I just finished the DS game Suikoden Tierkreis. If you are not familiar with the Suikoden series, the basic idea is to try to obtain all 108 characters while playing this RPG. Tierkreis is no different in that respect, the goal is to obtain the 108 characters in this quest driven game with turn-based battles.
This blog is not intended to be a review of the game, but more to introduce you to the series or to let you know about this particular game. I am an old-school gamer, and I will define old-school as I am using the term. I am an explorer in an RPG and I check out every nook and cranny to see if there is something there. I try to talk to everybody and I talk to them more than once. The big thing I am referring to as old-school is that I am accustom to playing a game without a guide or faq and I try doing things in a different way to see if something different happens.
As I stated, this is a quest driven game for the most part. There are a lot of the 107 other characters that join automatically as part of the story. There are also a lot of characters that join as part of a quest. Still there are those characters that require certain things to happen at a certain time before you can gain their support. Since I am thorough and always checking out different things, I actually stumbled into about 6 or 8 of the characters that way. Two of them were very near to the end of the game and I only got them because I was trying to get everyone of the characters at about the same level. That is another aspect of being an old-school gamer, I feel like I have to level the characters. 
I'm writing more than I planned to so let me just give you a quick overview.It is a good game, but there are a number of things that even I did not like. The camera had a bad habit of being in the wrong place for me to see what I wanted to see at that time. The random encounters were frequent, but the dungeons were short for the most part. Many of the characters had no real purpose in the game and could easily have been recruited and forgotten. The last 15 or 20 characters are recruited very, very near to the end of the game. I actually gave up on one of the characters and started the "final battle" sequence when the irritating little character finally joined. 
Those things aside, I did enjoy the game and would say that it is a good game. This game should probably not be the first Suikoden game that you play because there are some really good games in the Suikoden series. It is worth playing once, but it is also a fairly linear game that doesn't give you a lot of reasons to play it again...unless you get through the game without some of the characters.