know, we have a great respect for Konami.

But it's not a publisher or a developer you associate with role-playing games. It's not square. It's not even Capcom who had made... We never got Cave Noor. Right. You know, Capcom had made like Dustsame and Emperor and Emperor and stuff. Breath of fire. Breath of fire.

So there was a little bit of, I was a little wary, like, oh, well, Konami makes great stuff. I'm excited for Casabana, but, like, with them making an RPG, I was slightly wary of the announcement of this game. And the cover art for a sukaden one might be one of the worst cover art. In America, yeah. But the Japanese cover art's great. The art is good. Somehow this, the first Sikiden was the one of the first two games I bought for PlayStation.

When I got my PS1, I dumped my N-64 after. sucking all the content out of Mario Mario Kart 64 and Mario 64 I was like, this console just isn't for me. So I traded it, got a PlayStation, and bought Tomb Raider and Sweekidon. And didn't really know much about either one, except

that Tomb Raider was super hyped, and Swikodon was super not hyped. There was no hype for Swekegon. But it's just like, I had discovered recently, hey, I really like RPGs, so this seems promising. I wasn't sure about that Revelation's persona game. I don't know. Which came out the same day. Yeah. Like this

one, this one seemed promising. I remember that day in America, because I already worked at GameStop when this came out. Swayka-Den came out the same day as Revelation's persona and, I believe, Dark Savior for the Saturn. It was a great J-R-Prigy day. And like, Swikodend was like, you know, instantly the best RPG on PlayStation 1. Because some of us had suffered through Beyond the Beyond, this is a much better game

than you. Oh, boy. Yeah, Beyond the Beyond I picked up later and was not impressed in the least. I don't like Camelot RPGs. Any of them? I know people love Golden Sun, but I hate them. They're so interminable. The only good Camelot RPGs are the golf RPGs and the tennis RPGs are involved.

Like, that's what really gets me. I don't like sports. I don't like Camelot RPGs, but you combine Camelot and sports, and hey, it's fun. Well, and she even didn't reference the terrible box art in America, which looks like a romance novel or something. A bad romance novel. Like a bad Harlequin romance. Like a romance novel done by the cover art guy of Mega Man 2. It's really bad.

Yeah, it takes the teenage protagonist of Swikodon and turns him into like this beefy wrinkled. Yeah, like his name is like beef superchunk or something. And there's like, you know, a sultry looking kind of like belly dancer lady. Anyway, you can point at all the characters and you're like, oh, I know which character in the game of this is, but what the hell? But then you boot the game up and surprise, it just looks like a really good 16 bit RPG. And I think that's the refreshing piece to me at the time was, oh, they're not trying to make polygons here. They're like, they're just doing what they're good at making good. made looking 2D art.

Yeah, so the thing about that's two-good-on-one, so when I was in calculus and I think 1996, something like that, we were all like, you know, J-RP nerds, we had been passing around Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy tactics, and then one of my friends came up and said, dude, you've got to try this, and he pushed this game into my hand, and when you fire it up, it doesn't look like Final Fantasy 7 or tactics, but it looked like what you would expect if a Super Nintendo game had been pushed all the way to the top. So you played this after Final Fantasy in Tactics? And you still found this to be your favorite

PS1 RPG? Because the music. The music of this game just took me away. I'm glad you have him on this podcast because I'll say, I'm kind of an empirical from floating from above fan of Sikodan 1 and 2. I think they're great games. But I've never been one of these people. And I've had many friends growing up one of my best friends across the street, Todd Morton, you're out there. Spikodan is like his jam.

I watched him play through Sucodan 1 and 2 like a hundred times. And, like, you know, I respect these games, but, like, some people really glommed onto this, like, this is their jam. And I think for them it was, not the music usually, but it was the hundred and eight characters. That is the secret to the appeal of these games. Yeah, but having a lot of characters in an RPG doesn't make a good RPG. For some people, for some people, for like, chronocross, no thanks. Okay, give me a second. Hang on, hang on one ticket.

Let me, let me answer Shane here. So here's the thing about Suikodin, before we even talk about, just detail. Why would this game grab you? one, it's got 108 characters. But these characters are not just carbon copy

clones of each other. If you put them in different combinations, you can activate and unlock incredible set. You're getting way ahead of us. But I think for a lot of people,

you did not look at the notes, did you? He didn't. But I think for a lot of people, the appeal of this game was 108 characters that are hard to find. Like,

if you just trade through this game. Servantes is a little tough time. I played this after Final Fantasy 7, after Final Fantasy Tactics, after Lunar's release on, sorry, Lunar's release. No, no, obviously, but to congratulate you. Lunar. Victor Ireland would be so happy.

He just called it Lunar. They kept calling it that on that damn making of anyways. Because the A, the A is bigger. Lunar. So I played it after that and it's like Star Wars and Second Story, but... So what did you think when you first play? I'm not a biggest fan as Shivam is, but I thought it was really awesome. Like, it's not my favorite RPG of all time, but I stuck with it and I got all the

characters. I thought it was really cool. And I think it was because of that, that gimmick to it, the 180 characters. I'm going to reel this back to where I was going when... I thought we were talking about our experiences with the game. No, I don't know where that came from. I think you asked about it. I didn't know.

I was saying that this game, the original sweep it in, was created as a prequel, as a prologue to the bigger game. Which is cool to know. This is something that I think makes the game really great. This is something, I don't know, like, I don't know if it was deliberate at the time. But you also saw this with Arc the Lad, where you had this game that you can easily. complete in like 15 hours. It's like a test run. And then the sequel is about six or seven times that size.

Arcelaide 2 is huge. But kind of the same thing, just blown up. But very similar. I'm going to contest your argument here, Jeremy, because we play through Sweet Kodan 1 for U.S. Gamer maybe four years ago and it was like, oh, this will be a breezy, simple thing. It's like 10 hours. It's like 20 plus hours. It's like under 10.

Look, if I played two good at 1 right now, with my eyes closed, I could beat it in 21 hours tops with every character. With every character. Because the hard part is you get a little slowed down trying to get the mysterious pot. But otherwise... That mysterious... That'll slow you down. But otherwise...

Have you tried the panhandle? That's usually where you could... The kids don't do the mysterious pot. We're in California. Go to the mysterious pot store. It's legal now. The nameless urn. But...

You're right. It's just... It's smaller in scope than Tico2. It's smaller in every dimension, but it felt huge. Well, okay. So that's the thing. That's where I was trying to go with this. go with this. People keep interrupting. It is a very compact game. It's, you know, very much

in the vein of a 16-bit RPG like Final Fantasy 4 or Chrono Trigger where you can complete a single play-through in 15 to 20 hours. But despite the fact that it is a very brisk game, it doesn't feel small. Like, you do manage to get that whole army building, 100-8 stars of destiny. You have multiple combat systems. You build a castle. Like, it is this vast, sprawling epic that takes place across, you know, like an entire kingdom. And there's hints of a much larger world at work, too. And all of this fits into this pretty small game. But I think a lot of that goes down to the technology. Like I said, you know, it feels in terms of scale similar to a 16-bit RPG. It also feels very similar

in tech to a 16-bit RPG. And I think that's something that works a lot in Sweakidan's favor. And even though the games took a lot of heat in the press at the time for being ugly or dated, no, like the super low-tech look, you know, not having a ton of polygons really makes for a brisk game. You don't have tons of loading times. You don't have, you know, just the sort of inherent slowness of getting around in a 3D space. Everything is, okay, so being forced to move in cardinal directions is not great. Like that really dates it. I mean, the game was before the dual shot came out. Right.

It was, but you could still do diagonals and chrono trigger. Well, but most 16-bit and 8-bit RPGs you can't. I mean, I think it's just 32 bits. But I think if you look at this game, like what it launched with, you know, speaking of one, this structure of, you know, the 108 stars of destiny as the premise and the idea of three different battle systems, you know, the main core battle system, the dual system, the tactical battle system. Plus, the first one had a little bit fewer of like the kind of mini-game kind of things, the town building. It kind of presented these things that were really engaging that the player, as a player, I really, you know, immediately enjoyed.

And then the second one just kind of blew all that out with even more depth. Absurdily. Yeah. And I think that's what set it apart. And at the time, Stukaden 1 was kind of like the cult classic critical choice. The people would come into my GameStop asking for a role playing game. This would be the one to recommend. They'd be like, I've never heard of it.

The arts kind of matter. Like, no, no, stick with it. It's good. See, I enjoyed Sweeted-in one. I played it. I played it and, yeah, like, before Final Fantasy 7, I played it and then I played it again to get all 108 stars of destiny. But I didn't think that much of it.

I was like, oh, this is an eight little standalone game. It wasn't until the sequel came out that I was like, oh, these are two parts of a really amazing hole. I think people look back on the first one. It is a great vast game on its own. But when you combine it with the first one, and they do combine, like they literally combined. They go together in the ankles. Yeah, you literally take the same file over. We'll get to that.

But I think, you know, for Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo to like make these two games, as their first two PS1 role-playing games, like, they really did bring something new to the table simultaneously with what Square Enix was doing. I think actually

they should be respected for doing something important at the time. If I may make a wild and outlandish premise for a second, I think Shikodan 1. I think Sikodon 1 is kind of one of the perfect template of how to build out, how to do world building in an RPG that is still compact, hit all

your plot points without feeling cliche, without feeling like you're just following the numbers. Because when you're playing that game, it's a linear game, but it doesn't feel linear. Until you start saying no to the dot-like problem. And then you're like, oh, you're forced to say, oh, I'm being railroaded at a fall. Yeah, but the thing is, though, the game gives you this wide open kind of feeling of this world, and it creates in a very small space. a really deep breathing universe. I do appreciate the fact that in the first game, there are, there's like at least

one opportunity to kind of go off the rails early on and just do your own thing. Like, very early, you're supposed to go to this one place, but you can go, I can't remember exactly, you go to, like, Rockville or something. Yeah, you're supposed to go to Rockville, the tiny little time. Right, but you can go off in another direction, and you're way overmatched at first. Like, the monsters will just, like, stomp you. But if you can survive, like, you go fight one battle, then go back to an end and save, Fight another battle, and you'll start leveling up really quickly, and then you can get something.

So basically what is there's this dungeon that's off the first town. And if you go there before you pick up any other partners, except for like you solo. It'll be you and Ted, right? Yeah, you solo or you and Ted. If you go solo by yourself, you get material that gives you double experience. If you, not a material of whatever, the ruin, that give you double experience that will make you, like, you know, enhance your experience all the way. or if you go to TED. You get through the dungeon and find a town and a guy's like, you came here by yourself.

Yeah, here. Have this prize. You're awesome. The other one is you get double money. And it's just such a reward for like sequence breaking because you're not supposed to go there for a long time still. And just the fact that they even thought that far was so clever. It's funny. Bring up Ted reminds me like even at the time, the weird inconsistency of the names.

Like they don't really match. Like some of them are like all archaic and medieval sounding. The other ones are TED. It's very... That's a 90's localization. When you have 120-something characters to name, you start to go to TED, everyone. Well, and another thing, you know, this is supposed to take place in a kingdom, but it really feels like you've got pretty much the entire world here. You've got the fishing village that feels very, like, East Asian, and you've got Scarletica Castle that's very French.

Then there's like a ninja town, and then there's also dwarves and elves and... And it feels very cosmopolitan. Does? Does it? It's a mishmast. Well, I'll say, one of my issues was she got in back in the day was that, like, the story is good enough and I'm intrigued. I like most of the characters, but like there's something kind of separating me from really getting too involved with the characters. Like the story is a little more macro and it's like, you know, kind of warring factions and political intrigue.

Okay. For me, I guess it always just kind of resonated because it felt, it had the tenor of a Mahaparath or like a Hindu kind of like one of the old folk tales we have of like people getting caught up into this gigantic. Right, it does have a deities fighting type of source. It's based on classical Japanese or Chinese novel, the water margin. Right, exactly. And the anime for Shigugi is also based off of that. But the thing was it just had this kind of epic that we get in like Hindu Buddhist stories. And it had a whole kind of resonance that I had never seen in an RPG in America.

Plus the sound designers did things like they integrated tablas and sitars into some of the songs. They had like, you know, Japanese instrumentation. The towns kind of felt like their own little, yes, it was definitely a kitchen sink RPG. It was definitely, let me see if I can make Asia and Europe and, you know, Elfland. But it all fits. But to me, it had a cohesion. Yeah. And it drew me in with that kind of like sensation that, oh, these people can exist in this world together, which is really hard to do.

Like any D&D designer can tell you, like, okay, well, how do I make Chinese Elfland work with Scottish dwarves? It doesn't always work. Yeah, I feel like this game kind of had the same ambition of, you know, world building and scale as the Evalese games. But they feel a lot more personable. I mean, I love Yasumi Matsuno's games and, you know, Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story. Amazing. I love those. But they also feel, I don't even know about austere.

They just feel very, like, very formal. There's almost a kind of stuffiness to them. There's not that here. There's, well, I think it's part of, you know, like the tactical play. in Final Fantasy Tactics, you never really directly control Ramsa as just a character moving around, whereas here you control Teo or, you know. I think a lot of the evil-ist things happen off screen, too, where they're just like, you're not involved with these big events, especially Final Fantasy 12. You're like at a distance from the big events in the story. Yeah, right. Whereas here you are sort of the chaotic fulcrum around which events spin, whether you want to be or not.

And that is kind of like the defining trait of this weekend in games is that it's basically like this almost like a pattern of history where someone is drawn into the conflict and, you know, sort of against their own desires or wishes, they become the focal point of this conflict and end up changing the world. Yeah. And it's just, I mean, you're right. Like tactics in the other game feel kind of Rosencrantz and Guilden turn are dead as in like you are there. things are happening, but it's not you that it's happening to. In this one, when you're McDonough and you're running around and you're fighting, building a castle and everything. Suddenly, everything matters on what you are doing, who you are talking to. And it's absurd.

It's like when you're in the position of this hero, because he's a silent protagonist, a lot of times silent protagonists are kind of bad. But in this case, I felt like, oh, my God, he's not silent because they didn't write him. He's silent because he's so confused and terrified of this. event that's happening. Like, your father is suddenly like your enemy? What the hell is going on? So I mentioned, you know, 16-bit systems again. And I do want to say maybe the most shocking thing about Swikodon is that for a long time,

there was a rumor that the series started out as a super NES game, super Famicom game. I can believe that. I mean, planning. Yeah, like you can really kind of see that. Okay, sure. Like, even the FMV at the beginning of the game, it's like, it's not pre-rendered characters or hand-drawn animation. It's like some static images

that are given a Photoshop effect and then it's like actual just footage of the game like the sprites walking around. I sound of the music, there's nothing here that couldn't be done, really. Yeah.

But no, that was not the case. This was not meant to be a super Famicom game. It was actually meant to be a, like a keystone title for a console that Konami was developing. They were going to make their own console.

Like, what would that even have been? The 90s were crazy. Can you imagine? if Konami made a console? That's like the opposite of what Konami is now. I could see that happening though. I mean, the 90s, everybody was making a console. A console with exclusive DDR, Castlevania

that would have just broken my... I mean, I would have been a Konami stand forever. Kind of just the end of that. But for whatever reason, Konami decided maybe we won't do that. And it's probably, I'm going to guess, because PlayStation came out and was an amazing piece of kit that they could not have hoped

to compete with. And unlike Sega, who was like, well, we can't compete with that. So let's put a second processor in there. That's going to solve everything. They just said, you know what? Let's just go with it. Speaking of second, we've been a third party, we'll just stay there. Speaking of a second, did anybody ever play the Saturn version, which came out like two years later?

And I think it's troubled kind of like the Symphony of the Night. Which is so weird because you think this game, this mostly Sprite-based 2D game, should be a home run for the Sega Saturn. But I don't think they put their A-team on their Saturn conversions. I don't think they put their E-Team on the Saturn conversion. You know, I think thinking back to Stigna 1, my favorite thing about it at the time and thinking back was the main battle system. And the reason why I loved the battle system in this game is, A, it was fast, especially it loaded fast.

If you go back to 1997, 1998 era PS1 games, most RPGs, well, you might as go make a sandwich while the battles load. You get the Mosaic effect right down, done, down, every figure. About the time you get to the. the second stanza, then the character models load. And then you do, you know, Knights of a round time four, and then read a book and come back. By comparison, these battles load pretty quickly, and they run fast, and they're kind of fun. And you have, like, auto battle, too, which is I used to see all the time.

Or you could just pay the money and just walk away from the play. Oh, yeah, that too. You could do that too. But there's like a screen dissolve, and as soon as the screen dissolve ends, you're in. You are making commands. And if you choose auto battle on, like, just standard mobs. Everyone just jumps in. And the time it takes from the battle transition to begin,

to you tally up your experience points and patch, then that is the currency. That is the amount of time it takes for the mosaic effect to begin. And you do input your first command in Final Fantasy 7 or Wild Arms. So it has the best of both worlds. If you don't want to pay attention and just like level up, you can kind of put it on auto and plays itself. Or if you actually have hard battles, you know, there is tactical depth. Oh, God. There's so much depth.

Yeah, where you position your characters. It's like, it's a good battle system. It really is. Are we okay to talk about the battle system? I know, can I jump to head? Let's see. It's my favorite thing. I totally have a lot to say about the battles.

Sure, we'll jump ahead to combat mechanics. Okay. So we should mention that it's a turn-based battle system. Yes. So here's the thing, right? It's a turn-based battle system. You've got up to six characters, and they stand in... That's actually...

That right there is worth mentioning, because... It's a lot. What other console game lets you... Console RPG lets you control six characters in battle? Very few. Like, five had been previously the high watermark, you know? And not just forcing you to have six. You could have up to six.

Right. Yeah. Sorry, that was an error in which, because of polygons, they're drawing back to three. Yeah, like Final Fantasy 7, you had like your three years. Final Fantasy 9 went back to four and it was like the PlayStation 1, you could feel it melting as you played. Yeah, but in this, you have six guys. There's a front row in a background, so there's two rows of three. And depending on where you put it, you could have different units doing joint actions together that would let, for instance, the hero would jump out and do.

The character positioning didn't make any difference for joint attack. Sometimes it did. Very few. For the most part, your positioning was kind of determined and put in on your weapon type. I'm sorry. I was short, medium, and long-range weapons. I was thinking second-in-three, not ticket-on-one. In second-on-one, you're right.

Your positioning was based on whether you had a short weapon where you're forced in the front, long in the back, medium you could jump back and forth. That let you kind of customize the way your party worked, but also gave you in-built limitation so that you couldn't just, you know, try to game the system. Right. But also, it's worth noting that enemies also had rows. Yeah.

So if you had a medium, you know, medium range character that you put in the back row, they could attack the enemy's front lines, but not the back lines. But if you put your medium range in the front row, you could attack the enemy's rear lines. And it was smart because if you had a mage who had short range, you shoved him in the back row. Yes, he can't attack, but also means the enemy can't directly jump to them. Yeah, I mean, it really goes back to games like wizardry and like the sort of early dungeon crawlers, which you really don't see a lot of in this style of like

post-ultima, post-Dragon Quest RPG where it's not just like, you're dungeon crawling, it's wireframes. So it's a really sort of interesting, almost like, not a backward facing, but it's like they really stopped and looked at the roots of the

genre and said, hmm. It's almost like they in the branches of like Japanese RPG development, instead of following the dragon cuss path, they just went the wizardry route. But only for that one detail, really. There's not a lot of wizardry in this game. No, but that detail is so core to the kind of the idea of this combat system. And then your magic system was ruin-based.

You had different slots. So you could use like 157 amount of spell slots to cast your spells. And it was really neat to see just kind of the different combinations you could build because your max-level spells could combine in a macro to do like, you know, lightning fire damage or whatever. There weren't really summons in this game, which is good because that was what ate the processor and everything else. But, God, the combat was fast. It was furious. One of the things I really like about the combat system when you talk about being fast.

And it's something that I just remembered is that you have overlapping actions. Yes. Oh, simultaneous actions. Yeah, it's turn-based per side. So you input your entire party's commands and then execute. And sometimes your characters will act at the same time, not just as joint actions, but it's just like everyone's like. jumping forward. There's like a melee.

It's a satisfying feeling. I don't think I'd play the console game that had quite that same execution of like multiple people running into attack at the same time. Right. And it doesn't like give you a tactical advantage or anything. It's not like the game is... It looks cool. But it also makes the battles go faster because it's not taking turns for each character

and act out an attack. And I feel like this wasn't accidental. I feel like they wanted these battles to feel fast and they really succeeded. What's the thing many people were doing back then? Like one of the cool things was if you had a character who had multiple attacks, like for instance, and to go to, you've got Shiro the Wolf, and he would jump forward and bite one guy and then jump and bite another guy, and you would see, and it would make you feel like you're in a D&D combat or a melee where it's just like, oh, these guys are just attacking

anything. It's not just regimented Revolutionary War Rose walking forward. And one of the things that I think is really overlooked about the battle system is the sound design of the battle system. We talked about great music, and we'll talk more about the music. But the sound design, it's like they took a Saturday morning cartoon audio library. And there's, like, all these spell effects. Like, I could see Skeletor casting magic and it coming up with, you know, sound effects like this.

It just has this really distinctive design that I've never heard in any other game series. But it doesn't make the game feel cartoonish. It just makes it really distinct. And I don't know, there's, like, lots of sound effects for things like your character is getting hit or missing an attack. And it just, like, it's a very distinct soundscape. And when you start getting all these characters acting and their actions overlap happen, happened simultaneously, it just, like, creates this, like, pop, pop, pop, sound effect.

It's interesting, because I never looked to see who does sound effects for any game ever, but, you know, like, four or five composers worked on this game, and I'm curious, like, if the sound effects could do these sound effects were guys from Gradius or Kalsamia if, like, you know, like, because Doppi is one of the composers on them. Is he? Yeah. Like, you know, Konami doesn't credit individual composers. No, they credit.

It's always the Kukkaha Club. Yeah. And five composers. Like, I've done liner notes for LP releases of Konami games, and I've tried to to cite individual composers that I know work on the game. They're like, it was Konami Kukea Club. Wasn't this, this was like by Mari Yamane or something, right? Who did the... Yamani did not contribute to this.

I don't think so, no. There were five composers. I know Tappy, who is in one of the old school dudes is among them. But the point though, you're right. Like when McDowell does his big ruin of like destruction type of effect, it's got this kind of weird like sci-fi sound of like the world is kind of spinning going down. It's like the D&D cartoon. like the dungeon master cast a portal or something, like that's the sound effect you would hear.

And that's like the one... It's a really great sound design. The one 32-bit effect of the ground just twisting as it's kind of going down. Well, you know, even though I said this game looks like 16-bit, the battle system still does have sort of a 3D element to it. There are some effects. And so it takes place on like a plane. The battle system viewpoint is very similar to breath of fire, but it feels more fluid. Right.

And it feels more dynamic. is actually a polygon. Yeah, the ground is a polygon, and it means the camera can zoom in. Like, sometimes you'll get, like, a super powerful attack or something, and the camera will really come in close, and your sprites will scale up. And, yeah, it just, like, it's all very dynamic and fast-paced. That's one of the things that really sells this game. And it's one of the reasons I could not get into Sweekin'3 because it cut the combat group in half.

Among other problems. And it made everything so slow. And I was like, it's a very slow game. It lost all the things I love about the ducks. The ducks were cool, but the problem. There were no squirrels. It took out all of the interests. I mean, 3D polygons.

So that just changed the entire. The character models are like inexcusable in speaking of three. I don't care how ugly they look. It's just they changed the pace and the nature of the battle system. And that, to me, that really killed the experience because just like blasting through battles and not having to worry about slow down. Let's not taint the legacy by talking about things past two. Let's just enjoy speaking of one and two for what they are. You know,

I'm going to be able to be. You know, The thing is, though, like, just the balance of combat attacking and, like, magic in this game, it's very simplistic. It's almost like Fantasy Star 4 kind of, like, very base-like. But it never gets old. Much like, you know, actually, Fantasy Star 4 has really fast fun auto battles too. And I think it's a similar comparison where, like, I never got, I was never running away from combat and to be good in one because I was bored of it. It was fun.

It was fast. It resolved itself quickly. I was raising levels. And all of the character animations were great. Right. And because I think we're going to jump to like the. Other two battle systems. We'll talk about that later.

Okay. Because they do mix it up. It's not the only thing you're doing. Right. Yeah, I think we can't talk about the battle system without talking about first. We mentioned short, medium, long range attacks. Those are separate character. And there's a reason for that.

It's because your character has one weapon. You don't buy weapons in this game. You do not change up weapons. It's not just that you're restricted to one weapon type. You are restricted to a weapon. The name weapon. Yeah, your main character has, like your main character has a staff in the first game. There's like dudes with swords.

There's dudes with knives, like throwing darts, whatever, pull darts, pull arms. It's always the same. Like, they have that one weapon and they carry it through with them. And to make your weapons stronger, you go to blacksmiths. And the blacksmith can rework your weapon into a stronger form. And once it reaches like a certain level, then you get little plus marks on it. And the name changes. Yeah.

It felt like that was one of the details that I absolutely loved because it was first off there's a good game design limitation. You can't make your weapon too powerful for the area you're in because you can't get the next blacksmith for X amount of time. But because it's a one named weapon per thing, it made every character feel like a real hero, like a real figure of legend, a figure of destiny even. And it had this whole feeling that like, oh, there's the man with the tiger sword. He's famous for having that tiger sword.

And then it becomes a Puma sword. And then it becomes a mountain lion torch. Right. Right. Well, and some characters, like, you know, there's a couple of characters who named their swords after the woman they love. Like, Flick, right? Yeah. He's got the Odessa. And then there's the other kid in the warrior village. I remember his name. I think it was out of necessity for Konami. One, because they didn't want to draw a million sprites for each possible weapon use.

Yeah, sure. But also because for the player, you don't want to have to be juggling weapons between 108 characters or, you know, less if you were not going to use all of them. A lot of inventory to keep up with. Yeah. Right. But it's still, it still, I think, is a really cool. design choice just in terms of like how the game mechanics sort of tell the story and what you can infer from different characters based on the weapon they use and what they named their weapon.

It's a really cool little detail. And it just felt it felt like of the story that they were trying to tell, the Chinese legend of like, you know, like the ancient soldier who's got his famous set of nunchecks and it's like, oh, it just further defines everything. Right. Like just coming from Hindu mythology when you felt like, you know, Arjun, with his Indra Praksha bow, and you're like, this is a hero with his weapon of legend. It felt more real than just like, oh, look, he's got the Broaddard Plus 2 this time and a Broaddor plus 7.

As you start amassing these characters, there are some very specialized characters. Oh, the girl who can teleport people or whatever. And, like, you know, some of these are... Yeah, not all 108 characters that you read. Not all the combat. Some of their 40 per game. Yeah, some of your town to do cool things in your town. Yeah, there's like the lady who does laundry.

She's like, I can't do much for combat, but I can wash clothes. Or there's Clon, who's just like, welcome to the name of your castle. I feel so good. Can we talk about the town aspect? Because I think that's what drew me to the entire game. I want to wrap up combat by talking about combo attacks, which is another detail that is really great. You kind of touched on that earlier. But I think it's worth mentioning that, you know, this isn't like, say, chronotryor,

where every character has multiple combination attacks with every other character. It's more that certain characters have combo attacks, like team attacks with certain other characters. And again, like, this is the story influencing the game mechanics and vice versa. Like if two characters have a relationship of some sort in the story, they probably have some sort of team attack. And it does kind of determine how you build your party because it makes sense to keep characters who, you know, they have a relationship. and therefore can, you know, be more effective in combat together. Like, you could put, like, Flick with Tiers Master, but why would you do that?

You could, you know, you could have put a blacksmith with, you know, Yom Koo or something, but why would you do that? Like, they can't, they don't team up. But if you put five blacksmiths together in your party, they destroy everything in a crazy attack. And then again, McDowlin and his master have a double staff attack. The two pirates, I mean, like if you have the pirate battalion that you get together, they all have a massive pirate attack. This is the squirrels of the second one.

That's a second one. The five squirrels. Were they all just a bong, mong, mong, mong. The squirrels basically take the place of the blacksmiths in the first game. I just, and one of the joys for me was finding out these different unifications. And the thing is because each of the team attacks told their own story. Like they were like, oh, look at the old men who have known each other for a hundred years, just hanging out, going and thlapping you with their little staff. Or, you know, like the retinue that McDowell starts the game with, Cleo and Pond and

Gremio, yeah. Like, they can all team up for attacks. It's like the medallion unification. But it just, it was so cool. And like, you'd have all the elves together. They would all stand up and shoot with their bow and go tunk, tunk, tunk. And it just. You really was the little touches.

You're right. And there was so much extra animation dedicated to each of these. Like, you might never see all of them. and there's still just like some combination sprite out there that's just cool looking. It's funny. The first game felt slight, but in hindsight, like, it's rich and deep for, like, not being, you know, the longest game. They shoved as much as they possibly could in that game. Yeah.

Yeah, are there any characters that you always have to have in your party for Sweet Kid and One? I use Gremio a lot, actually. For most of the game, for some of the game. Well, I loved Clio, but my team was always like McDowell, uh, uh, Flick, Victor, and then I would have one of the ninjas probably edge, because he was good at carrying ruins and also

had the long range attack. And then I would have, God, who the hell is the old guy, Crowley, the mage, and it depends, probably stallion, because I wanted to run. Oh, yeah, he's a good run to have. I always had Kasumi because she's a cute ninja,

and that's cool. And crap, what's the name of the kid? Damn it. Oh, but you totally forgot. Oh, Clive. Clive was always in my party because he's got a rifle. Clive is good. I would use him a lot.

But now there's, I can't remember the name of the person that I always had in my party. I like Flick. Flick is cool. It reminds me of Locke. Yes. He's kind of identical to Locke in terms of his character design. I think it's why I like you. Rogue.

God, I loved all. I mean, every time I played the game, I tried to pick a different host of characters just to try to like mix it up and see how to beat the game. but it's just fun. Wasn't there an attack where like if you put all the Imperial generals you recruit and like team up and do some crazy Imperial attack? With Sonia Shulin and like all them. Yeah, they could get together and do this big just like hit you with my armor nonsense. Yeah, like yeah, it's it's really fun that just the way you build your party sometimes unlocks different abilities that you wouldn't expect.

Yeah. Oh man, this game is so good. I love so good until much. Oh my God. I mean, you know, I'm going to do. All right, so Bob, you wanted to talk about building a town, building a castle. In fact, it's one of my favorite systems in a game.

And I think it's why I like this game so much, not just for the characters you recruit, but for the fact that when you recruit them, they live in your castle and they build your castle up from like a squalid hellhole into a nicer place to live. Yeah, I mean, when you first encounter the castle that you take over, it is like a haunted island in the middle of a dead lake and no one wants to go there. Is this the first JRP to do this? So, this came out at the same time as Breath of Fire 2, which had the fairy town. Yeah. Which is a little, this is a little different. Wasn't there in the Super Nintendo Dragon Quest?

Didn't you have the ability to build your town? In five or six? I thought so. I don't know. Or was that in the Game Boy game remakes. I feel like this was my first encounter. I think that was a DS remake thing. Yeah, I mean, I love these systems because I like the idea of having an effect on the game world.

And some of my favorite games do this, like the two metal gear games where you build a base are my favorites. And the Souls games do this. You rescue people in the world and then they sort of build up a settlement. But also, there is a game I feel that's very inspired by Sweet Kod, and it's Radiatas stories or Radiata stories. I don't know if it's very good. I played through it all when I was incredibly depressed. but it has 180 characters you can recruit and put them all in your party. And the entire game is built around like all these characters have schedules,

learn them all. You cannot get them all on one play through. So this is a tri-ace game, so it's kind of weird and not, I mean, it's not completely, it's very janky, but I remember enjoying it while being incredibly depressed. So that's not a stunning endorsement. But I don't know if anyone else has played that. But that's one of those games. There's one of those I meant to, but I didn't.

I can recruit a thousand people. It's on my shelf. Is that a PS3? PS2. Not to be mistaken for Radiant Historia. Yeah. Oh, that's what I was thinking of. Also not thinking.

But the thing about Tugent's town system is that it would, like, again, it added to the milieu of the game, right? Like, you're a roving army. You're trying to build up an army to fight against the evil empire to take them over, which means you need to go recruiting people to get into your town. And some people won't join you unless they've seen that you've got enough people on your team because they're like, I'm not going to join a losing side of nobody's. Yeah.

And some people are just like, hey, yo, dude, I'm a merchant and I've got nowhere to go. And you're like, Oh, you know, I've got this perfect stall I've just built in my basement that you could totally tell me things. And then there's like someone who's just like, I like to say the names of places. Can I hang out at your place and say that's name? I love that kid. He said, I did just think, okay, I guess it does owe a debt to Shining Force. Shining Force one and two, especially two, you have like the granary rolling around with people in it.

Like, when you recruit people in China Force, they would come and hang out and you talk to them. So it does. I know it owes that shining force. My favorite thing in this game is when you recruit the guy that has the dice game, you basically just keep saving and reload. until you keep winning to have infinite money. And no one needed to tell me that. I'm just like, oh, I'll cheat. Oh, that's it.

That's the guy I always have in my team is Sanzike. Really? The bath guy, the guy who runs the furrow. Like, my favorite thing about the bath is that if you put the, like, six hex dolls as decorations in there, you get a cursed bath. If you put a peeing statue in the corner, it pees on the head of your main character. Well, and I just like coming back to the town, especially once you get deeper in the game and it's getting good. Because at the beginning, there's no one there.

But, like, as it starts to really flash out, it feels like a real stuff. It feels like a real city. And you have ownership. It's fun to hang out there. I mean, that's the thing. It just, it felt like progression. Like you're like, oh, we're making something. We're going to do something.

And it just had this, again, it just gave you this vibe of like this game is more than just fighting. Right. And also having a castle created a safe space. And that's something that I enjoyed in Dragon, no, Final Fantasy 8, where you had the garden. Yeah, the garden that was flying around and that was like your base operations. but here it was really like there's a space that you can go back to between missions. You don't have to go hang out in some town. You're not always itinerant, wandering from place to place.

You have a home. And also, I think the game subverts that once or twice by kind of thrusting events upon you. You're back at the castle and you go to sleep and you're ready to take on the next, you know, mission or, you know, go on in a for a and all of a sudden people are attacking you. And you're like, wait a minute, I'm not ready for this. And you have to prepare it the last second. And so it really creates this newfound sense of tension. And yeah, it's a really like the way they make use of the town mechanic I think is really smart because it does, it puts you in the mindset of like, hey, I'm really building an army. Like I'm always seeing these people, they're, you know, creating a town around me.

And when you see them in the town, they're logically laid out the way an army would be. You got your, like, warehouse person, the quartermaster, the boats, the Navy, like. Yeah, there's like the top floor as the command team, basically. The scientists at the bottom, the tacticians. And then you've got your like stores, and it was just neat to have your own permabase. You could always go back to anything you bought anywhere in the world would end up in one of your stores so you could go back if you missed something. And then like the gambling guys, like the cups that I memorized so that I could see the first thing you moved and then I just know with the pattern you're on to. Another game that does this, oh sorry, another game that does this very well is Brayfence from Musashi, I just remember.

Because I love any game that does this and that game does it incredibly well. You rescue people from the kingdom and you build the kingdom and they give you things and teach you moves and things like. I love games that do this. So I guess the other big thing to talk about are the other battle systems because in addition to the standard combat system, there's also the tactical system and the dual system. And that seems to be Shane's jam. Well, actually, you know, it's funny, I don't feel like these are as strong in the first game. No. No, they're definitely...

But they were cool. But they're cool. Yeah, they're a way to mix things up and tell a story in a different way. They were unexpected. And I think, this is again, pre-FF7. So, like, the idea of, like, inserting all these different gameplay styles into a JRP was very refreshing. And at the time, I remember the duel in particular, I felt like... Oh, so good.

But I felt like it was inspired by Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, which had duels. And it was, again, going to Shining Force or Fire Emblem, you have those, like, the individual actions kind of play out as duels. But here, like, that was the battle. You had to choose your action. But it also draws back to the source material of water margin where you've got the heroes who have to have the epic duel against the other general. And the one-on-one fighting that just comes from Japanese culture of, like, you know, the two soldiers are going to get in the field and they're going to have that. And it's presented in this very dramatic fashion, the very harsh angle that's... Yeah.

And it spins around. Yeah, it spins around. Yeah. But a great thing is that it's not like just a total, like the army battles are pretty much rock paper scissors. Like, choose the right command and you'll stomp the other army, mess up. Yeah, the tactical, like the army battles are a little too simple. Those are mostly. They're in front of flavor.

They're heavily story-based. Like there are some battles you just can't win. So it's like to basically say, oh, we just lost a thousand people. I guess we got to go figure out how to get the fire spear. And there aren't very many of them, but I found myself, even on the initial play-through, like, not looking forward to those so much. Yeah. But they're pretty quick and easy and painless. Right.

Although you can permanently lose characters from your army in those battles. Yeah. Only for bad. If you screw up really badly, though, you will lose a team member. Like, someone you've recruited will be gone forever. And they'll be like, sorry. That's it. That's true.

But I remember, I found these refreshing because, like, it was unexpected to have a different, a different type of conflict. But the duels are great because the, you know, you know, the duels are great because the. The outcome of those duels is not determined by the story and can in fact change the story. But there is an element of story to them because, you know, they are sort of like the big pivotal moments in the game. But if you pay attention to what your opponent says, it hints at what they're going, like, the action they're going to take. Like I love that this game basically had one-on-one fighting without forcing you to do dexterity,

right? Like it's all still text-based, it's all still turn-based. But you just have to know the characters. You have to understand the motivation of this fight. Why is he fighting you? What is he saying? What does that mean in terms of what you should be doing? Like the battle that McDowell has against Pond, his number one associate, you can – if

When you say McDowell, you mean General McDowell. No, I mean – there's no – well, yeah, yeah. When Pond is fighting against General McDowell, right? Like if you just play through it normally, Pond would just pass away. Way out match, he's going to be just crushed and then the game is just going to proceed. But once you play through it and you're like, oh, wait, I need to get all 108 to do a thing in the end of the game. Then you have to figure out how do I make Pond win this unwinnable battle? And that becomes its own kind of just like separate, like mini game that you just have to keep in your head to try to understand this incredibly difficult battle.

Right. And you can win that battle and you have to in order to be able to get all 180 stars of destiny at the end of the game and keep them alive. And if you do win that battle, like, Pond is exhausted and he's like, did he let me win? Like, even if you win that, like, the game kind of says, like, you weren't supposed to be able to do that, but you did anyway. But, yeah, the one-on-one battles are a critical part of the story, especially where the protagonist is concerned, when he is in the battles on his own, usually that has to do with, not usually, but occasionally it kind of builds into the main story, which is that he has the soul eater. And in order to power that up, he has to kill someone. And, you know, kind of like the big watershed moment of the game is when he goes face-to-face against his father, which is the moment you knew was coming and you weren't sure how it was going to go. But it turns out, yeah, there's only one way it can go.

And it, God, this game, all of the Suu-Den games are so good at forcing these like tension points where you're like, okay, look, there's only one way I can do it. And it's going to just crush me to have to do this. I mean, that's kind of one of the big themes of Swigodon is that war is thrust upon people and thrust them into situations they don't want to be in. I think that especially comes through in Swigodon, too. Yes. We'll talk about that after the break. I think we need to pause for a moment. And call her number nine for one million dollars.

Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck.

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If you like this show, check out Murder Made Me Famous every Tuesday at Podcast 1. The hit Reels Channel Crime series is hitting the podcast world when cover some of the most shocking crimes imaginable, including the Menendez brothers, Charles Manson, the Craigslist killer, and more. Check out Murder Made Me Famous at Podcast 1 in Apple Podcasts. Also remember to rate and review. And tune in for brand new episodes of the TV series every Saturday on Reels Channel. Thank you. So we talked a lot about Sweekin 1, and a lot of the things we've said transfer over pretty cleanly to Sweekitin 2.

I will say setting the stage, however, because I like to set the stage. Including your Sve file. But I like to set stage between the release of Svicoid 1 and the release of Sviken 2 in America, a very big thing happened called Final Fantasy 7. People started caring about role-playing games. Right. And the RPG explosion in America. But what they expected, with the guys who got on the bandwagon for the giant comment coming down to Midgar, we're not necessarily excited

when they saw the graphics of us we could in two because their idea of role-playing games was Final Fantasy 7. It's like, where's the summons? Where are the polygons? I need some FMVs. It was also in the splash zone of Final Fantasy 8. Right. It was released within the same month as Final Fantasy.

So, I'd say when it came out, despite getting great reviews and now being revered as the greatest entry in the series, if not secretly the best RPG on PlayStation 1, it was a quiet launch. It was hard to find. It didn't sell I remember trying to sell it to people. So, you know, the mythology of Sucadintu grew over the years.

And it doesn't help that the first printing of Sucodent2 that came out had like game-ending bugs in it. Did they ever fix those? In subsequent printings, I think. There were subsequent printings? Well, okay. I think there were. There had to have been because the only way I beat the game was by downloading an illegal ROM of it and making a hacked CD. Back then, like, they wouldn't.

say that a game was being patched in a subsequent pressing, but that kind of thing did happen. So I didn't get any game-ending bugs in my launched a copy of Sweenken-in-2, but there were definitely bugs. Definitely places where they were like localized text. What's that?

Oh, hey, we totally forgot this village existed. Could you get to Japanese text and Sikkuton-2? It wasn't, it was like Utica code, so it didn't, like they took out, I think, the Japanese actual alphabet from the game code. So what you got was like the data calls and stuff. So it's just like nonsense. It's like squares. Yeah. It's all

like brackets and nonsense. Yeah. And it's crazy because there was a scene where you're in the university town and the big tree, Flick goes into a building. He's supposed to come out and you're supposed to be able to progress the story. He never comes out and every named NPC in the world disappears. So that was a... Oh, yeah. Yeah. Actually, okay, there was... I did come across a bug where it's in Tinto. Yeah. And like, I actually walked outside the boundaries of the world. I was like inside a building and I walked out and instead of transitioning to the outer town area map, I just like kept walking around and there was, I saw how the map

for the town was laid out, like the internal rooms were all arranged in data. So I could like walk around and see like, oh, hey, here's the basement from this other building. Hey, you modern gamers who complain about seemingly endless patched and title updates, it's good maybe to be able to fix games in real time. There's a very famous bug in SICO2 where the gates of Tinto, when you're up there, the doors close on you. If you walk slowly inch by inch forward, you can actually cross through and skip a good chunk of it and, like, keep your party and get like just sequence break the game. Sounds like Secret of Mata.

Yeah, very similar. Of course, the famous NPC who you pick up, who's a singer, who's a singer, who's about a singer song. I do like that. I do like that's five minutes of silence. Five minutes of silence while her animation does a two animation. cycle of looking like a gaping fish. Her name is John Cage. Okay.

Before these guys make you think it's a broken. It's one of the greatest games of all time. And, you know, it is a direct continuation of the first game in many ways. Yeah. You know, back then you couldn't always assume a sequel was going to be that. And now it's freely available for PS3 and Vita for download, right? Well, not freely, but for like $5.99. Yes, but that is sort of a miracle.

For as much as we slag on Konami for doing horrible things with their IP, they're also very very dedicated to selling you their old games. A lot of companies aren't. Like, they make a lot of the stuff available. It is funny. And, like, I normally don't talk about my work run of mind here because this usually doesn't, what I do nowadays doesn't really talk about these old, old games. When I first got to Sony, Sukentintu was not on PS1 classics.

And, like, I went to the guy who does Konami account management. And I was like, whatever it takes, like, you need to ask those people to Fitzwego to do on PS1 classics. Like, please. And it took, like, for two years, I was like, yes. I was like, have you asked about that? I'm like, it's a really good game. The day that you announced that it was coming, I got like 50 messages on different social media.

It's here. And I think, I mean, I can't go too deep in. It was a long time ago. But, like, the bugs were actually a concern, I think. I think that was part of why it took so long. You need to personally put it on PS4, though. If only I could have wave of magic wand. And all the other classics and also all the PS2 games and PS3.

Shane, have you ever gotten the story on why Swicket in 1 and 2 for PSP never came to the U.S.? It's a good... Because they remade the games for PSP. And they're beautiful. And they didn't just, it wasn't just like the PS1 ROMs. The loading times are actually reworked all the graphics to, you know, like full screen.

It's true. But the loading times aren't great, I know, on them. And I wonder if that's one of the concerns. Was there some sort of, so we could end with loading times? I know, right? Was there some sort of strange across-the-board rule about ports for a bit on PSP until Parapa came along?

No, I mean, it's, but, you know, one thing that often users in the inner world don't understand that any third-party game, Like as much as like as someone who works at Sony might want to go to Konami, like, hey, you have this cool thing that like you might want to think about it. It's like totally up to the publisher. Like anything that happens with Shikodan is ultimately up to Konami. Like any platform holder or any outsider can be like, hey, you should think about this.

But like, it's up to them. I mean, they are responsible for Swigodan tier crease. So clearly, clearly, they can't be. Is that the DSP one? What's the PSP one against those Shukodan, weirdo, spinoff thingy? Oh, that one didn't even come to the last, the last, the last Sikodan title. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, unfortunately, his name Morayama left the series. Yeah, he like had the breakdown and left and then be a breakdown. Well, maybe, I don't know if he's a, I mean, that was a rumor. Maybe it's just like conflating the story with the FF12 guy. It could just be that Konami's not a great place to work. That could be, but it just broke my heart. Well, but do all of us agree that this is the end all be all? This is like everything they did in the first one times four, at least times magnitude of four.

I mean, yeah, this is kind of what you want from a sequel. Like take the good ideas and just. explode them. It's a much larger game, but it doesn't feel unwieldy. Like it's, you know, a 50, 60 hour game, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. But my God, is it good? It's just like, okay, so first off,

every art asset was upgraded. All the sprites. The art looks way better. All the portraits are just clean. Also, you can run. You can run by default without a big deal. You can run. The battles are the same, but now you can equip three ruins instead of just one. And they look better.

Everything looks better. Yeah, the background art is really nice. Like, people, I mean, critics really slagged on this game at the time of its release because, oh, it's so ugly. But like if you stop and just pay attention to, it's good animation in the background. You know, just like, you know, a, you know, a warehouse or something. Just the, the sprite art in each of these areas is so detailed and has such great use of color. Like they, one of the reasons I say, you know, the first game looks 16 bit is because it looks 16 bit. It doesn't, it doesn't really take advantage of the PlayStation's color. palette or the depth of possible. Oh, my God. The sepia tones that they use in Tseco 2 for like story event or elements, just it's so resonant. This game has the best sprite work on PS1 in terms of storytelling outside of Final Fantasy tactics. I also think there's a more cohesive art style and we were talking during the break, but

it's very charming in the first game, but a lot of the art, especially the character portrait art, is very amateurish. Yeah. And not like a sixth grader drew, but still it feels like it couldn't be better. It's cool. It feels, yeah, Dogen. It has a very sort of like sketchy water pastel feel to it, whereas in Swikin 2, it's more concrete and, you know, like, everything is more fully shaped. Yeah, it's like manga versus anime.

Yeah. That's actually that's exactly what it feels like. But the thing about Tsukin 2, like for instance, in one of the early scenes, your main character's sister and the squirrel are running and having this big battle against like a bunch of random people who are invading your house in a flashback. And it's just this long, five-minute-long, like, fully animated spright sequence of her just hitting people with flower pots and swinging your arms and legs and doing all these kung fu motions. And it's incredibly, like, that, like, 10 seconds might be one of the best uses of sprite art in that era of gaming. Just hands down. It's like so detailed, so thorough and it's only used once ever. So the first Sweenekinen tells a big story.

You are the son of an imperial general. It's a time of peace, but there's corruption within the empire. And ultimately, you end up sort of rooting that out by becoming involved with a rebellion, sort of being drawn into it against your will just by circumstance, becoming the holder of this legendary ruin. We haven't talked about the ruins, but we should. And, you know, eventually leading a resistance army that puts you in conflict with your own father, who ends up dying and you're kind of as a side effect

of all of this and you know some of your close personal friends also die your best friend Ted and what is Gremio to McDole he's like... Gremio's like a combination nurse bodyguard older brother

Yeah he's like an older brother who's not related by blood but is also like he's like a helicopter mom He's like your auntie in like the kind of like assigned him Yeah. And he makes a lot of stew. It's like, it's a strange sort of relationship they have.

But I guess, you know, the idea is that you are like the sion of a very important general or you need to be... He's like Batman's Alfred. Yeah. Actually, kind of like a personal butler. That's exactly. Yeah. I mean, again, though, it resonates back to the like East Asian story style of like, of

like, of course the son of the noble is going to have a personal person who's been appointed since childhood to raise you because your father is too busy and your mother is dead. So, like, you know, that's – but he's just, like, there, and he's, like, part of your retinue. But anyway, like, a lot of these people who are close to you end up dying, and there are some pretty sad moments. But none of these really hit with the same impact as events and sweep it into – So we get into – takes advantage of its larger scale and longer running time to slow down occasionally and let the story – let you really soak in the story. You know, the, sort of the intro, the first few chapters of the game, the protagonist, Rio, and his, like, not blood brother, but, you know, sort of adopted brother, Joey, like, you don't know that they're going to end up becoming enemies. We start with the spelling of Joey.

It's a problem. It's inconsistent. So, like, because of the weird spelling, J-O-I, like, my friends, I call them, like, J-O-I, and it was like, I never. I always hated him because I hated his name. It's inconsistent. That's not really important, though. What I was saying was that, you know, like the two of you and their adopted sister, Nanami, like, they're really close to each other.

And there are some moments in the early parts of the game that really allow you to get a sense of their bond. And the moment where you're, the moment where I think it's Nami and the little girl Pilika are waiting outside the town gates for Joey and Rio to return. And it's just like this kind of drawn-out moment of anxiety and you get to kind of witness this. And when they finally get back together, like it's a genuine release. Like you're really happy for the characters. God, that feeling. So like Nanami and Pilika are standing there and it's like the town is like kind of burning

or there's like that haze in the distance and you can just feel the nervousness, the anxiety, the fear that they have in a way that like video games didn't really do RPGs. weren't written like that. Right. And you just, like, it just hit you. And like, like, PILCA, the fact that she was mute and it's just like, oh. Because of trauma. Yeah, because of trauma.

Yeah, she was so distressed to see her, like, her family died. Yeah, her family died and her town got totally torched. And it's just like, that happens and realized. That's PTSD. That's like, it was just resonant and, like, it made you just think about things that. 16-year-old generally doesn't have been time thinking about it. It's been almost 20 years since I played through this game. And I still remember these moments.

It's like the sort of not like credit scene at the beginning where it's just showing you flashbacks to Joey and Rio and Nanami's their childhood and their upbringing and the moments they shared together, training together and goofing around and fighting with each other. Like it's really like those little moments are sort of the sort of wordless storytelling that animation can do so well in things like Up or, you know, a few other occasional works you come across where you're like this really. this really like wordlessly cements the fact that these are characters who are really important to each other and it gives you this insight into their lives just with these little flashes. And the fact that they took the time to do that in this game,

this huge game about war and conflict and about kingdoms fighting and about this madman who is magically empowered and just wanted to kill everyone. Most sadistic villain of all time. But at the same time, there's this heart to the game, this central core of these characters who really love each other

and their lives are about to be torn apart and everything is about to be turned upside down because of this war. I mean, they're the essence of it. This is what it's really about no matter how big the story gets. It's still really about these three characters. It makes you that, like those five minutes or so of the beginning with the Sepia town and everything, it lays this kind of foundation that makes you, makes every event of the game just that much stronger.

Like when these, like, when the hero and Joey gets that. their ruins. Hero gets a bright shield, but Joey gets the black sword. And just the implications there and the fact that they then split pads and Joey turns to you and you have that conversation. And it matters. You're like, oh my God, these two best friends who've lived their whole lives together are like now just this.

You can feel something has been severed and it just resonated. It just made you want to know what happens. Well, I love the fact that the protagonist of Swikidon 2, the magical ruin he gets, is a protective ruin. Because, you know, the protagonist of Sviken 1 gets the soul leader, which is incredibly powerful, incredibly destructive. Can like, you know, the first time you see it in action, it destroys a boss in a single action. And, you know, it kills people to empower itself. Whereas the bright shield, like, it turns the protagonist into a healer. It turns him into someone who create, like, yeah, not just tanks, but, like, he can buff the party and he can heal the party.

And it puts a completely different spin on the combat tactics. Like, he's no longer your heavy hitter. Like, he's, yeah, he's tough. He can hold himself in action. But you don't have to necessarily put another healer in your party because you've got this guy who has, like, one of the 27 true ruins. It's about healing and making things better. Yeah, and it's, it really does change the tenor of the game, too, because now you're like, oh, wait, my hero is. was like not just this cold killer.

Now he's like this caretaker kind of. He's got this and it just changes the way you approach the game. Even though it doesn't really have a tangible effect on how you play, it still mentally colors everything you do. Oh, you know, I'm glad you Oh, Oh,

you know, I like, I like how some of the sort of design of the sort of subtle choices or smaller design decisions in Sweak it into play off your expectations of the first game. And the first game, you're constantly given, or not constantly, but regularly given these opportunities to make choices, like dialogue choices, but you can't. If you choose the wrong answer, you're railroaded, like, you know, the bandits try to give you drugged tea, and everyone else is like, oh, it's bitter. So they're saying, hey, how come you haven't had your tea?

Oh, I don't want any if it's bitter. And you can say that over and over again, but no matter how many times you say it, eventually you have to choose, yes. Like, drink the damn tea, so you drink the tea. In this game, you get these opportunities to make these dialogue choices, and sometimes they actually do matter. And if you choose the wrong answer just to get the laugh, all of a sudden, like, things spiral out of control.

Like, intento, yeah, intento especially, you have the opportunity. Like, Denami turns to the protagonist and says, I don't want to be caught up in this war. Why do we have to be involved in this? Let's run away. Let's just the two of us run away together and go live in peace. And if you're like, okay, let's do that. You don't think you're going to be able to do it, but you can. Actually, it turns into like a non-standard ending where you go off and actually,

no, I don't think it's an ending, is it? It's like you run away, but they track you down. Matthew tracks you down. But the thing is, in the process of doing this, like the party that goes out to find you, one of the key characters, the general Ridley, gets killed. Oh, wow. Like, your action causes one of your party members, like an important party member to die. And his Star of Destiny is eventually taken over by someone else, like his son, I think.

But it's like, whoa, that is an option, right? You screwed up. You ran away from your obligations and someone died. Right. And I mean, that just, this game had that whole tenor of like, it definitely made you think about what you're doing in a way that RPGs used to not make you do. Like, your actions matter in Sukheda. You, whatever you are doing is not just like, oh, I just, you know, looting your house or something. No, this stuff carries weight.

And that was just mind-blowing. So, you know, after the first game, okay, in the first game, the protagonist's nursemaid or whatever, Gremio is killed, like midway through the game. And it's spoiler alert. It's an amazing sacrifice. It's a good scene. It's a good scene. It's a little bit overwrought.

Like when he's like, oh, the spores are eating me. You can kind of see it coming to it. It's a little weird. Like, maybe it's just the way it was localized. But I kind of had a feeling something like that was going to happen until we get in two. So I kept waiting the whole time, like, what's going to happen? Who's going to die? And it doesn't happen the way I expected.

Like, I thought it was going to be this unavoidable plot event. But instead, it happens suddenly like a thunder clap. All of a sudden you're ambushed. And there is a timed dialogue event where if you choose it just, right. Like if you respond and if you don't know it's coming, you won't know like, oh, I need to choose the other option right away. You're given like

two seconds to read this dialogue and choose the option. Is the correct one? Like the obvious one, it's been a while. I can't remember exactly but you have to like change the selection and activate it. Otherwise Nanami dies. And it's just like, what the hell? Like at the time

I didn't realize it was something I could change. It just seems so random and senseless. But then, you know, like once I beat the game and Nanami didn't come back, I was like And it wasn't like telegraphed. It wasn't like you saw this coming for hour. No, no. It was like this sudden thing where you're going into the enemy empire's castles and infiltration, and you're suddenly ambushed. And it gives you this, the only dialogue prompt in either of these games that is a timed response.

Like the dialogue pops up and enemies act and you have just enough time to like, say, get out of the way or whatever. So, yeah, like even if you go into this kind of expecting. things. It's going to surprise you. Sorry if you've never played this 20 year old game and I just ruined it for you. But the thing is like the writing and production of this game, it's an indictment of war in the way that is just so tangible. You see like the evil villain sitting there and just slaughtering people wantonly. Yeah, we mean to talk about Luca Blight or Luca Blight or whatever. The greatest villain of gaming in my opinion. I don't know about that. But he's definitely

the most over the top? Yeah. More so than Kefka. More so than Kefka. Okay, Kefka never made an NPC, random villager, bend down, and act like a pig and then a lop its head on. That's true.

It's pretty dark. Yeah. Like, he has the, what's a beast run? Yeah. And he takes pleasure. Maybe we could talk about what the hell the runes are. Okay. So in the universe of Sukodend,

there are 27 crew runes that were in the beginning of time, like they were created and they used to create all the world. And then from these... Think infinity gyms. Yeah. Or like, you know, any number of magical, mystical things.

And of these runes, the people who carry these runes are like, you know, locuses of history and everything kind of warps and bends around them. And they each have their own personas and personalities kind of like, they impact the way the carrier acts. So for instance, and all the other runes which are just like magical spell kind of things, like fire rooms, there's different fires. And there's true roots. Yeah.

There's normal runes and they're all. kind of birthed from these true runes. So like a normal fire run lets you like, you know, cast fireball or whatever. The true fire run let you do an inferno that would like level a town. And so with these ruins, like for instance, in the first game, you had the soul eater which is like this incredibly deadly ruin that takes, you know, like eats people to get power. In game two you've got the bright shields and black sword which are these attack and defense ruins.

And those are actually aspects of a single room. Yeah, a single room. Like the ruin of creation or something like that. Yeah. And similarly, there's like the teleportation ruin. There's like the ruin of Gates. And all these different runes that kind of make up the... Vicki has that, right?

Yeah. And then Look has a true ruin. Look gets the true run of wind later. Okay. But I thought he was like the main villain of the series. He is going to be. He is. I don't remember that much of... That's okay.

God, I haven't played Cic-O-3 in a long time, okay? So, but the point is, though, like, Luca Blyte has one of these ruins, a beast And that just changes his personality from being a normal, you know, sadistic emperor into this just like wild berser type of like uncontrollable evil. And he looks like the villain in Gladiator, you know, and he just got this, he's going through these towns and just killing people left and right for no apparent reason, but just tearing this world apart. People are trying to get together to fight against him.

Which does lead to one of the greatest final boss battles ever. The multi-part battle against Luca Bright is amazing. Oh, yeah. It's so much fun. But, yeah, so that's basically the runes. The runes are, like, deeply important to the mythos of the story and change the way the game kind of, like, tells itself. And, like, the villain in the first game had, like, the ruin of rulership.

Like, that ruin that tainted him and made him into a crazy evil ruler to. But it's kind of the central narrative of these concepts, these powers, kind of treating, humans are kind of pawns to these greater concepts that control them? I mean, that's the thing. There's a few runes that they describe that are like, you know, they make sense, they're meaningful. They have kind of resonance in the story. And then there were some that they're like, okay, well, here's the blue moon ruin that turns people into vampires. It's a true run because it is. We made it up.

And like, you could tell that as they got later into the series, that they're like, you could tell that as they got later into the series, that some of the true runes were just kind of getting a little. But like the ruin of punishment that you get in four, for instance, it does damage to the opponent, but it does damage to you too for daring to use it. And I couldn't tell why that was different than soul leader just being like, but it's still it was like it was pretty cool. It was pretty cool. Looking back, I feel like the overall narrative on Stigodon 2 took what they'd done in

the first game but made it a lot more personal. Yes. Because the first game was kind of about these grand, you know, political. battles and war and warring factions. But this one, like, you kept going back to something, like, the more micro and, like, letting you have more of a personal feeling about these characters. And really, not just being pushed ahead by, like, oh, I want to collect all the characters, but, like, actually caring about your characters.

And I think that's why people usually look to this one as, like, the high point. And, like, the way Jeremy just mentioned, the character Pilica, she's a little girl that you pick up outside of this town early on that burns down. It's burned down by Luca Blight. Yeah, it's burned down by Luca Blight. And when you meet her first, she's talking, she's a young toddler. she's acting up and then suddenly she's just silent for like a large chunk of the game until you meet this, you know, doctor character who kind of helps nurse her back.

And at the end of the game she's talking and it's just this kind of like micro cycle that you're getting of the story of what it's like to be a child caught up in a war, see your family slaughtered and then kind of come back to life over time with help and work. It's like you could tell the story writers of this game thought a lot about war. And about what, like, what does it actually mean to have roving bands of, like, mercenaries in this world just killing people? Like, you've got people who are just like, look, man, I'm just a humble town, you know, like policeman.

But now I have to be caught up in this giant epic battle. What's going on? My wife's at home. She's still doing laundry. Can I go back to see her? Oh, if I go back, they'll die? Oh, no. You know, I mean, it's just, it makes you consider every decision that you took for granted

in an RPG because you have to sit there and think, like, what would happen to this world if I do this otherwise common, like, you know, battle, right? And I thought that was just amazing. I like, I mentioned earlier the, the, the quote-unquote final battle versus Luca Blight, which is the final battle against Luke of Blight, but it's not the final battle in the game. No, it seems like it could be because, you know, even though you don't have all 108 stars of destiny by the point you fight Luca Blight, it's like 30 hours into the game. and, you know, if you've played the first game, you're like, well, I probably just missed a bunch of people. This is like, this seems like the end.

But it's not because this is a story that's bigger than one person. And once he falls, like if you manage to beat him over this multi-part battle that your entire army basically has to take on one man to put him down. It's so cool. The war keeps going. Like the, you know, the kingdom that Luca Blight ruled, it's taken over by someone else and they continue the war. more civilly, you know, without the wanton slaughter of people. Yeah, but it's not over yet. Just because you killed the leader.

Of a precedent quite that way in previous JRP, where, like, you think you're fighting the last boss and there's, you know, a good 20% of the game left, you know? Actually, Tales of Destiny did that. Or really the first one did? I even beat that, but I don't remember it. There's like what seems like a big final battle and you go back home and no, there's still more story.

Oh, yeah, Lunar 2 also did that. That's true. Yeah, there's like the whole epilitary. I mean, you know, Fundamacy 9 does it to terrible effect later. Yeah. So, I mean, it's an idea, but here it actually really makes sense within the context of the story because it really is about, you know, war on the scale of kingdoms and, you know, kingdoms don't stop, nations don't stop their forward momentum just because a leader dies.

Exactly. I mean, remember, the leader is the guy who's like, you know, doing crazy, but all the generals are the ones who are actually doing the actions, and they've still got a good reason to want to attack. They had a lot of skin in the game. Yeah, they're like, look, man, just because he's dead, that means I've got now room to grow. Well, it's interesting that these titles have this feeling of nation building, not far beyond

a normal game where you're making a party, but you're literally making like a giant city and an army and, like, customizing it. You kind of do take this pride in, like, helping society in these games. Well, I don't want to skip ahead to the secret best part of this game, but it's the cooking minigame. Oh, my God. It's the best of it. Well, and also, it's important to remember.

This is, you know, 1997, like, Iron Chef was only a Japanese thing. No, no, it was not. I need not. Well, at this point, Iron Chef, they were showing the Japanese Iron Chef in America. Yes. But Iron Chef America wasn't a thing. Yeah, Top Chef wasn't a thing. Yeah.

The idea of, like, a competition cooking show with a theme ingredient was a brand new crazy thing. And this game suddenly interjected this new character who was, like, basically an Iron Chef. And you'd had this fun cook-off mini game. Okay, so let me tell you. Wasn't Oriano Riori, like a PlayStation cooking game, wasn't that already around the same time? Okay, so in the late 90s, Iron Chef in Japan. Yeah.

Iron Chef in Japan was like at its peak in the late 90s. Like they just introduced Iron Chef Italian. It was like the huge cultural phenomenon there. And over here on like Asian TV we were getting NHK dubs of like Iron Chef with the subtitles of the bottom and like we were all addicted to this. And, first, when I was in college two years later, my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, she was like, you know, okay, the game, but she wanted to play Succa did in, too, because she had watched me play through the first one.

And we got to the Iron Chef battle, and she just took it from me and played for, like, the next 25 hours. Oh, yeah. She was like, okay, I need to go find every random pepper and seed in this universe. That's awesome. We need to go do all these battles. What's the chef's name? Do you remember in the game? No, I don't know.

But I remember just, like, the judging and, like, memorizing all the stats. It's clearly based on Iron Chef. It was 100%. There's actually an Iron Chef parody in Star Ocean 2, and Iron Chef was not on TV in Ohio in 1998, but all the cool kids are like, actually, I know what that is. I know what the reference is. It's a Japanese thing. I love Iron Chef.

But that was just such a cool. I mean, okay, so yeah, that was a thing. So you had the same castle building and took it into that you didn't want. You sell all your people. They did the things. But they realized that if you've got this big town that you built up, you should be able to do things in there. So we had this Iron Triff mini games that was obviously very famous.

We had the gambling games that were three different games. There was like a card game and a Mahjongi type game. There was like underneath the Bistiary area where your pet Leviathan, your octopus guy was. Yeah, all right. And like – was there an arena you could fight in? No, there was no arena in this one. But they really just made this into such – like it was a town. It wasn't just a castle.

It was a town. And every time you would go, it would grow up a little bit bigger. you would see new scenes, you would see new dialogues. And they went along, like at the end of the game when you're like, they build a statue to your character that did the most damage. So for me it was Shiro the Wolf inside of the main character, which is amazing. Even that little touch is cool that you could like have, you know, a castle looks different than my castle.

Yeah. Exactly. And I don't know. This game just went out of its way to make all of the things you liked about 2nd1 into even better things. So, you want to talk about the difference in the tactical battle system or what's... I don't remember. It's slightly better?

So, the tactical battle system in one was literally just... Paper rock scissors. If you played the DS game, not the 3DS, like, we, meware game or whatever it is, where you've got like the soldiers that they have the battles where you need, I forget what it's called. But it was basically just rock paper scissors. You're like, oh, his archers, mice, lanterns, or whatever, right? In Silicon 2, it was actually, you have groups of like three or four people who are in a battalion and you're on a grid map and you walk forward and your team has like little powers that they can use to affect the guys kind of left and right against them.

So it was more like a board game. It felt more like a grid-based board game with powers that you could then go around and walk around. Actually tactical, not just... It's actually tactical. It actually felt like you had to sit and plan out the battle. And I remember the duels were slightly more involved. But still fairly simple. The duels were effectively the same.

Yeah. I mean the difference was maybe like just the texting, but you still had attack, crazy attack or defend. Right. And I mean, the fact that they were still there though, that was just such an epic part of the game. It was so cool. But the secret best part was the fact that you could go back to the capital city of

the first game and recruit your hero and Grammy out to join your party. Yes. Good old Dick Dole. Yeah. Oh yeah. And so that's the thing. to, right? You could import your save file from Sukkenen 1, but there was a weird bug in the import that in the first game, whatever capital letters, if your characters, like when

you create your character's name, let's say Zaminar, which is what my brother named my character. So capital Z lowercase E. So we import into two and the first capital letter overwrites McDowell's name. So it begins Zickdoll. It's really weird. I had Diceke McDowell, so I got Dick Dole. Right? And like I knew a guy who decided, he was playing Pokemon of the time, so he named his main character Ash, all capital letters, A-S-H. So he got Ashhole. Good old asshole. And it was so silly.

Weird. But yeah, that was great because it wasn't just, you know, return to Toron. It wasn't just McDowell that shows up. If Grimio, if you got all 180 stars in the first game, Grimio would show up. And give you a secret stew recipe for the Iron Chef game. Yes, of course. And then there were also other characters who would show up regardless. Like, you had to choose between a ninja character.

Oh, Valerie. I think. Oh, Valerie? Yeah. I mean, obviously I went with Kasumi because cute Ninja Girl. Yeah. Like, okay. Fair enough.

But yeah, like there were lots of opportunities to kind of, not lots of, but this one really interesting opportunity to revisit the first game and see what had happened following the events of the first game. Yeah. What does peace look like? That is pretty cool. Like that impetus to be like, oh, if you did get everything, you can bring it over. That's pretty rare to this day.

One of my favorite PC games ever. I mean, Arc the Ladd let you do that before that. Right. And like the Quest for Glory games on PC let you import your character. And Wizardry before that. Yeah. But it's just like in Japanese RPGs, like you never had a Final Fantasy six character going to seven, eight to eight, into nine.

But you could hypothetically take your save file from Succo 1 to Succo 2 to Succo 3 because of, you know, PS2's ability to use PS1 cards. That's amazing. The fact that you had continuity that made the story just linked together. together and just feel like chapters of an actual continuous story in a way the other RPG just didn't do. Like I think Fantasy Star was like the other one that I just think of what I think of continuous like joint stories.

Because like each Final Fantasy is individual game, each Dragon Quest individual game. But the fact that like they had the guts I guess to sit and make a story that so was standalone but linked back and gave you benefits as a person. who is like, it's like a reward for having read the first book, right? It's interesting. The context that Jeremy said at the very beginning of this podcast, that this was by design, that they kind of got their feet wet with the first one and then expanded the scope for the second one. But always had the vision in mind.

Like, it's interesting. I never actually knew that. Me neither. I remember interviewing Junco Coahu, Coano for a split-a-in-four, and she didn't talk about it. And she worked on the first game. She was a designer on it. But, like, I think that gives me the context that, like, now it all makes sense. It wasn't that, like, this happened in a vacuum or by accident.

It was by design. That's such a cool detail, man. And I think that's a good way to approach games even now. It's like, oh, you have this grand vision, but you can kind of like, what's the minimum viable product to make the thing I really want to make? And like, speak it in a one is that. It gets the point across. It does most of the things that's a perfect game. That's the approach I'm taking with Jetpack Goonies.

Yeah. Is that a sequel to Jet Force Gemini and the Goonies? Yes, absolutely. So I think we've pretty much covered the gamut here. So I think we've pretty much covered the gamut here. There are a few little odds and ends. like we could talk about Victor settling his score with Necklord once in the second game. Or like the, you know, even though you're kind of meant to soak in this game and take your time through it, there's also the timed event where if you...

If you go as fast as you can, you get the full Clive story. Right. So good. I never did that. Huh? No, I don't want to rush through this game. I don't care that much about Clyde's story. How much do you have to rush to get...

You have to beat the game in like 20 hours or less or nothing. I have to beat the game. You have to get to certain towns by certain hour marks in order to meet special NPCs who give you more. Also, it's kind of like the Save the Queen quest from Final Fantasy 9. Also, remember, this was, you know, internet was around back then, but it wasn't the way it is now. Like, a lot of these secrets were pretty well hidden.

There was a strategy guide. Game facts was beginning. Beginning. But it just, when you, like, we pass around the details like, you need to be in this town by 1542 or you're going to miss it. I think game facts was still secret of the Sega sages back there. I think you're right. But it was just so.

I mean, Clive, just getting Clive, was one of my favorite characters. I had to jump through all these hoops and get to these cities and meet you, they made you work for it. It was cool and it felt cool. And it was also, I think, one of the first games where I discovered what Yahweh is because I went online looking for like Anard of Sikidon and it's like, oh. You're like, Grameo, Grameo Cross. Oh, oh, dear. I thought Grimio was like a big brother to the main character, but I guess not. Yeah, and it's like, oh, oh, boy.

Now you're right. This is different. Do you write light novels about these? Yeah. Oh, God. So good. All right. So we have some letters from listeners, but I think we're going to save those for the mailback episode.

And wrap this episode up. It's been... What's the time on the clock, Bob? 135. That's perfect. Do you think in the future we will go to the other Spikodin games? Because it's a mixed bag, but there's some things to be found in them. Yeah, maybe, maybe, I don't know.

Here's a summary. Sucanin 3 is great. 2ndan 4 is garbage. Sucodan 5 is a prequel to Sucodan 2. It's worth your time if you like Tukodan 2, which you should like Sucodan 2. Five is worth your time. Sikodan Tactics is one of the most disappointing games I've ever played. Tearcreas?

Tierkidane. Tierkrease is not a Sikodan. That's correct. Sikodgaden. Succo Guiden 1 and 2 are really, really cool story sequences that fit between 1 and 2. And I enjoyed them, but they're also a good way to practice reading the Japanese. Aren't they visual novels? Yes.

Yes. Yes, they're a visual novels. Swikidding card game. I have the full set of. at home. No, the GBA game. Oh, no. I've got the actual printed TCG.

The PSP game, earlier Bob was looking at it. I've never seen it. I've got it. I've got it at home. It's amazing. It came out when I was living in Japan. Yeah, I literally, I've never seen this. It's beautiful.

Yeah, it was pretty good for PSP game. I fully recommend the Sweet Koda and co-creators other game. Well, she's done several games, but I really love Shadow of Memories, Slash, Shadow of Destiny. It came out just recently called Alliance Alive. I just picked it up because I heard it was about the scenarios. That's Morayama. Yeah, Muriela. It's like, Swikiden and Saga had a baby.

Is it a PC or mobile? D-D-R-S, dude. What's it all again? Alliance Al-I. I just picked it up. I worked in the video game industry and I've never heard of that game. Me neither. Who published it?

Atlas or something? They didn't promote it much. You would think that a game by the guy who did Sikodin would be something that would be on my radar, but it was not. And now it is. Shadow Destiny, everybody, it's great. Also, it's one of the, I want to talk about Shut up. No, it's good for fuck's sake. Let me talk about it.

It's also on PSP. Yes, it is. Thank you. I had a nervous breakdown recently. So let me tell you about Shadow of Destiny. It's one of the best puzzles, adventure game puzzles in adventure game history in that in order to get people witness, in order to have witnesses at a crime scene to avoid getting hit by a car. You have to go back in time and convince the director to make a less interesting movie so the witnesses will not be distracted by a poster for the interesting movie. What? And that is the solution to that puzzle. You have to go back in time and tell the director, no, make this more boring movie. So people will not look at the poster. They will be the. there and they will witness you. It's cool. Yes. It's weird. It's like the room almost.

It takes itself way too seriously, but it's goofy as hell and I love it. Okay. So, music, music, music, music. That'll speak for itself with the integration throughout the episode. I mean, there's a certain. Don't worry, in the letter bag, the letter bag episode. Letterbag. We're going to get some of the greatest soundtracks in video games.

I don't care. Fight me. You can find me on Twitter, but I'm telling you, I've got 18 of those CDs. I still listen to them to this. day, the Celtic version, the Asian version, piano, the jazz versions I did. This is Konami Kukea Club's peak when they were doing Castlevania Symphony of the night, when they were doing Sukoden, and when they were doing the early DDR stuff, it is magical. It is still one of the greatest RPG soundtracks of all time.

I don't care what you have to say. I want to hear the jazz arrangement. It is hella good. What's it called? It's like Sukoden Jazz arranged. All right. So that wraps it up for our Sweikiden one and two episodes. So thank you, Shane and Sheevam for coming in.

And Bob, of course, for being here as always. Hi, I'll place. You're the rock upon which we built our church. I'll place we get into one day. I just need 60 hours and other things. Yeah. It's really good on the Vita, man. If you take the Piazic version.

I bought the damn thing just to say thanks for doing this, but I've only played a few hours of it so far. All right. Well, sorry that I spoiled it for you. I'll forget all of this. Okay, great. So, yes, Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. find me on Twitter as GameSpite and at Retronauts.com.

Where can the humans find you? People can find me at Electrotal on Twitter. I'm there. You should probably spell that out. E-L-E-K-T-R-O-T-A-L. I tend to talk about magic and politics more. There's a silent K in there. This is Shane.

You can find me on the Twitter at Shane Watch, all one word. Hey, it's Bob Mackey. On Twitter, Bob Servo, other podcasts include Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon, and those are Patreon-supported. And go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. you'll find out everything we have to give you. And it's a lot. And I won't talk about anymore here because it takes literally minutes to get through all of this.

So thank you. Can I plug my other podcast? No. Yes. That's what you're here for, dude. Yeah, I host a podcast about the Magic Format Commander. It's called Commanderin. You can find us at Commander in MTG on Twitter and other places.

And finally, Retronauts, of course, is at Retronauts.com on iTunes, other podcatchers and the podcast One network. And also, we are supported through Patreon. that's how we pay our bills and do our laundry. Retronauts is on Patreon at patreon.com slash retronauts. Yes, that's very good. That makes sense. Support your favorite creators. For three bucks a month, you can listen to these episodes a week before all the other

humans and also listen with higher bitrate quality, which is great. When you listen to an episode like this. When I start screaming. Yes, when Bob shrieks. No, that has amazing music integrated into it because, yeah, this music is all from Sweet Kid 1 and 2. that's what you've been enjoying. You've been soaking in it, and so have we. And we will be back next week with another podcast. I didn't even get to talk about my Suket and branded iPod that I got.

We're done. We're done. Stop. You know, The Mueller report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fight. was among the mourners attending his funeral.

Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue. Thank you.