Arcade Berg Game Designer

Good Design – Dialogue Selection

Once again; Suikoden Tierkreis shows some clever design choice. Konami's JRPG to the DS.

A very, very common problem with any games containing dialogue and dialogue options are that when you skip some lines you accidently make a selection of what to say in that conversation as well.

You know what I mean, you keep pressing A to skip the talk, either because you've heard/read it before or because it's just crap, but then all of a sudden you're presented with a number of options for you to choose among. By the time you realise this, you've already selected the first option, with no way to change that except for loading from an earlier save.

It happens to me all the time, most notable in Mass Effect.

It's a common problem, but really, it's not that difficult to solve.

The solution seen in Suikoden is that if you skip the talk with the action-button, once you arrive to a dialogue option screen, the game won't accept your input untill you've changed option at least once.

Let's say you're presented with two different options:

- Yes.
- No.

To answer No, you'll of course first have to press down once on the D-pad, then the action-button. To answer Yes, you'll have to first press down once to "activate" the option-marker, then up once to select Yes, followed by the action-button.

It might not be the sweatness of awesomeness, since it's three button presses to select the top option in which most games would have only required one. However, I have not once accidently chosen the wrong line! It's so worth it!

If you're skipping the conversation and making selections with the stylus on the touch screen, you're obligated to press twice in succession.

Good Design – Towns in JRPG

I was a big fan of Japanese RPG's during the SNES and Playstation-era, and somewhat during the last generation of consoles.

Today I don't nearly play them enough, mainly because I don't have the energy to invest that amount of time into one single game.

I was a Huge Suikoden and Suikoden II-fan. Suikoden II being one of my favorite games of all time. Therefore I've made sure to try out the new Suikoden game for the Nintendo DS; Suikoden Tierkreis.

An overall, what seems to be, good game. This far I've invested about 5 hours into it and I'm not bored yet.

One thing I greatly appreciate with this game is how it handles navigating in the cities. With menus! "Yuck", you might say. But I'm very pleased.

I hate running around in cities, villages and whatnot in games. The places where there's never any action. Sure, I admit that the very first time you visit a new town it can be exciting to run around in it and explore, but after that novelty wears off, it's just a plain bother to run around there, looking for the local weapon shop, inn and key-NPC.

In Tierkreis I just have a menu, with different choices depending on town and where you are in the story: Inn, Store, Alley, Town Hall, Exit Town, etc.

I say: Thank you!

This saves me both time and temper!

Suikoden Tierkreis (Konami)