This one is built to gut you through nostalgia for a friendship that never gets to stay simple. Riliu and Jowy start as kids from the Highland Kingdom's youth brigade, sharing a tent and the same stupid hopeful belief that the war will end and normal life will just resume. It doesn't. The Dunan region chews that promise up fast, and watching two best friends get pulled onto opposite sides of a conflict neither of them chose is the entire emotional engine here, not some tacked-on subplot. If you know the Suikoden name you already know this isn't going to let Riliu and Jowy just talk it out over a fire like old times. It's war fantasy that remembers the personal cost is the whole point, and that starry-sky scene is going to wreck people once they see where it leads.”

The hero and his friend Jowy serve in the Unicorn Youth Brigade, a unit that has fought in a long border conflict between the Highland Kingdom and the City-States of Jowstown. A few months ago the two sides agreed to a truce, and both were glad to see the fighting stop. Beneath that brief calm, though, the embers of a new war are still burning. The series is an action fantasy adventure that adapts Suikoden II, and it is the first anime series produced directly by Konami Animation.