There are certain sidequests you can't do or characters you can't recruit if you advance the plot past a certain point. I'm not sure how many are time-limited and how many are just "do it at this point in the plot or lose your chance," but it's certainly possible to miss certain things forever.
And the Clive/Elza deal is very strictly time-limited - if you don't reach certain points within a certain number of hours of play (the first is 11 hours, the last is 20) it's permanently lost to you. Though I did find a walkthrough that says you can get all the characters while doing the Clive and Elza plot, so I guess it's not as much of a tradeoff as I thought. You'd still need to know exactly what you were doing, though.
It's a shame some of the games are so rare - it seems like they did re-releases the first two around the time Suikoden III came out, but even that was eight years ago.
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And the Clive/Elza deal is very strictly time-limited - if you don't reach certain points within a certain number of hours of play (the first is 11 hours, the last is 20) it's permanently lost to you. Though I did find a walkthrough that says you can get all the characters while doing the Clive and Elza plot, so I guess it's not as much of a tradeoff as I thought. You'd still need to know exactly what you were doing, though.
It's a shame some of the games are so rare - it seems like they did re-releases the first two around the time Suikoden III came out, but even that was eight years ago.