Video Game Life Lessons: Suikoden’s Real Roots

Video Game Life Lessons: Suikoden’s Real Roots

Not if it’s bitter!

You can learn a lot from video games. It’s funny—game developers used to bend over backwards to create “edutainment” games as a ruse to trick parents into buying consoles because they weren’t all violent brain rot, honest! Yet in reality, kids learn a lot just by playing. Not just simple hand-eye coordination and sharper reflexes, but more important and complex skills, like problem-solving and spatial comprehension. And how many times have you heard someone say that they got a head start on reading because they loved video games? It happens all the time.

But even for us grown-ups, video games can still be educational. Or, at the very least, they can feed into the “continued education” pipeline. One moment—please brace yourself while this entry shifts from our usual collective first-person plural format (the preferred flavor of corporate blogs!) to the voice of your regularly scheduled individual blogger. Hi, that’s me. Blogger person.

Not too long ago, I stumbled across an online thread reveling over the fact that one of the world’s oldest novels, The Water Margin, included some protagonists who practiced cannibalism. That’s pretty weird and shocking by our standards, but it was transgressive by the standards of Chinese culture in the 14th century as well. The Water Margin challenged social standards, following the adventures of a host of rebels who dared to stand up to a corrupt, oppressive government. 108 rebels, as it happens, each one connected to a different Star of Destiny.

Sound familiar? That is, of course, the entire premise of Konami’s fan favorite Suikoden series: Each entry of the franchise follows a different group of rebels drawn together by destiny to challenge fascism in the name of freedom. This is not a coincidence; the kanji script that spells out Suikoden in Japanese means “Water Margin Legend.” Director Yoshitaka Murayama (R.I.P.) built his game around elements of the classical Chinese novel.

Rebels waging war against murderous imperial forces? Straight from the pages of The Water Margin! The Tolkienesque elves, maybe less so.

It’s funny, but Japanese popular media turns out to be the primary vector for Western awareness of Chinese literature over the past 30 or 40 years. Konami’s Suikoden followed in the footsteps of Koei’s 8-bit strategy sim Bandit Kings of Ancient China (which was called Suikoden: Tenmei no Chikai in Japan), which Koei of course created as a follow-up to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is based on one of the other great classical Chinese novels (Sānguó Yǎnyì). And those novels hardly even rate compared to the number of games, comics, and cartoons that have emerged from Japan based on the most popular of all the foundational Chinese novels: Saiyuki, or Journey to the West. You have read, watched, or played something based on Journey to the West. Dragon Ball, for example. Remember how Goku used to have a monkey tail? And a cloud and bo staff? Those were references to Son Wukong, the Monkey King who features in Journey to the West.

Anyway, back to Suikoden. The feature I stumbled across talked about how the cannibalistic husband and wife would waylay evil travelers by luring them into their inn along a mountainous pass and serving them tea adulterated with potent knockout herbs, leaving their victims helplessly asleep. This will of course sound immediately familiar to anyone who has played through the original Suikoden. The game’s protagonist never committed such heinous deeds, of course, but he does find himself a victim of a similar scheme early on in his adventure: He and his party stop at a mountain inn where their host generously offers them a doozy of a tea service. The entire quest would end then and there as the party is robbed and murdered in their sleep except for the fact that one of the innkeeper’s companions recognizes a member of the hero’s party as the leader of a sympathetic rebel faction and begs for her life to be spared.

A face you just can’t help but trust.

Suikoden acknowledges the possibility that players might have read The Water Margin and would clock the innkeeper’s motives. The game offers players a rare dialogue choice prompt when the party is offered tea... although Suikoden has a story to tell, so as with nearly every other story choice prompt in the game, you’re railroaded into making the decision the game has set before you. After all, it would be rude to refuse the hospitality of tea after a grueling journey... even if that tea does taste weirdly bitter.

Suikoden’s basis in the The Water Margin is a fairly well-known piece of trivia, but it wasn’t until I stumbled across that discussion of the original novel that I fully appreciated the fact that Murayama didn’t pull from the older work in broad strokes alone. It piqued my interest in learning just how much the game owed to the novel beyond its basic premise... and the answer is, quite a bit. Obviously not the part where you team up with kobolds and elves to invade a trap-laden dwarf fortress, or the part where carnivorous plants attempt to eat you in a miniature version of Versailles. (In fairness, Versailles didn’t even exist when The Water Margin was originally published.) But a surprising number of scenarios and events within the game come from the novel, even if Suikoden reworks them into new forms.

See, mom? Video games really are educational! Even now that I’m an adult.