Suikoden Part #10 - Odessa Castle, ROTC Office

Part 10: Odessa Castle, ROTC Office

Don't believe Kraze's lies!

Mathiu: Let's designate this day the New Liberation Army's Foundation Day.

Viktor: Great idea! Let's have a banquet tonight!

Camille: Hey, what about my money?

Tai Ho: Don't be a bore, young lady. We'll talk about that later.

Leknaat: I have brought you gifts. One of them is this. Please accept it.

Leknaat: Your true power comes from the colleagues with whom you share your ideals. So go and find fellow soldiers-in-arms. The names of your new friends will be carved into this Tablet. The other gift is...

Yup, we get Luc here. He's one of the best magicians in the game, and is pretty much THE best until the very last recruit in the game. Also of note is that when he calls upon his Wind Rune earlier in the game, it was supposed to say “True Wind Rune”. We'll explore the importance of that in the games to come.

Leknaat: His power should be of use to the Liberation Army. Miles, history has only just begun to move. Keep your spirits high. Let us meet again someday.

Gremio: I'm absolutely sure Lady Leknaat just got rid of a troublesome burden.

Cleo: … Yeah... I guess so.

Mathiu: Now is the time to find recruits. In other words, recruit fellow comrades-in-arms. A fellow by the name of Lepant is in the town of Kouan. Let's recruit him. He's sure to be useful.

Suikoden Tunes – Island Fortress, HQ Theme #1

Be prepared to see Gremio appear a lot after every story event. Like most constant characters in the series, he will greet you upon waking up, and the party you had before the story event will have split off to populate the castle.

Every character gets a stock line they will always, always utter inside the castle, barring a few exceptions. This is the only thing Cleo will say for a very long time.

Luc gets his own room, along with his buddy the Stone Tablet of Promise. By talking to him, we can view our Stars.

By clicking on each of the Stars, you can view a character's stats. If, however, the character is not usable in battle (such as Mathiu), you'll just get his/her/its portrait, the Star he/she/it falls under, and “-” where all his/her/its stats would be.

Mathiu: If you tell him that you come with my introduction, he's sure to join up with you.

Viktor and Cleo force themselves on us for this mission, leaving us with two open spots. We'll fill them, temporarily, with Tai Ho and another character but we're about to get some very, very terrible characters soon.

Mathiu is the party exchange dude. We can view all our battle characters here. As you can notice, Yam Koo joined, too. He joins automatically following the acquisition of a castle. He's much less powerful than his brother, but they have a Unite attack, which makes them a little more interesting.

The castle expands as we acquire new recruits, with a certain amount of recruits opening up a whole new floor to the place. Right now we only have just two floors, with the basement being the docks and such. However, it's not the ACTUAL basement as we have a dungeon further down from that.

Camille just kinda dicks around downstairs for now. Anyway, let's go get recruits.

Where the Dragon Zombie used to be, there's now a statue. Awesome.

Tai Ho and Yam Koo usually stay in the shack by the docks, but since they're with us it's empty right now.

Suikoden Tunes – Blues Oceans, Blue Skies

Welcome to the wide open sea. There is literally nothing to visit right now since we have a dinky ass boat and nothing to really check out. There are no enemy encounters out at sea. That will change in a later installment of the series.

We can visit the fort of Shasarazade, but there's nothing to do here for another twenty-five hours. One thing to note about the Suikoden series is that there is rarely, if any, optional places. Every location on the map is usually a place you are required to visit at least once for the story. I like that. It keeps things tight-knit.

Sergei: What, you? You're the leader of the Liberation Army? Of course, of course I'll help you! A liberating invention needs a liberated world.

Recruits often flip-flop between joining your party right away to leaving to go back to your castle. This is all dependent on what role they serve and/or if they are useful in the plot. Sergei is a battle character, and yes, we will be using the fuck out of his uselessness.

Gaspar is down here, and he plays Chinchirorin, but we can't recruit him to play him for some time. Also, thanks to the fact that Marco is in Rockland and Tai Ho's dice game went away with him, we have no way to extort rapid amounts of funds for a long time. So abuse Marco's game while you can.

Cleo picked up a cast of the level 3 Fire spell, Dancing Flames. It does ludicrous amounts of damage right now.

Marie: Of course, I'm not a warrior, but I can give your soldiers a bowl of soup if they need one. Please, Miles.

Marie is our castle's inn. Note that while it seems like she provides a free Inn, she doesn't. Rather, she provides the cheapest Inn in the game, equivalent to spending a night in Rockland.

Old Onil here knows everything. I also know that the Liberation Army is short of people. Maybe I should give you a hand.

Onil is probably the most functionally useless character in the game. She does, however, occasionally provide interesting insight on either characters or events of the time, so it may be worth it to check in on her every now and again.

Chandler, from Friends, is our item shop. To get him to have new items, simply visit every item shop you come across in the game, and you'll fill up in his inventory that way. The same is true for the armor shop down the line as well, so make sure to always check in.

This is the Fisherman attack, a Unite that combines Tai Ho and Yam Koo's attack power. It does, however, leave both of them Unbalanced. Use it wisely.

Thanks to Sergei, we now have a working elevator. There are elevators in every HQ in every Suikoden game, or something equivalent to it, to make moving between floors easy.

To acquire another recruit in Seika, we need to talk to Marie until she says this. I got it on my first try, it usually takes a few more tries.

As you can see, Sergei is fucking terrible. Perfect for our Terrible Party.

Sergei uses a wrench that gains attack power like molasses. Awesome.

Antonio joins us on behalf of Marie's request. He's pretty bad in battle, but not as bad as you might think. He uses a frying pan, as you'd expect. He also has a Unite with another cook we'll meet later.

Our travels then take us far south of Kaku, and southeast of Kouan, to the town of Great Forest (which is actually Forest Village).

Maas here, who has like fifty million brothers who all look the same but have different colored outfits, is the first of the many blacksmiths we meet in the game. Maas here can only sharpen weapons to level 5, or the same level as Kaku. Either way, it's helpful. He wants to join so he can be a politician, I guess, but fuck that I'm keeping him in the armory.

Sansuke is also here, and he opens up the castle bath. We'll explore the bath after the Kouan arc, since he will be joining us in battle because he is just as bad if not worse than Sergei.

Great Forest's item shop has an upstairs floor. There's goodies up there, we'll be sure to find them later on. We don't have all the requirements for it, but expect cool shit (like a battle arena!).

Its item shop sells Mega medicines, the best healing item in the game. We have few reasons to carry these right now, aside from Viktor, who has mountains of HP right now (364, and he's only level 18).

There's a forest next door to the town, but we can't really get through it yet unless we had an Elf in our party, and where the fuck would we find those? It's a good place to levelgrind, though.

As you can see, Sergei is shit. He has pretty good defensive growth, but his attack strength is equivalent to a mage, while simultaneously not being a mage. He's also slow as fucking shit. So of course he's going to stay!

West of Kouan is the Fortress of Garan, whose plot importance won't be ascertained until much later, but there is a man here we can acquire.

Kai is Miles' old quarterstaff instructor.

Kai: I heard about you, Miles. You're leading the Liberation Army. No, I'm not criticizing you, it's the path you're choosing. Nevertheless, what will old Teo think? All right, old Kai will join you. The Master Stickfighter is as good as 100 men. Ha ha ha!

Kai is fantastic. He joins us at level 21 with a weapon similar to Miles' that is sharpened to level 8, and has a Unite with the main character called the Master Pupil attack. This attack hits all enemies and does an amount of damage equivalent to both character's Attack combined, and it breaks the game in half. Because of this, we will never ever ever ever ever use him.

Sansuke is similar to Sergei except that he has paper-thin defense and uses a saw as a weapon. He's a keeper alright.

Say hello to our party at the moment: An elevator inventor, a rebel beast man, a bathhouse owner, two legal guardians, and our main character.

also, Sansuke looks super hilarious when he attacks enemies

Kouan has an appraiser, and every now and again you'll get lucky with enemy drops and get expensive items to sell, such as the Peeing Boy statue for 16,000 bits.