The developers behind the upcoming remasters of Suikoden 1 and 2 are apparently hoping to make even more entries in this beloved franchise going forward. The last full entry in the series came out on February 23, 2006 and the most recent spinoff was released on February 9, 2012. Suikoden is primarily inspired by the Chinese novel Water Margin, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh. The classic follows a group of 108 heroes who rebel against a corrupt government, reflected in Suikoden by the 108 Stars of Destiny, characters who band together to fight off a common enemy.
The news comes from a recent interview by IGN at the Tokyo Game Show. “I can’t say anything specific right now, but we didn’t really want to have an end with just the remaster,” developer at Konami Yasuo Daikai said. “I would really like to keep making more Suikoden games in the future. So, we hope all of our fans will root for us and support us and we hope that we can deliver on those promises and you guys can enjoy them.”
While the possibility of another entry in the series remains uncertain, fans of the franchise can take heart with the knowledge that Konami is finally revisiting Suikoden, ending a nearly decade long silence. The company has been furnishing some of its older franchises with elaborate retro collections, Castlevania and Contra for example. Rumors have also been making the rounds to the effect that multiple Silent Hill games could be in the works.
"When you think of Konami’s roleplaying games, you think of Suikoden," Daikai remarked. "It has a lot of fans and it’s a really good product, so from here on out, we want to make sure that lots of people are able to interact with the series that we’ve made.”
This comes in the wake of news that both remasters will be receiving completely overhauled localization. The original games were famously flawed in this regard, featuring a bevy of translation errors and even garbled sentences. According to Daikai, the problems mostly had to do with the small size of the dialog boxes. “Initially, for the original games, the size of the dialog box was quite small and there wasn’t a lot that we could fit in there,” Daikai pointed out. “Japanese is a language that can say a lot in a very short amount of space, but for English and other languages, you need a lot of space to say the same thing, usually. So, in this game, we have expanded the size of those dialog boxes and that has let us retool and work on the localization to get us more in tune with the Japanese script.”