Can't believe I forgot this little underrated gem on the SNES (think it was on Genesis too?). It was based off the War of the Roses, quite unusual for Koei's usual focus on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or Feudal Japan.
Gonna disagree with you on Suikoden III though, Fluent. I thought the main combat system was the best in the series. Pairing characters up made things a little more interesting, and tactical. You could only use 3 Runes per turn, instead of unleashing a fusillade of your best attacks to take things out immediately. Plus, depending on a character's title, they could swap spots with their partner who was about to be attacked and take a hit for them. Multiple swings and continual attack (and movement playing a role in terms of turn length) were great additions that for some reason didn't remain for future titles.
S3 also had the series' best rendition of Strategy battles. War in S1 and S2 felt like shallow copies of Gemfire. S3 made you level, and customize most of your characters, or you would get absolutely steamrolled in the late-game war battles. Finally, S3 had Geddoe. Not even Viktor could touch Geddoe's badassery.
Cool KOEI game. Didn't understand them at all as a kid but now they are very interesting to play for me.
I actually agree that Suikoden III's various combat systems are the best in the series, or at least, my favorite. But what I'm basically saying is that I wish there was a higher degree of challenge to the combat overall. Not that the other games in the series were particularly hard or anything, I just would have liked to have seen more challenge or a higher difficulty setting or something. But I do agree with everything you said. Although I did like the Duals and Wargame Strategy sections of the first Suikoden a lot as well, too. You could get steamrolled in those battles too, including the Duels if you hadn't leveled up the person who was going to be dueling. I thought it was so cool as a kid when I discovered that mechanic and saved the life of a character by leveling him up before the duel. Characters could permanently die in the first Suikoden game in various ways, which was also interesting. You could even kill off some characters for good, which I didn't really see the point of at the time since otherwise you can just add them to your group. The strategy wars in the first Suikoden also varied based on how leveled your characters were and how many you had recruited total. When you had all 108 characters + high levels for all (as I did, grinding away on my PS1 and loving every minute of it
), your wars were won easily to say the least.
Loved the "gotta find 'em all!" element to recruiting characters in that entire series as well. Suikoden 1 & 2 did it in a slick way, since they were 2D/overhead perspectives, they would hide some characters in certain spots, such as a tricky place for you to get the camera to reach, or behind something in the background, etc. Very cool idea for the 2D engine they were using. Also loved in the first game and to an extent the 3rd of trying all sorts of different characters together to find the affinity/combo attacks. It would be so sick if the game offered some sort of mega-dungeons or something where you could grind tougher enemies and what not, while exploring a really cool dungeon. Suikoden 3 lacked a bit in dungeons overall, but it did add a neat feature in which you could visit the same dungeons in various chapters or whenever you had the opportunity to explore the entire map, and they would have different, tougher enemies in them, a new/tougher boss and possibly another chest with dope loot to plunder.
Really wish they made a new Suikoden game. Suikoden Tactics seems very interesting as well, but Suikoden was dope, man.
Edit - And again forgot to mention a crazy element of those games, the base building. Recruit NPCs, shopkeepers, fortune tellers, etc., and your home base would develop based on who you recruited. It would get larger, new areas would be added, new mini-games, shops, etc. etc. Whoever came up with the ideas behind that game is a genius. No other RPGs back then were really doing anything like that that I had played up to that point.