Gensei Suikoden Plus

I went into Gensei Suikoden Plus expecting a curiosity - a niche late-90s Japanese PC game that barely anyone outside of South Korea and Japan had ever touched - and came out genuinely charmed by how compact and self-assured the whole thing is. This is a remaster of a 1997 Windows 95 title from the Gensei Kitan series, a lineup of around ten RPGs by Compile that never found a global audience simply because they were never localized. Plus changes that. It rebuilds the original from scratch in a modern pixel art style with improved resolution, while keeping the side-view turn-based combat loop that defined the original intact. The setup is light but effective: Ataho is a reclusive martial artist who gets dragged into a fighting tournament by an old dojo acquaintance, which then snowballs into a full world-saving situation. Your party grows to include Rin, a cat fighter, and Smash, a dog whose defining personality trait involves a contraband magazine and an obsessive appreciation for clean restrooms. The writing leans hard into puns and visual gags, including legally-distinct parodies of Street Fighter and Tekken fighters scattered through the world. If that sounds like it would get old, it doesn't - the jokes are placed with the kind of authorial restraint you don't expect from a budget-tier disc release. The cast has more personality per line of dialogue than most modern RPGs manage per cutscene. Combat sits in a side-view format that kicks in whenever you run into enemies on the 2D overworld maps. Turns resolve quickly: regular attacks, special moves, items - nothing here asks you to min-max a spreadsheet. The game includes a party-wipe safety net that lets you resume immediately from a defeat rather than reload a save, which keeps pacing tight and removes the punishing retry loops that make older RPGs feel dated. The flip side is that the combat system offers minimal mechanical depth. Build variety is not the point. If you come in looking for theorycrafting or class synergies, you will be disappointed. The game's replayability comes from elsewhere - hidden events, branching paths through towns, mini-games, and a secret final boss that gatekeeps the true ending. Clearing the main story runs under ten hours for a focused player, but chasing the full picture bumps that to around the mid-twenties. The community reception has been strong for a game this obscure - sitting north of 90% positive on Steam across nearly a hundred user reviews - and the praise is consistent: people love the tone, the pacing, and the fact that replaying it actually surfaces new jokes and hidden encounters rather than just grinding the same content. The late-game grind that some users flag is real but mild; this is not a game that asks you to farm random encounters for ten hours to unlock a door. Where it genuinely falls short for an RPG audience expecting narrative weight is in worldbuilding depth. The setting is a Chinese-inspired martial arts fantasy world that is fun but thin. Don't show up expecting lore documents or faction politics. The world is a stage for the characters to be funny on, and it mostly succeeds at that specific goal. For the retro RPG crowd, this is a straightforward recommendation - a brisk, witty, well-remastered curiosity that deserved a global audience thirty years ago and finally has one. For players who need build complexity or heavy narrative branching, it will feel slight. Go in with calibrated expectations and you will probably finish it twice.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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