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Recently I was lucky enough to find very good condition used copies of both Suikoden III and Suikoden Tactics at the local EB games. I picked them both up, and now I have a few questions.

Firstly, about how the games' stories relate to one another: am I going to be lost if I just started playing either of them? I've never played parts I and II, and they're apparently pretty rare and expensive, so I'd probably have to go look up a plot synopsis if they're heavily related. I'm particularly wondering about Tactics, as I've read in a few places that it is a sort of side story for Suikoden IV, which I don't really intend to hunt down and play because it doesn't seem to be nearly as well regarded as its fellows.

And secondly, just how good is Tactics? I picked it up mainly because I enjoy a well-made tactical RPG. Suikoden III seems to be highly praised, but reviews I've read of Tactics are somewhat mixed. Is it a good game, particularly considering that I'm not going to play IV?

I have one week to return one or both of these games for any reason if I so choose, so if someone could help, I'd be much obliged.

You won't need to have played 1 and 2 to play Tactics, though you'll probably want to play IV to know what's going on in that game, since Tactics' entire story is based around what happened in that game. Though, you'd probably be better off reading about IV's story online, since that game's aggresively mediocre. Don't know about Tactics' gameplay, since I haven't played it. Heard it was a pretty decent tactics game, though.

For III you're fine not playing any of them. The only thing you're missing is who the main villian is and how he relates and a few of the characters that show up as recruits. I enjoy III a whole lot, but a lot of people get annoyed at the "buddy system" that III has. Basically, you have six characters but can only input three commands. Lets say you have two characters set up in the first two-character slot and you want to cast magic. One casts and the other auto-attacks (normal attack) something. It's not such a bad thing, but it gets annoying when you cast AOE spells and the characters buddy goes running into the damage zone.

EDIT: Oh, yeah. If you have a save from II then some characters have higher level, some items and you can find plays depicting scenes from the first two games. Of course, since you haven't played them, it's not a big loss. Not like playing II without a save file from I.

Suikoden Tactics is an average game. It mixes the stuff of other existing tactic games in market but somehow just doesn't match up to any of them. Characters are recruited as the story moves along. You can send characters off to do "jobs" like Final Fantasy Tactics, move around in the map, fight random battles and story battles. Each character has elemental affinities and there elemental spirits thingys that move around in the battlefield affecting the tiles' elemental type as they move over them. Depending on your character's affinity, it can either be beneficial or harmful.

I found it the whole elemental thing too annoying to bother with and wished they hadn't put that in. I was something like 25% into the game, then I just moved on and never touched it again. I suppose it's not a bad game, if one has a lot of patience.