Suikoden Part #14 - Battle at Pannu Yakuta Castle

Part 14: Battle at Pannu Yakuta Castle

Fights down here mostly consist of people from the show Red Dwarf and palette-swapped robots.

4/20 erryday, thanks Gremio and Pahn! As you can see, level 9 weapons help a lot. Even our buddy Krin can do some decent damage.

And Valeria can one-shot anyone down here now with her Falcon Rune. If she's doing anything besides using her Falcon Rune, you're using her wrong.

A lever puzzle, joy. Basically, you need to flip the switches such that you can make it to the chest and the other side.

This is the Rune I usually put on Gremio, considering his constant presence. The Sunbeam Rune recovers HP per step, and in later games, recovers HP per turn in battle. This Rune is present in all five main titles and Tactics.

if you were too poor to get some back in the Village of the Elves, you can find one in this out of the way chest.

Not much to say here. The platforms are easy to figure out.

The tablet gives you an idea of what sound you need to make to get past the door. The button presses sound like dial signals on a phone. If you do it wrong, the puzzle resets, so you can figure it out.

Gigantes is the guy who guards the Running Water Root from us. He's nothing too bad, although like most big bosses in this game, he can hit all of our party very easily.

That's his all-party move, and it's not particularly dangerous to anyone who isn't Krin.

Strategy: Hit. Hit him over and over. Never stop. His physical defense is really low so even Krin is hitting for over 100 damage.

The game gives you an Escape talisman before you fight Gigantes, so use it.

Chief: As you said, the Burning Mirror is a terrible weapon. But it can be blown to pieces using another of our treasures, the Firewind Cannon. I'll have one built for you right away.

We have nothing else to do in the Village of the Dwarves for the rest of the entire game. Seriously. Unless you couldn't recruit Meese, there's nothing left to do here now.

Upon seeing the wildfire that used to be his home, Kirkis is so blown away he must utter something totally nonsensical and probably best suited to a narrator, like myself

So instead he opts for a one-liner of surprise and shock, terrified awe!

That looks like a shriveled, dead tree alright.

Suikoden Tunes – Theme of Sadness ~ Ensemble Version

Oh that Kwanda Rosman, what a dick

Valeria: Our efforts were...

Kirkis: But why, Master Miles? What good were our efforts? Why did this happen? I was insulted and abused, but I fought on. And yet... yet...

Kirkis: Now this ring has no hand to adorn. It's useless now.

Gremio: With just a little bit of hope, you can survive. That goes for humans as well as elves. Young Master, we must return to the castle immediately. We cannot let this tragedy repeat itself. Let's defeat Kwanda Rosman's army and destroy the Burning Mirror. That is our only deliverance.

Returning to the burnt village after this scene makes Templeton show up. It's important that you find him, he's an important recruit.

He gives us the world map, which is going to be very handy for the rest of ever.

Red is where we are, white is possible locations for us to enter. Which you can't really tell from this screenshot because they flash on the world map, and I caught this shot at the wrong time.

Kuromimi got himself caught up in a little situation.

Gremio: V-Valeria, by law traitors are put to death.

Valeria: The Burning Mirror must be destroyed. That can't be done if we all die here. The Liberation Army cannot afford to lose its leader. A leader must stay alive. That's why...

I'm not letting her be dumb. No.

But she'll leave the party no matter what.

IN A SHOCKING SHYAMAMALALAMAN TWIST

Valeria:What?! You just swore to god.

This guy is a goon's best friend

Luckily, our kobold buddy joins in the fight. Guess where he gets put...

in the motherfucking BACK ROW. AND HE HAS AN S-RANGE SWORD

I oughta take you out back like Old Yeller

Thankfully, Mathiu comes at the just the nick of time.

It appears Sylvina told Mathiu about what's going on, thanks to quick-on-his-feet Stallion

We'll go into the silly goof they made about Stallion soon.

Sprite quality! Yeah! Gremio gives Kirkis back the ring, but doesn't get the chance to tell Sylvina about it, just yet.

LET'S

FUCKIN

DO THIS

God I fucking love this game.

Suikoden Tunes – War! ~ Collision (must listen)

I cannot express how much I fucking love war battles in the first Suikoden. The epic theme, the simplistic nature of it all, the EPICNESS.

War battles in Suikoden work on a RockPaperScissors system. Charge beats Bow, Bow beats Magic, Magic beats Charge. There's also the Others, which I'll explain first.

The Merchants we acquire can (sometimes) make enemies come over to our side. It doesn't work very often at the moment.

One of our little guys goes over and tries to talk smack about the Empire. However, the reason it did not work this time is because we cannot acquire troops over the max we have available to us during any given war battle, and THAT number is determined by how many Stars of Destiny we have at the time. So, you should use this if you happen to misread an enemy's tactics and need some more troops.

Our strategists, which at the moment is just Mathiu, can boost the power of Charge attacks for one round. This is very useful when we have the chance to use it.

It also has another of our wonderful Mathiu Mistranslations.

We can also try and guess what the enemy's next attack will be. This isn't incredibly useful since neither Krin or Giovanni are very good at this. Sometimes, though, when they fail, they'll come back with some bits they stole. And even when they do succeed they'll follow their guess with a “maybe”.

When Krin is super sure about what's going to happen, we can trust him on it. Kwanda's Attack is a Charge move, so we want to use Magic.

Currently we have access to Children of the Runes, headed by Luc, and Magicians, headed by Viki.

This is again another instance where Luc should have said “True Wind Rune”. It knocks 3,800 soldiers off of their roster.

Since Giovanni failed in guessing their next move, it's generally safe to use a Bow attack, since even if the enemy charges, you'll still fight back. You'll still get hit, but you'll also do damage. We currently have access to Soldier Beauties, Forest Protectors (w/ Kirkis), Cooks (Antonio, Rock), Engineers (Sergei, Templeton), and Kobolds (Kuromimi).

Yup, it appears they charged. We lost quite a few, but so did they.

We're gonna bumrush them next, and the Charge category tends to have the most parties available all the time. The strongest will, for most of the game, be the Commander's Team, but we also have the Lepant Family (Lepant, Eileen, and character I forgot to recruit), Bandits (Varkas, Sydonia), Fishermen (Tai Ho, Yam Koo), Humphrey's Team (Humphrey), Good Buddies (Marie, Onil, Sansuke), Invulnerable Defense (Gaspar), Viktor's Team (Viktor), Old Soldiers (Kai), Former Imperial Team (Valeria), Black Golds (Maas, Meese), and Tricksters (Juppo, Meg).

But then I remembered... Kwanda's a very predictable foe. In fact, once you find out the order of attacks an enemy uses, you can reload a save beforehand and their AI will not change; it comes hardcoded into every new playthrough. I had a feeling he was going to use magic, which would have been very bad if we had charged here.