You'll need as many of Suikoden II’s 108 allies as you can gather to overcome Luca Blight
07.03.2025
Di Francisco Dominguez, Contributor
There are many reasons the game deserves its reputation as an underappreciated gem. It built on the original’s six character party turn-based format, adding mechanical depth and customization and expanding its wargaming Fire Emblem-esque strategy battles. The second game's story has even more emotional heft than the first: It's the poignant tale of comrades-in-arms Riou and Jowy finding a path to broker peace after a painful betrayal.
But what truly sets it apart is Suikoden II’s notorious villain, Prince Luca Blight, a force of nature who is secretly one of the greatest villains of the PS1's console generation.
The heir to the throne of Highland is an imposing figure. He's a tyrant in the making, quick to anger or to kill. Clad in gold-trimmed plate armor, a regal royal blue cape flutters behind him with every imperious step. He’ll murder a child without a second thought. He’ll force a survivor into squealing like a pig for his amusement, promising mercy before executing her anyway. From the very beginning this heartless monster, more demon than man, has you firmly on the back foot.
The game starts with protagonist Riou and his companion Jowy together as members of the Highland Youth Brigade. Their unit is ambushed, not by enemies, but by their own Prince’s forces. With his army disguised under the banner of the neighboring City-States of Jowston, this shocking false flag operation is designed to stoke outrage, pinning the unprovoked slaughter of the nation’s youngest soldiers on another state to justify a long-planned invasion.
Cornered in this fateful assault, your only way out is flinging yourself from a waterfall in a desperate bid for survival. Now framed as traitors and barely escaping the hangman, you arrive at the beginning of a slow and bitterly fought resistance, one that commences with failure after failure, with you visiting one ruined town after another. You desperately seek to convince prospective allies to defy the evidence, in the form of the piles of corpses he creates, that resisting Luca Blight is futile.
The Prince you’ll learn to loathe casts a deep shadow, even in long stretches before he’s back at the frontline. He’s the source of a relentless sense of drama and threat in a military plot of grand strategy and geopolitics. In the strategy battles, he and his White Wolf Guard far outclass all others. You survive encounters with Luca Blight by fortune and your wits, not capability—one time you cross swords with him, Riou and Jowy are flung aside like pebbles. Even Luca Blight’s half-sister Jillian is powerless to stop him, or even curb his cruellest excesses.
Yet you persist, collecting up to 108 new recruits in your travels. Some come easily, like Viktor, the charismatic mercenary leader who itches to join the fray; others less so. Out of the impressively eclectic number of sidequests and minigames, you can seek a unicorn to complete a town’s traditional ritual and win a town elder’s allegiance, a quest that leads you to adding Siegfried the unicorn to your forces (as long as your party includes “a fair maiden”). Elsewhere, you can play Tai Ho at a high-stakes game of dice to win his crew, challenge Amada the fisherman to a dockside duel, or trade your way into a merchant’s lucre-loving heart.
You’d be wise to collect as many allies as you can. To turn the tide, you’ll need every one of them.
As your forces in the stronghold of Dunan Castle continue to swell, its facilities are enhanced by waves of recruits gained by your hand. Your feeble initial resistance was swatted aside, but now hope can take root. Your six-character party encourages you to learn to use and level up a variety of characters and exploit different formations in turn-based random battles. You’ll never be stronger than Luca Blight, but you might become smarter, better-drilled, and better-equipped through your Rune selection and refined party composition. It takes not a village, but practically an entire city to form a unified force capable of standing against Luca Blight’s relentless hate and ambition.
Just one month before Suikoden II came out in Japan in 1998, George R.R. Martin’s Clash of Kings introduced the sadist Ramsay Bolton. Just like Game of Thrones pulls inspiration from the War of the Roses, the Suikoden series also draws from history for a villain players love to hate: in Suikoden II’s case, it recreates the tale of two rival Chinese generals, Xiang Yu and Liu Bang.
Late series creator Yoshitaka Murayama split the now-legendary Xiang Yu’s personality across two characters. While Jowy reflects Xiang Yu’s compassion and diplomacy, Luca Blight embodies the famous general's notorious cruelty. Untrusting even in victory, Xiang Yu was reputed to have ordered the deaths of 200,000 Qin soldiers by live burial. In the end, it took three armies combined to outmaneuver and vanquish him in a famous battle that established 400 years of the Han dynasty. Even then, no warrior could claim his life—not before he took it himself, after slaying an entire platoon first.
Luca Blight is every bit as larger-than-life as his historical predecessor, who still enjoys renown thousands of years later. Many RPGs use the multi-stage battle as a way to create a challenge for players, extending a boss fight with a surprise second (or even third) act to up the difficulty. Suikoden II ingeniously flips that concept on its head. When it comes to Luca Blight, you're his multi-stage battle. At one point, it’ll take not one, not two, but three fully equipped teams of six characters in a masterfully planned woodland ambush to even have the faintest hope of thwarting his plans.
Though the odds are stacked against him, your chances remain poised precariously on a knife edge in one of the best set pieces of the PlayStation generation—genuinely a sequence to rival the drama of that twist in Final Fantasy VII, the thrill of watching Grey Fox take on a mech in Metal Gear Solid, and the shock of getting pounced on by a zombie dog in Resident Evil.
Just like Xiang Yu, or those damn zombie dogs in Spencer Mansion, Luca Blight won’t go down without a bitter fight. It’s on you and your allies to prove that this demon in human form is mortal after all. And, again just like Xiang Yu, Luca Blight’s fate is a story that deserves its place in history.
Suikoden I&II HD Remaster Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars is out now on the Epic Games Store.