These days, the RPG market seems to be flooded with game after game of cliché, overdone stories and dull monotonous gameplay, and it seems like almost no companies are even trying to truly push the envelope. For nearly a decade, the Suikoden series by Konami has become famous for one rather remarkable feature: unlike many RPGs that provide only a half dozen or so playable characters, each Suikoden game allows players to use upwards of one hundred characters (the count in Suikoden IV is 108). Unfortunately, in the case of Suikoden IV, quantity doesn’t even come close to trumping quality.

In the game, you take control of a nameless, voiceless hero who is just graduating from his rigorous training to be a Knight of Gaien, a small archipelago in the middle of a vast sea. Things quickly take a turn for the worst, however, when Gaien is attacked by a band of pirates. Gaien retaliates, and as the pirate leader dies he puts a sort of curse on the leader of the Gaien Knights. As your superior slowly withers away and dies before your very eyes, the curse is passed on to you. Unfortunately, nobody else sees the curse in action, but they do happen to catch you standing over the rotting corpse of their once great leader. Thus, they do the only logical thing possible: you are exiled without being able to explain (you don’t have a voice), and now you have some lousy curse slowly eating away at your life.

First of all, I just want to get one thing clear: games where everyone else talks but my character stays completely silent totally frustrate me to the point where I just want to start shouting at the television. From an actual role-playing perspective, it’s certainly possible to think that I have essentially become the irate, cursing, and overall potty-mouthed voice of my character; unfortunately, unlike actual role-playing, despite the immense number of expletives flying out of my mouth, nothing changed in the world of Suikoden IV.

Second, my synopsis of the story doesn’t really give it justice at all. The story was actually very interesting, and for the first 30 hours of the game (it took me about 50 hours to complete it), it truly kept me engaged. I remember staying up late for many nights just to figure out what would happen next. Then, for some reason, the story just travels in a downward spiral; down and down it went to the point where it became almost incoherent. I don’t know what went wrong, but someone threw a monkey wrench in there somewhere and everything just stopped for about twenty hours. After those first thirty hours, I traveled on and on and discovered that I, even though I was at the last level, didn’t even know who the bad guy was. When it was finally revealed in the final minutes of the game, I was just confused, because I didn’t even know what the motives behind his actions were. I fought him and, in an extremely anti-climactic battle, I killed him, but I had no idea why it happened in the first place.

In retrospect, the absolute halt of the story is somewhat attributed to the fact that I spent roughly 49 of those 50 hours going from island to island in my boat, which traveled at an almighty one millimeter per hour. You see, unlike other games which might feature an airship or… I don’t know, walking, every bit of travel in Suikoden IV is done through the awe-inspiring power of your trusty sailboat. Sure, once you find an island to land at you can go on foot through the city, but getting from island to island can take upwards of at least an hour or two. At one point in the game, the point was specifically to discover other islands, which meant going from one end of the sea to the other with no idea of what you were looking for. The only time you knew you were going in the wrong direction was a gigantic invisible wall that blocked your path and turned you around. I estimate that roughly half of the cursing directed toward my television set came from sailing in the wrong direction for an hour, only to be turned around by a mystical, invisible wall.

Another reason the story falls flat on its face has to do with the 108 characters to collect and cage up in your little tiny sailboat. Of those 108 characters, only about 15 were actually given story development, and of those 15, only five or six were actually useful in a fight. Finally, of those five or six useful characters, only three of them are given interesting stories. Essentially, this means that I simply didn’t care about any of the other 105 characters. Add to this the laughable dialogue that was given to each, and I’m actually almost thankfully that my character didn’t speak, because he probably would have sounded like an idiot.

Now then, with some of the negatives out of the way, it’s time for the positives. First, despite the badly written material the voice actors and actresses have to work with, each and every one of them does an absolutely wonderful job. I could tell that a lot of effort went into casting the characters, as I could really feel their emotion in many parts of the story. Fortunately, it seemed like extra special attention was paid to the main characters of the story (which number roughly six or seven), because not only do they talk a lot, but they also have some of the worst dialog in the game. But hey, at least they sound nice. Another thing that sounded nice? The music. For most of the game, it was spectacular.

Also, even though I absolutely hated sailing around the sea for hours at a time, I loved the naval battles. In the beginning of the game, you’re given a small sailboat with a mere one cannon, and each ship you go up against uses a different kind of ammunition and a different hull. In order to be victorious, not only do you need to make sure your ammunition is strong against their ships, and that you’re not weak against theirs. As the game progresses, you gain more, larger ships with more cannons, as well as the added difficulty of fighting more and more ships. Really, unlike the battle systems of many other RPGs (and, unfortunately, the regular battles in Suikoden IV), the naval battles require far more brow furrowing than mindless button mashing.

Speaking of the battle system in Suikoden IV, it’s quite possible the—oh, forget it. It’s not even worth wasting my rhetoric on. I’ll just say that there were far too many of them for mere humans to tolerate. Even the most highly advanced robot on the most highly advanced planet in the most highly advanced galaxy would explode from the battle overload featured in this game.

After spending countless hours on this game (actually, it was 50—the game counted them) and getting absolutely nothing satisfying out of it, I played it a second time because it was certainly possible that I just didn’t notice something that explained the story. After the second play-through, I became even more bitter as it only revealed a problem that I hadn’t noticed the first time around: numerous plot holes and loose ends that made the story even more nonsensical and ridiculous. Even now, it’s hard to comprehend how something with so much potential in the beginning could have fallen so quickly, and now, as I watch the ending, (which isn’t actually an ending, but more of little one-sentence blurbs going across the screen that explains what happens to each of the 108 characters), only one thought is crossing my mind: thank God I got this game for free.