It was another productive day in Suikoden V, as our group decided to invade the fortress of Doraat in order to lower enemy morale.

That led to another war battle, of course, which was supposed to be tough but turned out to be rather easy in the end. The enemies don’t attack until you get close enough, so you can take it at your own pace, and I used my ships to gain naval superiority first, used their Barrage points to soften up the squads on land, and then cleaned them up with my land troops. I only got a regular victory instead of a victory+ though, despite low losses on my side, so maybe time was part of the evaluation (I took it fairly slow, as I was at a severe numerical disadvantage and had to use slowly self-healing ships and strategic retreats a lot).

After the war battle we fought through the town, faced the Queen’s Knight Alenia (now possessing the Twilight Rune) and beat her, though she got away afterwards. I also had to duel Miakis, my sister’s old bodyguard, and actually lost the first time. It’s a damn good thing it let me retry the duel, since there hadn’t been any save points for quite a while and I would have had to redo the whole war battle and town crawl. Miakis then revealed that Georg had killed the Queen (though it had been heavily hinted at in previous cutscenes anyway) during the coup, and Georg left the castle.

After that was a bunch more recruiting, including finally getting a magic trainer. I also finally got the Tablet of Stars, which let me double-check that I hadn’t missed any of the recruitable characters so far.

The tactician then came up with a plan to ‘kidnap’ the princess and end the war that way, since Godwin would lose any legitimacy then, and I had to build three groups for three different tasks. This was hyped up as being the final battle, but I knew it wasn’t. (How? Well I’m still only on Chapter 10 of 14…) There was also an ominous cutscene where Sialeeds encountered one of the Nether Gate assassins, but was not entirely surprised by him…

My newly-crowned sister was now leading the front-line troops and sending them our way, so another war battle occurred before I could get close enough to rescue her. I got sloppy and lost a squad the first time, so I had to restart it, which was annoying because it required going back through numerous cutscenes and reassigning the squads again. It was fairly easy on the next try, though.

The three squads held their separate battles against the Queen’s bodyguards, and won with only a little difficulty (not all of them were my best, most well-equipped fighters). I was then reunited with my sister, but only briefly, as then my bodyguard was stabbed by an assassin and Sialeeds betrayed us and kidnapped my sister herself, vanishing into thin air. Damn.

Lyon was partially healed by the Dawn rune, but still needs to recuperate a lot, so Miakis is acting as my bodyguard now. Galleon, one of the more honorable bodyguards we fought, has now joined us as well, and he clarified further exactly what happened when Georg had to kill the Queen. She had used the Sun rune to fight off assassins, but it made her loopy again, she lashed out and killed the King, became completely crazed, and Georg had to kill her before she used the rune to destroy the whole country.

Now, the next plan is to investigate some ruins in the west for more information that might help cure Lyon, with a detour to check out a keep.