Lots of RPGs try to have large parties but nothing beats Suikoden. What starts as a small force opposing an unjust empire, grows into an unstoppable army. Sure most of the recruits are utterly useless but that's what makes it fun. If you want to challenge yourself, you can.
The game, from the 32Bit era, is pretty simple. The sprites are good and the music is passable. I do wish there was a better way to skip some of the animations. Having to watch the same rune magic over and over again does get kind of old. But I understand that for the time this game was made, that wasn't the norm. It was a lot of work to make those animations after all and I can see why the developers wouldn't want them to be skipped.
The core game revolves around building your army by recruiting 108 characters or "stars". Many of them come from progressing the story but not a lot of them do. Figuring out how to recruit of the stars is kind a of puzzle at times and does provide a nice little side piece to the mainly linear story. Combat consists of building a party of six characters, with both a front and back line to consider. Front line characters will hit harder and take more damage but some characters can't attack from the back line. Usually the back line is reserved for the archer or magic using characters.
That brings up magic, to use magic or a skill, you have equip a rune. You have your standard fair of magic, based on the elements like fire, water, wind, etc. Then there are some that do different effects, like protect against status ailments or reduce enemy accuracy. Not every rune is useful and not every rune can be unequipped. Some characters come with a rune that you cannot change but they usually are pretty powerful.
There are two other kind of combat, outside the main RPG battles previously mentioned. Occasionally you will fight in large scale wars. These play out in a rock-paper-scissors manner where you select and hope you picked the right option to counter what the enemy AI picked. There aren't many of these and they aren't terribly hard but having the options for Ninjas/Thieves to tell you what the enemy is going to do is almost needed in some cases.
The other kind of combat is rare with only three instances that I can recall. These are duels, where it is one vs. one between one of your characters and an enemy. The interface looks like a fighting game with two large health bars at the top but boils down to a rock-paper-scissors style fight again. Although it isn't a true RPS style as one of the options doesn't have a a counter. It was a neat way to do some very key story fights and better than just doing a standard fight with lots of dialogue. If you know what you are doing or know what the enemies selected line means (each piece of dialogue corresponds to a choice), then you can easily win them. They are very important to win as losing could mean permanently losing a character or a game over.
You would think that having over 108 characters would get muddled but each character has a unique style. Some don't develop much but others you learn quite a bit about. There are certainly some that I grew fond of and always kept in my party when I could. This game isn't the most challenging and isn't super long but it was a fun ride while it lasted. I enjoyed my time with it and understand that it really builds in the sequel. Unfortunately, I won't ever get to play the other games in the series as they are incredibly rare and expensive. It is a shame this series isn't around anymore, there are really good ideas here and I feel that this series could make a come back. The only gripe I have is that the encounter rate was way higher than it should have been at times and a lot of the fights that you get into, you sometimes can't run from. So you end up having to fight some enemies that literally give you 5 EXP for no reason. For the most part though, it was enjoyable.
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