The Chinese PC version of Suikoden

I used to spend my college days randomly wandering around New York City's Chinatown, for it was one of the only place in the areas where you could find any number of Asian imported stuff. They had (and probably still have) racks and racks of Chinese RPGs, all for Windows, most of which I'd never heard of. A long time ago, I did remember seeing a version of Konami's Suikoden, but being a college student and therefore poor, I passed on it. But with the Suikoden article posted last month, it flooded back in my mind, and I tracked down a copy.

Although China has a reputation for bootlegs and hacks, this is in fact a legit product, and was also released in Japan. I'm not sure who ported it but it was definitely published by Konami, or at least under their license. It's a strange, strange port too. Instead of just directly porting the PSOne version over, they totally built it and designed it around the Windows interface. The main window is where all of the action takes place, and runs in the same 320x240 resolution as the PSOne game, so it's pretty small. Everything else - the dialogue, the menus, the battle commands - each take up their own window, where you can select them via the mouse. You can also move your character with the keyboard or by pointing and clicking. I'd heard rumors that the graphics were redrawn in a higher resolution, but this isn't true, because the visuals and even the sound are more or less identical to the PSOne game. (Please forgive the gibberish in the pictures - I have Japanese language support installed but not Chinese.)


There also appears to have been a Windows port of Suikoden II. I found an ISO of it, but I couldn't get it working on my computer. It is official - Konami logos are everywhere - and it must be pretty recent, because it requires DirectX9.

Anyway, I've also taken the opportunity to tweak the Suikoden article again, which was admittedly a bit messy when it was initially published. It's probably still not perfect, but at least it's better.