#suikoden i art

[scyanako]

Can't wait for the Suikoden remasters! Then I get to see these two again 😊

[108stars]

he is so small........

[nero-draco]

[bleatroot]

me & a friend have been playing suikoden for (my) first time since sometime last year. beautiful and silly and beautiful.

[clawsou]

Gadgets for Suikovember 2023.

[zentendo]

Konami Unleashes a Double Dose of Nostalgia: Felix & Rocket Knight Return!

Get ready to swing your magic bag and strap on your rocket pack, because two beloved Konami classics are making a glorious comeback! Felix the Cat and Rocket Knight Adventures are gearing up for a modern revival, bringing back charming pixelated platforming for a whole new generation (and rekindling some serious nostalgia for the rest of us). Both collections will land on Nintendo Switch,…

[ramenheim]

WIP reverse-only sneaky-peak:

[daily-rayless]

20 years on

It's about twenty years since I first played Suikoden III in early 2003. So I have to talk about Geddoe.

July 2003 – I think this might be the first time I tried to draw him.

If you knew me from 2003 to 2005, you've already heard me talk about Geddoe, and sorry about that. While he wasn't my favorite when I first played S3, he's since become my favorite character out of any game. Here’s why.

June 2004. I tend to draw Queen more than Geddoe, but he's still the favorite.

I don't know that he's the best written character, but sometimes a character just lands in your brain right and stays there.

October 2004. Another thing about Geddoe is that very often, especially back then, I never felt like I got him right.

I think there's a number of factors for why. He's not a typical JRPG protagonist. He's in his thirties. He's seen the world, and he's tired.

April 2005. This was the first time I felt like I actually got him.

He believes in justice, sure, but as circumstances go, he often turns a blind eye to the dark realities he knows he can't change just by objecting. He has the loyalty of his teammates, but he's not exactly charismatic.

June 2005

He can be pushed into making big dramatic speeches, but most often he leads from behind, waiting until other people have blustered and argued and had their say, then quietly doing the thing he was going to do anyway. Sometimes he waits too long and things go wrong, and he copes with minimal complaint.

November 2006

He seems unchanging, unflappable, but we see him defeated. Then we see him pick himself up.

May 2008

As tired and detached as he is, he's still an idealist. He's worn down by his duty, but he doesn't give it up because he can't accept the alternative. Who else would he ask to step in?

October 2009. That's Emilia from Yggdra Union because it was part of a meme.

He won't plead with you to try to save you. He'll tell you you're wrong, and he won't feel guilty for knocking down what you placed your faith in.

July 2011

I just really like how he ignores so many of these young, wide-eyed seventeen-year-olds who believe they can fix the world with a speech and stopping one bad guy tropes.

2012?

He's mature, thoughtful, grim, but not cynical.

February 2013

There's a passion there, sharp words and a well-timed punch (you know the scene), even if it takes a lot to bring it boiling up to the surface.

June 2014. Accompanied by Elza (Suikoden II) and Asch (Tales of the Abyss) for another meme.

And while he's not warm, you can tell he really loves his mercenary team – and at times is surprised by how much they love him back. Because they're not a demonstrative group. The whole Twelfth Unit has a special place in my heart.

November 2019

But the GeddoeQueen dynamic, whether you read it as platonic or romantic, is one of my favorites because it's so quiet, so strong – there's such a sense of them complementing each others' needs without making any sort of big deal about it.

May 2020

Geddoe doesn't want to make his problems yours, but he finds himself grateful when he has to depend on you. He won't smile and promise you it'll be all right, far less promise it to himself. But he won't give up either. He'll lead your army, but he'd much rather be hidden away in a back room, quietly drinking with people who know they don't have to make small talk. He's seen it all, and he's telling you nothing.

December 2022

I wouldn't be surprised if, twenty years from now, he's still my favorite.

February 2023

[scribblewing]

So way back I made a chibi Sararai had planned on making a Luc to match.

I got as far as finishing the lineart, then left it to sit in my folders for 3 years. It’s done now.

[motherfactorin-pi-face]

As someone whose veritable fandom curse is that I seem to be almost a Bide-A-Wee Home of Wayward Small Fandoms...yeah, I felt this one, metaphysically :D Actual true thing--one of the more obscure fandoms I still follow (Breath of Fire) had a fairly prolific Japanese fanartist creating art for Breath of Fire IV and Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter (the last game of which resulted in a sufficiently Broken Base that the series has been moribund outside of Japan since 2005, so you had to HUNT for BOF:DQ art in particular). Said fanartist...is also responsible for Hatoful Boyfriend. Yes, the high school dating sim where you are dating uplifted, sentient pigeons. Which turns out to be a *post-apocalyptic* dating sim where you are dating sentient pigeons. And goddamnit, we were GLAD for any fan content or other content at all

in small fandoms you need to be grateful to the person who only accidentally hit you twice with a frying pan while trying to make you breakfast. in big fandoms you can block people for wearing a shirt you don’t like

[scyanako]

Tir McDohl ✨

[satoshi-mochida]

Suikoden I & II HD Remaster: Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars adds PS5 and Xbox Series versions, launches March 6, 2025 - Gematsu

Suikoden I & II HD Remaster: Gate Rune and Dunan Unification Wars will launch for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC via Steam on March 6, 2025, Konami announced. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series versions are newly announced.

Digital pre-orders are available now for all platforms except Switch, which will begin pre-orders on September 6. Physical edition pre-orders will begin on August 28.

The following downloadable content is included with pre-orders for the digital edition:

57,300 potch – In-game currency

Fortune Orb – Doubles the experience gained by the character that bears it.

Prosperity Orb – Doubles the “potch” gained when winning a battle with the character that bears it.

Here is an overview of the collection, via Konami:

About

A hero’s destiny is written in the Stars. The legendary Konami JRPGs Suikoden I and Suikoden II have now been remastered in high-definition!

The Story of Suikoden I

A once renowned hero turns into a violent tyrant, and an empire falls into decline. A Liberation Army is rising up in an act of rebellion against an oppressive rule. One by one the 108 stars of Destiny gather to shape the course of history.

The Story of Suikoden II

Our story’s hero and his friend Jowy are members of the Unicorn Youth Brigade, which participated in a drawn-out border dispute between the Highland Kingdom and the City-States of Jowstown. A few months earlier, a truth agreement was signed between the two forces, both of which were happy to see an end to the fighting. However, hidden under the momentary peace the fires of a new war continued to smolder…

Key Features

-Graphical Improvements

Pixel sprites and environment art enhanced with new screen effects including lighting, clouds, and shadow animations Flickering flames, smoldering smoke, the movement of leaves and insects, all add up to a lively in-game atmosphere!

The effects and direction have been redesigned, bringing memorable scenes back to life in more beautiful ways!

-New Character Drawings

All character portraits have been updated in HD. Junko Kawano, who designed the characters for the original version of Suikoden released in 1995, has newly re-drawn all the character portraits for Suikoden I HD Remaster: Gate Rune War.

-Sound Improvements

Field Sound – A large number of environmental sounds not found in the original version, such as the sound of running water in the river, wind, insects, and running footsteps, have been added. You can enjoy an immersive experience like never before!

Battle Sound – All sound effects are now in HD. In addition to the impact of the 3D effects, the realistic sound greatly enhances the dynamism of the battles!

-Game System Improvements

Many new features have been added, such as dialogue log, auto-battle, double-speed battles, etc.

Watch a new trailer below.

Release Date Trailer

English

Japanese

[quinloki]

My preliminary 2025 Plan

Please note, anything can happen.

Overall:

- start an illustrated kink series. I want to do more art and tying it (heh) to drabbles will help

- tie off Just Like Fire, and Heart of Gold. If the gods are merciful I’ll tie off Mythological Christmas, Hey Doll, and The Dragon— actually no, that one is gonna be BIG.

- be more chill with shorter long form and maybe cut some of the titles I’ve been struggling with short so that I can just focus on the The Point and move on. ( I’m thinking the Honeysuckle series will be a short stories series so I can take some pressure off the idea).

- start Split Ends - a series of good stories gone bad where I write dark endings to my otherwise fluffy titles. (Or good ends to any dark/sad ends)

- Average 42k/month so I can hit a personal goal of 500k+ words by the end of the year.

- have the Host Club AU series as my main focus

- More OC/Selfship appreciation, and work from me too. I need to give Quill more love.

By month:

Jan: two-year tumblrversary celebration event.

Feb: >.> maybe some variety of Match Maker drabbles for people and/or their OCs

March: fucknowrimo 2.0 (this is also when the Suikoden remaster drops and gods have mercy on my soul).

April: Roped In - a writing collaboration event! Details in January - people should have a solid 60-90 days to write their pieces for this MULTI-FANDOM event \o/

May: One Piece Kinky Head Canons v 2.0 (y’all are gonna bury me I know it.)

July: Birthday bash celebration \o/

October: Kinktober

And that’s it so far. (I say like that’s not enough lol)

[maiji]

Side effect of getting nostalgic about Star Ocean 2 and going through my old fanfics, I also went through my old Suikoden V fanworks.

I posted the entire fancomic "perhaps." here if you'd like to read it!

I also finished a fic draft I started in 2012 about Shoon that was never posted anywhere! This is a missing scene story based on what happens if you choose to lose the Sacred Games' Ceremonial Match!

It's been a very productive week, haha.

omg you guys. I was reorganizing art storage last night (Now Recharging pages were getting outta control) and dug up extra printed pages of my mini Suikoden V doujinshi, perhaps., from like 10 years ago. I reread it and got so sad over the story lmaoooo. In Suikoden I, one of the recruitable characters is a blind martial artist named Morgan who comes from the Queendom of Falena. In Suikoden V, which takes place before Suiko I, you’re in that queendom when you meet a young gladiator slave named Shoon and he mentions that he had a friend who was a good at fighting and they blinded him and shipped him off to another country and you’re like HEY I KNOW WHO THAT IS!!! Anyways this was a short story about them.

I’m going to reprint covers and finish these little books. The original (which you can see in my hand) used a cool translucent paper for a layered effect on the cover and was handstitched with sea green thread, but I don’t have those materials anymore. So I’ll print an image of the overlaid cover and use turquoise staples. 😂 #comics #doujinshi #suikoden https://www.instagram.com/p/BuOnY7qhh1Y/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=bvyggk73hqqe

[cookiekurimu]

Happy Suikovember!!!

This year, I challenge myself to redraw the official illustrations of Suikoden characters for the first two weeks! Here are the entries of the first week. Is there any of your favorite character? :3

art by cookie

[ryin-silverfish]

Keisei Suikoden: Genderbent Water Margins

This is probably Part 2 of the "Obscure Vernacular Novels Spotlight" series. Dunno if there's gonna be a Part 3, because most obscure novels stay obscure for a reason. Which is often formulaic boredom. And I'm only picking out the fun ones.

(Also, my main interest is still Ming-Qing vernacular novels, but since I'm doing a final project about Keisei Suikoden for this semester's class, I may as well use the post as Draft 0.)

...

"Is this the Edo Japan equivalent of FGO making historical figures and deities into anime girls?" I thought, when I first came across a Chinese summary of the novel several years ago. 

Then I learned that the author, Kyokutei Bakin, has indeed appeared in FGO as an anime girl. 

As the title suggests, this fan novel of Water Margins has made all the male 108 heroes into heroines, and the female characters into guys...but the changes go further.

Specifically, Bakin has localized the entire setting, rewriting the storyline so that it took place in Kamakura Japan instead. (Hey, it's even contemporary to Northern Song!) Kinda like how Konami's first Suikoden game put the 108 heroes into a medieval fantasy setting.

Which means: 

All the 108 characters got their unique Japanese names, sometimes sharing one or two characters with their original inspirations but not always. 

Daoist characters became Shinto priestesses, yamabushi, and onmyoji. 

Beef dishes that appeared in the original novel were replaced with poultry and fish because Edo Japan had a ban on livestock meat.

The Genpei War and other rebellions in its aftermath were featured in the backstory of a bunch of female bandits, who belonged to defeated clans, and many of the 108 heroines were associated with the Minamoto Clan. 

Almost every character got genderbent. Which means the damsels in distress from the original novel become bishonen in distress, female bandits would kidnap men and force them into marriages, etc.

The rough outline of the story goes like this: an arrogant female official, while trying to find the famous priestess Murokai (fem! Heavenly Master Zhang) in the Kumano mountains to dispel a plague, released the 108 vengeful ghosts of unmarried courtesans mentioned in the Manyoshu anthology, who reincarnated into our 108 heroines.

After a timeskip, in the capital, the Shirabyoshi dancer Kamegiku (fem! Gao Qiu) has gained the favor of Emperor Go-Toba, both of whom were real historical figures.

During his reign, women skilled in various martial arts were selected to train in the Female Warrior Training School, and after offending Kamegiku, one of the head trainers, Ayaosa (fem! Wang Jin) was forced to flee with her aging mother.

During their escape, she encountered the spunky tomboy daughter of a village chief, Fusenryu Komorode ("Komorode the Diving Dragon", fem! Shi Jin), and taught her the eighteen martial arts after defeating her in a duel...

We then got to Otatsu of Hanagara (fem! Lu Zhishen), my favorite of the genderbent characters——A plump, dark-skinned lady with a fierce temper and love for sake, able to effortlessly move a 45 kg mortar around.

She became a fugitive after she killed the mean usurer widow and salted fish vendor, Kaina, with a single punch, to save the male courtesan Yasanosuke and his mom.

Then she was made a Buddhist nun and took on the name Myotatsu, but got expelled from her first temple for acting exactly like the original Lu Zhishen: getting drunk and eating meat, fistfighting a Jizo statue outside the temple gate and bringing the entire small shrine down, and beating up the nuns who tried to stop her.

"I'm adept at explaining the nature of cause and effect: Fuck Around and Find Out." ——Myotatsu, right before rescuing the village head's pretty son from a forced marriage to the local bandit queen 

The novel does have a main plot: while Kamegiku was playing the temptress in Kyoto, Hojo Masako ruled as the "Nun Shogun" in Kamakura, and had essentially usurped the Minamoto Clan by placing her son, Yoriie, under house arrest and later assassinating him.

Thus, instead of robbing Cai Jing's birthday present, the 108 heroines were kidnapping Princess Sanze, the youngest daughter of Yoriie, to protect her from the Hojo regents and restore Minamoto control.

Sadly, we don't know how the plot concludes.

Bakin had gone blind in his old age, relying entirely on his daughter-in-law to transcribe his oral accounts, and since he was focused on finishing his most famous epic novel, Chronicle of the Eight Dogs Heroes (Nanso satomi hakken-den), Keisei Suikoden had taken a backstage and is never finished.

Some highlights:

-Sakurado of Torano-o (fem! Lin Chong) got fucked over because Kamegiku wanted to take her husband for herself. Her husband, Nansei, is a pretty twink monk and one of her disciples. He's timid, delicate, and has no interest in women, but loved Sakurado platonically and was in turn supported by her, who never looked down on him.

-Fushishiba (fem! Chai Jin), a.k.a. Oritaki no Sho, is descended from a member of the Taira Clan who owed a debt to Yoritomo, and was granted various honors and titles after the war.

-fem! Chao Gai's name is Kocho, which translates literally to "Little Butterfly". It might be a pun, since Chao and Cho sound kinda similar. And yes, she did lift an entire stone pagoda and carry it to her village to protect the villagers from the local yokai.

-Fittingly enough, "Sasuno Miko Medogi" (fem! Gongsun Sheng) is an onmyoji of the Abe lineage, who can manipulate Shikigami to summon winds and clouds.

-Oohako (fem! Song Jiang) murdering male! Yan Poxi is...surprisingly cathartic, not gonna lie. For context, Yan Po was not genderbent, but she abused Oohako's generosity to try to set her up with her son, a Joruri actor named Gidakichi, in an attempt to leech off her money.

-And while she's unwittingly offering patronage to their performances out of social obligation, Gidakichi was having an affair with her assistant, Adako (fem! Zhang Wenyuan), and being a stain on her reputation.

-After a very awkward and uncomfortable night at their house and Gidakichi being a creep to her, she accidentally left a pouch containing Kocho's letter of gratitude (because she alerted them to an incoming arrest) in their bedroom.

-Gidakichi found the letter and tried to use it to blackmail her into not only approving his marriage to Adako and covering the full expense, but also giving him the 300 gold mentioned in Kocho's letter (a gift she rejected).

-At which point she finally had enough and stabbed the guy to death. As you can see, the plot beats are mostly the same, but I like it better than the original.

-Why? Because 1) Yan Po's intent to leech off their patron is made a lot more obvious, and 2) instead of Yan Poxi (understandably) having no intention of sleeping with Song Jiang due to his cold neglect, and Song Jiang getting pissed at her for that?

-The dynamic is reversed. Gidakichi had no love for Oohako, and the feeling was mutual. Yet when she was pressured into spending the night in the same room by his mom, she was the one who kept a polite distance while he tried to force himself on her.

-Takeyo (fem! Wusong) is said to be 6 ft tall, with a dignified appearance that resembled the famous Tomoe Gozen from the Tale of Heike. Before she met Oohako, though, she was also short-tempered and prone to violence.

-Because Japan doesn't have tigers, the tiger Takeyo killed was a tiger cub gifted to the local lord by emissaries from Joseon Korea, which had escaped captivity upon reaching adulthood.

-Just like Wu Song, she avenged her sister, Butayo's murder at the hands of Kiresuke (male! Pan Jinlian) the abusive freeloader husband and his mistress, Okei of Seimonya (fem! Ximen Qin).

-Not gonna lie, the original Pan Jinlian and her Plum in the Golden Vase incarnation are both fascinatingly terrible people. But, just like Gidakichi, Kiresuke managed to outdone her through sheer creep factor during his failed attempt at seducing Takeyo and pinning the blame on her.

-Bakin generally tried to tune down the gore and cannibalism in Water Margins, as well as the slaughter of innocents and random passersby. Even Rikiju (fem! Li Kui) is slighty less of a indiscriminate murderhobo, and the targets of her killing spree were limited to samurai guards.

-That said, they still killed the corrupt official Ikken (Huang Wenbing)'s entire family by setting fire to his mansion, and preserved his head in a jar of sake after Rikiju killed him.

-Instead of receiving the three divine scrolls from the Mystic Lady of the Nine Heavens, Oohako received a single scroll from Benzaiten.

-Because of the aforementioned lack of tigers in Japan, Rikiju killed 4 giant "mountain dogs", a.k.a. Japanese wolves with unusual stripe patterns on their fur, after they devoured her elderly mom.

Final Thoughts

I'm not a fan of most genderbent AUs because oftentimes, it doesn't add anything meaningful to the original premise, or alter the character personality too much to the point of losing all resemblance to their counterpart.

Keisei Suikoden, however, is a pre-modern example of a genderbent adaptation done well.

The heroines are as badass, colorful, and violent as their male counterparts, the entire premise has been localized in a manner that's both funny and interesting, and the rewrite + deletion of certain story beats have actually removed many elements of Water Margins that do not sit well with a modern audience.

Also, I'll totally play a Keisei Suikoden RPG game, if the heroine designs stay true to the novel and they aren't all made into pretty anime girls. 

A two -volume English translation can be found on Amazon, together with the Chronicle of the Eight Dog Heroes. There's also a free digital scan of the original Japanese print by the Harvard-Yenching Library.