The game starts off by following the prince of the Felana as he is coming back from a trip to Lordlake village. Once the prince has reached the palace, characters are introduced, and a flashback of his trip begins. In Lordlake there was an uprising two years ago and the queen decided to use the sun rune to bring punishment to the village. The sun rune completely dried up the lake and the river turning the town and the forest next to it into a dry and parched wasteland. Water there was so scarce that people were braving the monster infested forest to get water from a small well near the center of the woods. So understandably, most of the people really do not like the royal family. Of course, a problem occurs and, you being the prince and all, goes to help your not-so-faithful subjects.

The first thing you will notice about Suikoden V is when you finally take control of your characters is that the game does not feel like a current generation RPG. Almost all RPGs on the current systems have the camera looking over the shoulder of the character that you are following. This particular game, the camera is always above the character, unless there is a cut-scene where the camera needs to be focused somewhere else. This makes the game feel more like one of the classic Suikoden games. Also, changed from the fourth game, your parties are back up to six people, and you control them all, unlike in the third game. One of the biggest changes is the fact that you can actually have up to ten people with you, with six fighting and four supporting characters. The supporting characters can do things like make your escape percentage higher, or heal you at the end of fighting the round. You may also have other characters that can fight in the supporting pool; these characters can be switched in during fights, providing the character you switch with is alive. Also new to the game is the addition of formations. In the first few Suikoden games, you had a six person party, however you were limited to three in the front and three in the back. Now, the different formations actually give you different advantages and disadvantages. Bonuses vary depending on where you place the characters in the formation, for example, in one of the formations you might have better attack power and worse physical defense in the front and vise versa in the back.

For those of you familiar with the Suikoden series, most of the aspects of the Suikoden games are intact. You still sharpen your weapons at a blacksmith up to level 16, and you also have to locate certain items in order to get your weapons sharpened at higher levels. Runes are the source of magic in the Suikoden universe, so in order to obtain spells and special abilities, you must equip runes on your characters. Trainable skills are back as well, with which you can improve skills like strength, agility, or magic, just to name a few, and unlike Suikoden 3 only two skills can be equipped at a time. You also get a pretty cool castle during the course of the game. One of the nicest aspects of the game is the fact that you get a character that can teleport you to anywhere that you've been before. This is extremely handy since the overworld is rather large and it takes a while to get to places on foot. During the course of the game you also get a chance to control large armies to fight against an overwhelming enemy. The army fights play much like a real time strategy game. You control individual units and move them around on the map. Depending on the characters in the units, and what runes you have equipped on them, the units get special abilities and spells.

Graphically, the game lacks a little bit. The areas that you explore are rather well done, however, the character models and spell effects do not measure up to the game's otherwise high quality. Many of the spell effects were good, but just as many I found to be done very poorly. The star rune in particular I found to be very bad and you will understand as soon as you see it. Load times where exceptionally long, and considering the size of the towns, often multiple load screens were required to get from one part of the town to another. For those of you expecting graphics similar to the likes of Kingdom Heats II, or Grandia III, you will be disappointed. In some places you even see a little bit of slowdown, but not to worry as it is extremely rare, and it happens maybe three or four times during the course of the game. The only other item that caused any issues was the camera. There are just a couple of spots where you can run in between buildings or be standing near a tall wall and either the wall doesn't become transparent or the camera doesn't move to be able to see you. This is generally not a problem until very late in the game.

The story is one of the better stories to come out of this series. There are a few predictable moments, however, most of the game's twists and turns keep you trying to figure out what is going to happen next and why people did what they did. The music score is very well done and contains some remixed songs from previous games. The game has the feel of the first two games of the series, both in the music and gameplay departments. The cities are also much larger in Suikoden V then they have been in games past. This means you have to spend a lot more time exploring your surroundings in order for you to be able to get everything in each town. There were times I spent a good hour or two just running around town talking to everyone and trying to find all the treasure in town. One of the big features that many people will enjoy in this game is that it is a longer than average game. Most of the current generation RPGs available give you only between 20-30 hours of enjoyment, but with Suikoden V, you will get your money's worth. During my run through, I only collected a little more then half of the 108 available characters and I still spent 55 hours finishing the game.

Since Suikoden V has a more old school feel to it, veteran gamers will probably enjoy the title most. Overall the game is very good, the story is intriguing with enough twists and political intrigue to keep most anyone glued to their TV while playing this game. Most everyone who enjoyed the first two Suikoden titles will enjoy this game as well, and for those of you looking to fix the feeling of, "they sure don't make them like they used to," this is a RPG for you.

	Great story
	The game is longer than most RPGs
	Improved classic combat system
	Well done music score
	Loading....
	Poor spell effects