Friday, July 19, 2013

Who is Suikodens Millie? Only the best character ever!

My most favorite video game series of all time is called Suikoden, and my favorite character from the series (and of all time) is a character named Millie. She appeared in  Suikoden II, and the spin off title  Suikogaiden II.

She is a young girl who appears in the village of Ryube, looking for her pet Groundhog, Bonaparte. After assisting in locating her pet, she joins your team as a token of her appreciation. She uses a Boomerang as her weapon, and has decent magic capabilities. (Also very high luck, and magic defense). She isn't the strongest character in the game, but she's definitely not the weakest either!





A drawing I made of my home girl, based off of her character art.
The creature on her arm, is her pet "Bonaparte", who can also do a special attack.

So here's a little back story

Note: Runes, are the magic of the Suikoden world. They work differently than in other games, as each magical rune can have up to 4 different spells. As a characters magic ability gets stronger, more spells unlock so that they can use them more frequently.

Back in 1999, I started playing Suikoden II because my dad got the game. He went to take a break, and told me to go around the towns in the game, and try to recruit people. (The Suikoden games require the hero to go around the country, trying to find allies to fight against an enemy nation)
My dad left off in the town of  Ryube, where you can recruit a few characters. This includes, but not limited to, a bum on the streets whose tab you pay for, some very flashy circus performers, and of course, Millie! (Who also watches the circus performers show before you can recruit her.

You first find Millie walking around town, just talking about whatever... But after a certain event, she appears in another spot, and is asking for help. Her pet Bonaparte, has run away, into the woods! (Maybe he's throwing a surprise party?!)

You have the option to help Millie find her pet, or just leave her there. Obviously, we want to help a home-gurl out! She joins the team as a temporary character, and when you find Bonaparte, you have to fight him. (Maybe he just doesn't want to take a bath?)
After defeating Bonaparte, this makes him "normal" again, and Millie joins your group!

Millie is a long ranged mage type character, who's equipped with a boomerang as her weapon. She's excellent with Fire, Lightning, and Blue Gate magic. (Blue gate is just monster summoning magic) In fact, she's the best Blue Gate magician in the game, even surpassing the other mage characters who surpass her in magic stats.

I usually gave her Wind magic, because I give characters magic based off their outfit colors. (Wind magic is blue in the first two games, but it changes to a green color in 4 & 5.)
She's only really bad with Water magic.

She has a special attack with Bonaparte, where he eats an enemy. This is a "whatever" ability, that is useful in the early stages of the game, but then somehow you get many "miss" attacks against stronger monsters.

When I first recruited Millie, I thought her special attack with Bonaparte was hilarious! The Suikoden team had a sense of humor. The special attack involves Bonaparte jumping out of Millie's arms, causing her to fall flat on her face. He then goes up to an enemy, changes in size, and eats them!

Anyways...

One other thing to mention, is Millie can use something called a "Kite Rune", this is an ability only long range characters can use. (There are 19 long range characters in the games). Kite Runes duplicate the characters weapon, and cause them to throw multiples of the weapon at the enemy at once.
Since half of the long range characters are mages, it's mostly good for characters with low magic capabilities.

But it's a wild ride watching Millie throw like 80 boomerangs at once! Which is also what the character Van does in Chrono Cross...
(There's another boomerang character in the fifth Suikoden named Faylen, she is not able to use the Kite rune because they probably realized it didn't make as much sense as a knife thrower doing it!)

Personality wise, Millie does not get much character development at all. We just find out that she's a part of the "Special Forces" (Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean!), and that she likes to sleep inside her pet after he turns into godzilla.

Because Millie was my first recruit, I just thought she was so cool, and it's also how my boomerang obsession started as well! (A weapon that needs no ammo, and is long range is pretty cool! Granted, it wouldn't work in the real world, unless under specific circumstances.) 

 So of course when someone on youtuber who I won't name, states their opinion that Millie sucks. I can't just keep silent!

It's one thing to have an opinion, but running around in the video constantly saying Millie sucks and that she is useless, is totally not cool. Especially when people in the comments are now agreeing with the youtuber, when they have never even played the game before! They have no right to say anyone sucks if they haven't played it themselves!
You cannot form much of an opinion on someone else's opinion, and now ignorant viewers are being fed this poison not to like Millie (And another character named Freed Y). So Millie and Freed Y will now be disliked characters automatically just because of the youtuber's opinion. (Granted, most people hate Freed Y already, because of other reasons. But everyone loves his wife Yoshino, whom you can recruit later.)

Some comments are as followed,

Negative Comments

¤ - "C" "Someone should do a solo Millie run >.<" - This is insinuating that Millie is a useless character, even though she has nice magic and okay stats. (There's plenty of other characters who have really bad stats) As a Millie Mega fan, I have her in my party most of the time, and have never had an issue with her. I usually bring her in my party for the final boss!

¤ - "Ch" *REQUEST* I noticed that three characters: Tengaar, Millie, and Meg have a unite attack. Since Millie's so bad I thought it would be fun to see how effective/ineffective this attack is at some point in the game."

¤ - "Blank" "Wait, if Millie is crap and Freed is crappier than crap..........does that mean using Millie is actually better than using Freed?"
(I think this is funny, since the character Tuta, has literally the worst stats in the game.)

I don't think it's fair that viewers are making their own opinions on a character because of what the youtuber says. Millie is in no way useless and if you give her good items, she can become an even better character to have with you. I should know since she's my favorite character of all time and have her in the party constantly.

Positive Comments
There were probably more positive comments in the comment section, than negative ones. So that's good!

¤ - "J" I loved using millie. she always ended up with the highest magic defense of all of my characters, and had amazing affinities. Use the wizard rune to transfer the mdf into magic attack, and she was a power house
¤ -  "D" - Millie's actually my favorite party member. She becomes an awesome spell caster later and has really good magic defense too! Her only real downsides are being stuck with the gopher rune and that she's a late bloomer character, but that kinda makes sense since she's only like 14 years old.
¤ -"Ji" I've trained Millie to the point where she has been useful to me. I'm very much a long ranged/magic party person. XD
Just a drawing I made of Millie as a witch, ready to sacrifice virgins to the moon god! You know, a typical day!
Yes, I made bonaparte a pumpkin creature!

Counter Argument to why Millie can be a useful character!



1. Millie has high magical stats that surpass most characters in the beginning of the game, the only bad thing is that her magic stops after a certain point and doesn't grow for a long time, but that isn't until the second part of the game. So after a while, other characters do surpass her, but that is only when you start getting other mage type characters. There is something you can give characters, that make their magic better, and an item like that would be perfect for Millie. Usually I just give her two magic runes.

2. Her affinity with runes are mostly high scores, She has an A in Lightning and Fire, a B in Darkness, Earth and Wind. The only thing she is not good with are Resurrection runes, which she has a D in and Water rune which she has an E in.(The E rating means the spell can backfire, and injure your characters instead! I don't know how this works with water runes considering Water does not have attack spells until the third game.)
Obviously, the creators wanted her to be a black magic type character, since she's only poor with holy and healing type magic, but she's good with dark, attack and defense type magic.

3. In Suikoden II and up, there is a powerful rune called the Blue Gate Rune (Pale Gate Rune in some installments). This rune has a different type of elemental spell for each spell, the first is fire, one of them is lightning and one of them is water, which is the only one she can do badly with.
It has been proven by the biggest Suikoden fan site known as "Suikosource", that Millie is in fact the only character that is able to use the Blue Gate Rune to the highest power, not including the one water spell. Even the greatest mage characters cannot make as much damage as Millie with the rune. The water rune affinity and Blue Gate rune should be tested out sometime, maybe I can do it in the future and update this post!

4. She is one of the few long range characters that can equip more than one rune, characters in the game can hold up to three runes. Depending on the character, certain characters never get their rune slots open (Every character has at least one).. Millie gets all three of her rune slots open, the third slot is taken by her rune called "Groundhog" which is the attack using Bonaparte.

Millie is really just a lesser version of two other characters Rina and Eilie, Millie has Eilie's magic and Rina's health! lol

If I were to give Millie an A-E rating based off of her stats, I would says she's a C+ character. Her HP and magic stats are decent, but is over shined by other characters. But there are plenty of other characters who just fail in many categories, she's somewhat of a middle ground character.

It's interesting to see that the youtuber did NOT complain about the character Tuta, who is widely criticized as being literally the weakest character in the game. Statistically, Tuta is very weak in every aspect. He is a character you have to babysit in the beginning of the game, and is just very weak, dying all the time.
I don't hate the character, but I only use him when he's forced upon you.

Note as of 11/8/13:
Any negativity about Millie will be deleted! This is about liking the character Millie.. if you don't like her, then go somewhere else, make a cult for all I care, just take a hike!
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7 comments:

  1. I love Millie! I ALWAYS have her in my team, every single game. She has great style, a unique rune, a brilliant personality. It's a shame her stats aren't higher but I always equipped her with Water + Blue Gate. I didn't realise her healing wasn't very good but I did realise she was the best with the Blue Gate rune years ago after seeing my brother use her with the same. Ridiculous people are being turned against her for no reason.

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  2. In which level Millie got her 4 level spell?

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  3. That drawing of yours came up when I was looking for Suikoden II concept art and led me here. Despite being... lemme count... roughly 7-8 years late, I'll leave a comment why not!

    I was always lukewarm on Millie. I think she's cute, and I sometimes stick with her through early game to change play-throughs up. It NEVER occurred to me that she'd be a good Blue Gate user.

    I did not know until recently that there was so much Millie hate. There are FAR worse characters. For one, I can't stand Sheena- I don't care how strong he is I hate him as a person.

    I do not care for Freed Y either, to be honest. His name alone bothers me. Why the Y?

    That said, I wish I could remove Bonaparte from Millie. I really do (he even ruins her battle sprite in my opinion).

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    1. Freed Y is really Freed Yamamoto, his surname was just too long. Freed Y., with the dot, would be less confusing to me, maybe it is a Japanese thing?

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  4. U made some really good points,i mostly use Millie because of Bonaparte,he reminds me of my dog lol,she's definetly not the best mage in the game,but she's far from being the worst.

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  5. I came here accidentally, but your attachment to the character Millie is endearing. During my next Suikoden II playthrough I will use her often in homage to the great affection you bear in heart.

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