yeso Re: III, I played it through once shortly after it came out and at the time I was mad about it being in polygons and not having any Miki Higashino music. As it turns out (and as it turned out for Murayama shortly thereafter I think), she wanted to have a normal life and not work 100-hour weeks so I get it now ha ha. I tried replaying a few years back and I really think the music is like actually bad, and also I was trying to play it in Japanese and it was too hard for me so I stalled out. I’m trying to get to it again especially before Eiyuuden comes out.
fridgeboy II has so many neat characters and nearly everyone has someone they gravitate toward. Some are “better” than others but the game is easy enough, and leveling happens so fast, that really anyone is viable at any time. It’s also just very interesting as an example of a game that zigged when everything else zagged toward 3D. It still looks incredible, obviously, when so many early polygon games now look terrible, but the 2D also means there’s almost zero loading, making it super playable now. As a whole the game just feels very fast. Relatively low encounter rate in most areas, auto battle feature, characters attack simultaneously rather than in turn, magic that lets you instantly kill enemies, etc. It’s night and day compared with something like FFIX which is almost painfully slow in a modern context. Something of a look at what might have been had polygons not happened.
Anyway I’m going to start a Suikoden thread to avoid derailing this one further