OK so the european version of Suikoden Tierkreis (I had to cut and paste the name), probably the name with the most confusing name since Ys: The Ark of Napishtim, is already out there. At this point, I'm about four hours into it. It does seem like Konami has made a lot of subtle changes to make this as appealing as possible to a larger audience: elimination of the blacksmith system, a party size of four, the adoption of MPs for rune magic, short and small dungeons (even for Suikoden), and the look of a modern random anime cartoon, among other things.
In my first few hours of play I found the characters to be your typical irritating anime brats. However, I must acknowledge that at about 3 hours of play the game does start to pick up a bit and to play more like the Suikoden I know.
If there's another thing I'm wary of, it's the level of difficulty, which looks like it'll be pretty low, even for a generally easy series like Suikoden.
I appreciate all the small changes Konami has tried to make, however what I disagree with is dumbing down the game to the DS audience, which seems to have been made for this game. However, not to the point of completely alienating the older fans.
I don't know how the rest of the game is going to play out, but ff I look at my Magic 8-Ball right now I'd say it's going to be a lot better than IV, but slightly inferior to the others.
As for general Suikoden games, while I have only ever barely played III, my favorites would be V>I>II.
V was the longest one and had the deepest plot and characters, and I appreciated its very slow pace. I liked I more than II because I found that the second put too much emphasis on cameos and because there was too much nagging humor that wasn't present in the first game.
