Suikoden 1&2 HD Remaster review

Almost 30 years later, Suikoden 1 and 2 are still marvellous adventures that expertly combine supernatural shenanigans with the more worldly horrors of bloody war and the politics behind them, sprinkled with just enough silly minigames (cooking) and collectables (for the bath) to give them balance.

These remasters remain so close to the legendary originals I can follow old walkthroughs without making any adjustments, still finding the same items in the same treasure chests and the same friends in the same places. In Suikoden the people you form bonds with could be anything from ancient vampires to cape-wearing squirrels, and the series' defining base-building feature encourages me to recruit as many of the 108 characters available per game as possible.

Even today, in a world of cinematic Final Fantasys and Falcom's impossibly dense world building, these stories stand out. Both games effortlessly weave the personal and the political together; sometimes the greater good must be fought for at any cost, and sometimes it's worth throwing it all away for a childhood friend. The retro-blunt nature of the text, everything short and to the point, only enhances these dramatic scenes. Every line has to serve a purpose, every villain encouraged to go straight for the throat, every heroic sacrifice more poignant because it's played out before I've had a chance to process what's happening.

The dozens of allies I assemble in each game don't just fight alongside the lead characters in battle. They can also add new features to my home base: keeping hold of surplus items, setting up shop, even providing my own personal teleportation services. It's as satisfying to see a wreck of a castle slowly turn into a fortress filled with heroes as it's ever been, and each game's relative brevity—these are stories comfortably cleared in 30 hours, not a bloated 300—means there's always someone new to recruit just around the corner.

Or to fight in the game's standard, duel, and army style battles.

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Regular fights are snappy and chaotic, often showing multiple characters from my handpicked team of six leaping into the fray at once. The view constantly shifts as this goes on, offering an exciting close-up of a critical hit or sneaky counterattack, or pulling back to give a powerful spell room to show off its full effect.

New to this collection is the ability to speed up these (and only these) standard encounters, although as this also speeds up the wonderful music to match I generally preferred to wait a few seconds longer for a bout to finish than subject my ears to ruined tunes.

Dramatic duels also pop up every now and then, tense rock-paper-scissors challenges where I have to guess what my opponent will do next based on their dialogue and react accordingly. On the opposite end of the scale are army battles, with thousands of soldiers mobilised at once. In Suikoden 1 these broadly follow the duel rules, but with the added ability to order sneaky allies to try and find out what the opponent will do next, or wise strategists to maximise the next attack. In Suikoden 2 these are more thoughtful strategy RPG style affairs where I move multiple units around a grid-based battlefield and command them to attack, defend, or perform some sort of special skill. More than simple variety, these disparate styles breathe life into both games' conflicts, some things just too big or too important for a plucky one-size-fits-all RPG party to handle.

Who gets a slot in my standard group depends somewhat on the outcome of the large-scale skirmishes. Party members can die in army-sized battles—and only in army-sized battles—in both games, the difference between temporary defeat and permanent death nothing more than bad luck. It was a bad idea back in the '90s and it's disappointing to see it return unaltered.

And it's sadly not the only obvious rough spot that hasn't been polished out of these remasters.

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One semi-modern convenience that's conspicuously absent from both games is the ability to save anywhere, or even just suspend the games at will so I can pick them up later. The best this collection has to offer is an extremely infrequent autosave system that only activates in rooms I can save in anyway. Seriously. It's so useless it's almost insulting.

Suikoden 1 in particular suffers from a lack of modern polish. That game's menus are still as awkward as they were the first time around, featuring such irritating "highlights" as being able to rest or save but not rest and save, and the process of equipping freshly purchased armour then selling my old gear involves a ridiculous dance between the shopkeeper and my own inventory and back again. Suikoden 2 fixed both of these issues at the time, and retains its improvements in this remaster. Why couldn't this 2025 collection extend to the kind of enhancements Konami already implemented back in 1998?

The first game is also conspicuously lacking the grander parts of the HD remaster's graphical upgrades. In Suikoden 2 a burning massacre casts a warm bloom effect over pin-sharp sprites, and clear water ripples as it flows over a stony riverbed. A vampire's castle is finally wrapped in the thick shadows it really should've had the first time around, and the 3D battlefields used for random encounters are packed with new flourishes that simply didn't exist before.

Suikoden 1 was always the more graphically basic of the two games, but when subjected to the remaster treatment (which can't be toggled off) its interiors tend to look sparse and sterile, lacking the clutter and dings that would distract from the sharp edges and make them appear more lived in. Shop counters are the same featureless ruler-straight slabs of brown they were five PlayStations ago, and everyone in the land seems to possess several copies of the exact same wooden stool within their relentlessly right-angled homes.

Other new features thankfully fare better. For the first time ever, Suikoden 1 and 2 have difficulty levels. Easy and normal can be switched between at will, while hard mode is an all-or-nothing game-long choice. And remembering what I've done and where I need to go next has never been easier, thanks to a conversation log that allows me to scroll through the last 100 lines, and then save any key pieces of information or helpful direction for later reference.

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All of the extras introduced in the Japanese PSP release are also included in some form, with diagonal movement the most substantial of the lot. It's still clear these games weren't created with it in mind, but these corner-cutting jogs are so convenient it doesn't really matter. The PSP's expanded widescreen locations make a comeback (including an odd decision in one area that makes it look like a castle wall is paper thin and propped up by support beams), as does the gallery, although the decision to allow me to listen to every piece of music from the start but only allow me to rewatch events I've already cleared after I've finished a whole game remains a bizarre one.

These are fantastic RPGs wrapped up in a middling remaster. Many of the new additions have simply been lifted straight from a 19-year-old PSP remake, and rarely address anything that seriously needed more care to improve. An inconsistent lick of paint that in one game highlights as many flaws as it hides and some additional difficulty levels really are the only significant unique features here, and surely not the best Konami could do for these incredible games.