How's Eiyuden Chronicle? Does it in any way live up to Suikoden? I've been wanting to check it out along with Sea of Stars kinda like throwback-style RPG games on a modern console.
There's a lot to love about it IMO, but honestly, I'd tell anyone to wait a couple months while the developers work out the bugs. Or at least wait until it's on sale.
It feels like a Suikoden, if a lower stakes one. Aside from a couple of weird difficulty spikes, I enjoy the gameplay. The war battles are entertaining to watch (and amusing at times, in the case of the 'live feed'). I love the mini-games (to my surprise, I ended up liking the card game more than the beigoma/spinning tops). Not a fan of the racing game, but then, I usually don't like racing games.
My two complaints are the crashing/freezing rate (which honestly, should be fixable), and the requirements for recruiting one of the characters (which involves beating many beigoma games... and that's fine... but there's that 'difficulty spike' with one of the matches and it relies mostly on chance. Which is fine for higher level games, but as a requirement for recruiting a character? Ridiculous, and I honestly hope they fix that).
Despite that last paragraph, I played the game long enough that several songs are living in my head rent free (music's fantastic too). I did mess up and made the game harder for myself by not exploring a specific area lol (hint: not all fishing areas are marked by docks!). Basically, I needed to recruit someone, and their absence was blocking a lot of castle growth. I still managed, but having that person earlier would've been nice.
I liked all the throwbacks to Suikoden and Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising. Not sure what the future of the series is though, with Murayama gone, but I would have loved to see another tale told in this world, but with the emotional impact that S1, S2, and S5 (and parts of Tactics and Tierkreis) had. Eiyuden definitely has its moments but it's not quite up to that level yet.
So yeah... if you get it, it's got Suikoden elements but definitely don't expect a clone.