/vr/ - Retro Games

I just finished Suikoden II and want to have a discussion about the first two games. I heard a lot of people saying how everything in S2 was improved from S1, but after finishing both... I honestly prefer the first one a lot more. I thought the combat dragged a lot more than the first one because of the bigger dungeons and the overall higher level required to use the "Let Go" command. The overall sense of building an army was way more satisfying in the first game, the Castle was a mess... and it was pretty long compared to the first (not an argument against it, I just liked how short Suikoden was, you can beat it in 13 hours). The Army Battles were pretty garbage too. At first I was like "cool, they added SRPG elements instead of the boring Rock-Paper-Scissors from the first), but it became dull pretty quickly when I noticed that the outcome of duels were determined by RNG and the outcome of like 2/3 of battles were already determined by the story, so I felt like I was just playing Make Pretend.

The strongest point for me was the story. I liked the first one a lot, but Suikoden II blows it out of the water. I loved almost all of it, but it led to a meh conclusion. The characters were equally great and the deaths were heartpunching.

Overall both games are amazing exemples of JRPGs (except for the easy combat), but I want to ask /vr/ why is such a consensus that Suikoden II is better than OG Suikoden?