The Suikoden Games, in Order

Five main games, one continuous world, and a chronology that runs backwards as often as forwards.

The series is easier to enter than its shelf suggests. There are five main games (1995 to 2006), a ring of side stories, two handheld departures into other worlds, and then silence until the 2025 remaster. Everything in the main line shares one continuous world with overlapping histories, so release order and story order are two different maps. Both are drawn here.

THE PLAYSTATION ERA

1995 to 2001: the world is founded

Suikoden · 1995

PlayStation. The Gate Rune War in the Scarlet Moon Empire: the template is set, 108 Stars, castle, three kinds of battle. Saturn and Windows ports follow in Japan.

Suikoden II · 1998

PlayStation. Three years later in Dunan. The game the series is judged by, and the collector's prize of the whole shelf.

Suikogaiden Vol. 1 & 2 · 2000, 2001

PlayStation visual novels following Nash Latkje around the edges of Suikoden II and toward III. Japan only, never translated: the missing chapters.

Card Stories · 2001

Game Boy Advance. The Suikoden card game folded into a retelling of Suikoden II. Japan only.

THE PLAYSTATION 2 ERA

2002 to 2006: expansion and argument

Suikoden III · 2002

The Trinity Sight System, full 3D, the Grasslands. The best seller, and the last game Murayama made.

Suikoden IV · 2004

The prequel at sea, 150 years before the first game. Kawano produces, Matsukawa directs.

Suikoden Tactics · 2005

A strategy RPG braided around IV as prequel, side story, and sequel; with IV, the only spin-off of its kind to leave Japan besides Tierkreis.

Suikoden V · 2006

Falena and the Sun Rune, developed with Hudson Soft: a deliberate return to the second game's shape, and the main series' end.

THE HANDHELD DEPARTURES

2008 to 2012: other worlds

Suikoden Tierkreis (Nintendo DS, December 18, 2008 in Japan; March 2009 in the West) leaves the main world entirely: a parallel universe, its own 108 Starbearers, and a story about colliding worlds. Genso Suikoden: The Woven Web of a Century (PlayStation Portable, February 9, 2012) does the same in another direction, gathering its hundred heroes across a span of a hundred years. It was the last new Suikoden for thirteen years, and it never left Japan. A mobile spin-off, Tierkreis: Castle of Stardust (2008), and a pachislot machine (2011) complete the era's record.

THE SILENCE AND THE RETURN

2012 to 2025

Konami's Suikoden team was reported disbanded, its members scattered; a 2015 Nikkei article described development on the series as halted. The return, when it came, was staged: the HD Remaster of I & II (announced 2022, released March 6, 2025), then a March 2025 broadcast announcing Suikoden: Star Leap, a canonical mobile game set between I and V, an anime of Suikoden II, a stage play of Suikoden I, and a concert tour, with Konami framing the remaster as part one of a revival plan. The map, for the first time in over a decade, has a next entry.

THE STORY ORDER

The internal chronology

First · IV and Tactics

The Island Nations war comes first, a century and a half before the empire falls.

Then · V, I, II

V returns to the mainland shortly before the first game; I and II follow three years apart in Toran and Dunan.

Last · III

The Grasslands war, fifteen years after II, is the latest point the main series has reached.

Outside · Tierkreis, Woven Web

Both handheld games stand apart from the shared world and can be played in any position, or none.