Suikoden I&II HD Remaster Gate Rune & Dunan Unification Wars Review

I’ve only ever known the Suikoden series as the JRPG where you can recruit like a hundred different characters. I always loved the idea of that whenever I heard it, but the closest I came to actually playing them was with being tempted by the recently released spiritual successor Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. With Konami setting out to revive their entire gaming catalogue, though, it was only a matter of time before Suikoden was brought back into the spotlight. I’m thankful it was, and that this two-for-one HD remaster gave me the kick I needed to finally dive into a pair of unsurprising but thoroughly enjoyable old-school JRPGs.

The amount of effort put into restoring and remastering these games for modern screens is immediately evident. These aren’t quite HD-2D works of art on the level of Dragon Quest 3 Remake, but they get pretty dang close. Plenty of environmental sprites has either been entirely redrawn or enhanced in 3D, with some realistic lighting or brightly glowing fires placed here and there in certain environments.

Despite characters being the focal point of this series, they don’t feel like they’ve gotten as much love in the process of remastering. Character sprites look nearly identical when compared to the original releases, retaining a pretty lanky & blocky pixel aesthetic that ends up clashing just a bit with the much more modernised environments. Character portraits, meanwhile, are hit-or-miss. Those in Suikoden 1 have all been completely redrawn, and while some look pretty sharp many of them lack the same sharp style as the original portraits. Suikoden 2 portraits, meanwhile, are simply scaled up HD versions of the original portraits – but they’ve had a bit of their edge sanded off in the process, and a few even have bits of smudge and blur that come off looking pretty uncanny.

The stories of these two games slot right into the classic fantasy formula. first game weaves a tale of an evil empire and a young hero poised to topple them with the help of his friends. The sequel, set a few years later, is a bit more open-ended as it follows childhood friends who get swept up in a series of fateful encounters and separations in the midst of a massive civil war. Both games, ultimately, steer you towards the same goal: recruit 108 allies to build an army big enough to conquer the big bad.

Most of the time, you’ll only be hanging out with up to six of your allies. Standard battles in the game are pretty traditional turn-based bouts where your crew of six occupy a set of rows based on their attack range, standing opposite enemies that have done the same. It’s pretty basic stuff, but these battles are broken up in a few refreshing ways. For these remasters new quality-of-life features let you toggle auto-battle or sped-up battles to help trudge through the slower sections of the game, but there’s also different battle types that you’ll be thrust into at times.

Both games feature Duel battles where just two characters duke it out in a rock-paper-scissors combat format. It’s a really cool way to add some extra stakes to the more climactic encounters in the story. Then, there are War battles. In the first game, they’ kind of like scaled-up singular encounters from Advanced Wars. In the second game, though, War battles are massive turn-based tactical RPG bouts that really test your patience.

In an otherwise basic set of JRPGs, I was constantly kept entertained and on my toes thanks to the features that make Suikoden such an iconic and unique series. Constantly encountering and recruiting hundreds of new allies was a thrill, and any time the slightly-basic story or combat started to overstay their welcome, an epic Duel battle or a massive War battle shook things up and got me right back into the thick of it. Suikoden I&II HD Remaster doesn’t make these old-school titles feel like brand new games by any stretch, but it’s still a surprisingly polished and easily accessible way to dive into JRPG history.