@ami_angelwings

i feel like mass effect partly reinvented what suikoden was doing much earlier with the large cast of missable characters and branching choice structure. writing and directing that kind of game is certainly really difficult, but suikoden 2 and suikoden 5 especially were pretty compelling.

anime endings often do something with a similar catharsis, at the end, so there's something fundamental about the kind of story the suikoden series featured that works, but it's probably also a bit depressing to carefully write a bunch of long tail narrative scenarios that most probably will never play through (visual novels invert this by making discovery of the ending scenarios its own reward).

i do wonder if rpgs as a whole would be a lot different now if suikoden ii had hit just a bit better.