I played Suikoden II for a while and stopped (trying to get into the capital again to meet up with some people). I'm not sure why everyone raves about it...the story up to this point is very cliche-RPG.
Your father/mentor dies, you get exiled from your home, there's some evil prince out to do something very bad, you join up with a rag-tag group that is trying to stop him, etc.
What's different about Suikoden II? Does the story improve a lot later in the game? Right now the battle system is very repetetive...use the same combo attacks until everything is dead, magic in an emergency. Does that change at all?