AbortedWalrusFetus said:
The naval battles in 4 were actually pretty decent. Too easy, but they were ok. It's been a long time since I played it, but as I remember regular combat was both better and more challenging (although it's not hard to be more challenging than Tierkreis. The game is simple). It has way way worse design decisions, like the boat that was slower than a person walking, but at least I didn't have to run out of dungeons, and there was a damn dash button. The entire calendar cycle in Tierkreis was basically completely pointless aside from recruiting a very small handful of character (and frankly it became more of an annoyance than anything--Namna in particular) I don't remember how the encounter rate was, but it's hideously bad in Tierkreis, and instead of being able to avoid battles with weaker enemies completely they give you spark, which means you have to load the battle screen, issue a command, and wait for combat to be over for every encounter, which was the most annoying thing ever. I remember actually enjoying some of the end-game plot in 4, whereas the entire end game plot in Tierkreis was just dull. The entire plot was insanely repetitive as well. It's been way too long since I've played 4 to give it a fair judgment, but from all that I can remember I certainly wouldn't put Tierkreis far from it in quality.
I am so late to this, but 4's battles are even easier than Tierkreis's. I know that probably sounds crazy, but it's true. I think I had one game over in each game, and it was just because in 4 I was forced to use an under-leveled, under-equipped crappy character to recruit someone else at the end of a dungeon, and in Tierkreis I tried leveling up some scrubs in the battle simulation thing on what was apparently the hardest possible fight. If you're wanting to run faster, there is a (deceptively hidden) item about halfway through the game that you can equip on the hero to make him run at least 2x faster. I didn't like the lack of escape items, either, but the game is so forgiving with its fights that I was able to escape every fight I needed to without dying.
I don't remember where you find a champion's orb in 4, but I know I got one and equipped it and it didn't make a difference even when I could use the flash/slash skill (same as spark) to instant kill trivial stuff in the final dungeon. Not that I'm saying Tierkreis doesn't have tons of random encounters, but it also has an absurdly forgiving escape rate, just like every Suikoden I've played. I ran from about 2/3 or more of the fights after I was far enough in the game to have the upgraded HQ.
I didn't like the lack of war battles or duels or minigames in Tierkreis, but Suikoden 4 has the worst minigames I've ever played in the series, and usually Suikoden minigames are a lot of fun. They managed to make the dice game no fun (I totally forget the name of it and don't trust 2's crappy translation of "chinchirorin" to be right), but even worse, it had motherfucking Rita-pon. I think the only part of 4's gameplay I really liked is the war battles, even if they were way too simple.
Basically, Tierkreis might be lacking a lot of features that the rest of the Suikoden games have, but that doesn't make it worse than 4. 4 has all those features and doesn't get a single one of them right. Tierkreis is lacking them, but didn't fuck up what it had. And in general, I liked Tierkreis's magic system. It fit with replacing D&D styled spell levels and casts/uses with regular JRPG MP. I wouldn't want to see it paired with the regular Suikoden runes, but really my only complaints about Tierkreis are the Suikoden features it lacks, while with 4 I hate pretty much everything about the game except how fast it is to teleport to/from places with Viki.
