Grandia
PlayStation
Nostalgia Factor:
I first became aware of Grandia back in 1997 or 1998. This was supposed to be the Sega Saturn's big answer to the PS1's Final Fantasy VII. I was super excited for it. Unfortunately, despite enjoying success overseas, the title was never ported to the US. I was very disappointed. The reviews for it had been overwhelmingly positive. I'd even read it described as the greatest RPG ever made. And yet I wasn't going to be able to play it. Another failure in a long series of failures for the Saturn console.
Luckily, in 1999 the title was picked up and ported over not to the Saturn but to its original competitor the PS1. I didn't immediately run out and buy this game, but I did get my hands on it about two years later. For whatever reason, I never bothered to really give the game a chance. I fired it up one time in 2002 or 2003 and made it to the part where Justin has to swab the deck, but that is where I stopped.
I'd end up coming back to the game in the year 2021. 22 years after the game's initial release, and 18 years after that one time I played a few hours of it. It's kind of funny how it took me so long to finally play this game, despite being so excited for its potential Saturn release WAY back in the day. I don't know why it took me so long. It was just... never the right time to play it. This is a perfect example of the way I choose to play my games - precisely however and whenever I want.
Would Grandia be worth the long wait? Read on to hear my thoughts.
Story:
Grandia’s story is actually pretty simple. You play as Justin, a young self-proclaimed “adventurer” living in the ocean side city of Parm. Justin sets out on a quest to discover the mystery behind the Spirit Stone, a strange gem left to him by his late father. His travels take him to an excavation site where he sees a vision of a woman named Liete, who tells him that he must travel across the ocean to discover the lost city of Alent – where he will find his answers. Justin is joined on his journey by a local friend named Sue, and along the way they encounter many different eclectic personalities that join the party and flit in and out of it.
Justin and his companions travel past “The End of the World”, a mysterious wall that separates the New World from the old. There it is discovered that an ancient creature named Gaia has been awakened by the Garlyle military. Their leader, General Baal, is looking for the Spirit Stone which will help him control Gaia and take over the world… or something. Justin trades the Spirit Stone for his friend’s life, and is forced to regroup and bring together all of the people he had encountered during his adventures to strike back at Baal and destroy Gaia and the Spirit Stone once and for all.
This is an extremely truncated and short version of the game’s events. This is a 50-plus hour game. Not mentioned are all the side quests you are going to get pulled into. I’ll give you a few examples. Along the way, one of your companions (Feena) is kidnapped and you have to rescue her before she can be forced into a marriage she does not want. You battle a ghost ship while crossing the ocean. You save a town from acid rain. You run multiple fetch quests almost every time you enter a new village before the people of the village will actually help you. There are many, many more side quests that I can’t think of at the moment. If I had to compare the pace of this game to any other game, it would be that of Final Fantasy IX. It just felt very similar at times to me, particularly with how linear the game is and how you are pulled into a new adventure each time you reach a new location. The actual main plot often felt secondary at times in favor of the small adventures you encounter along the way.
Gameplay:
This game takes place from your typical RPG overhead view. You run around, you explore towns, you buy and sell items, you talk to people. There is no overworld that you use to traverse from location to location. When you leave an area, a game map is brought up and you simply pick your next destination, hit X, and you are taken directly there.
Battles are not random. You can see enemies on the game map and either run directly at them, which often results in you gaining initiative during the battle, or you can try to avoid them. Be careful though - enemies will chase after you and if they touch you from behind, you are pulled into battle and the enemies will have initiative, making the fight that much more difficult. Combat takes place in a semi real time manner. There is a bar on the bottom of the screen that indicates attack order. If you strike an enemy, it freezes their progress on the bar for a second or two while everyone else continues to advance along the bar. You can use this strategically to stun your enemies and try to sneak in as many attacks as you can before it is their turn.
Character and enemy placement is also a big thing. If your characters are bunched together, it makes it easier for enemies to hit everyone in your party with a single magic attack. If you space everyone out, the enemy has a much more difficult time doing that. This works in reverse, too. If your enemies are all bunched together, you have a much better chance of doing damage to all of them with a single magic attack than you would if they were spaced out. Utilizing this strategy plays a big part in battles throughout this game.
One thing I liked about the combat system is that your special moves and spells level up the more you use them. So for example if you cast fire all the time, eventually fire will level up into a more powerful attack. If you never cast fire, you’ll be stuck with the same measly weak fire spell the entire game. This lends a little extra strategy to battles. I was often using multiple techniques in battle since I wanted the most leveled-up skills and spells I could get.
If this all sounds fun and dandy to you – it is. This is a very well-designed and intricate battle system. But let me get to the problems I had with it, most notably the load times and the grinding. The load times often last a good ten seconds after each battle before you return to the game map. This may not seem too excessive at first, but keep in mind that you have to grind A LOT if you want to have a chance at beating this game. Some of the bosses in this game can be absolutely brutal. You have to sit through hundreds and hundreds of battles throughout this game if you want to level up strong enough to win. Those ten seconds really start to add up. There is also a long delay when you open up your inventory on the game map. It made me not want to use healing items or check my character’s equipment since it takes so long for the menu to open up each time.
Another issue I had was with the enemy placement on the map. Grandia kind of gives you the illusion that these enemy fights aren’t randomly generated like, say, Final Fantasy IX. While it is true, yes, there aren’t random encounters, enemy placement on the map often forces you into fighting them whether you want to or not. There’s so many tight corridors filled with enemies you just can’t sneak by. And if you do try to run by them, they’ll just hit you from behind and force you into a more challenging battle. As a result I ended up fighting almost every single enemy I came across, which somewhat defeated the purpose of no random encounters.
There also seems to be an imbalance in the game’s difficulty level, especially later in the game. I would absolutely slaughter every enemy on the map before they even had a chance to attack me, but then when I’d encounter a boss I’d get wiped out in just a small handful of turns. WTF? My only solution was to grind and grind some more – against weak enemies who offered no resistance or challenge to me whatsoever. The grinding would go on for hours and hours. It just KILLS any momentum this game may have had in its second half. It took me months and months to finish this game, it became such a slogfest. What were the developers THINKING???
That’s my AVGN moment of this review. Anyway, this game had such a great concept, fun characters, a good battle system, etc. It feels like such a waste that the grinding and the load times pretty much canceled that all out.
Graphics:
This game has that classic JRPG pixel art look to it that I just love. The world is bright and colorful. This is definitely a good looking game. If I had to compare the look of this game to anything it would be to Xenogears, with its 2D pixel characters inhabiting a rotating 3D world. In many ways this game looks better than Xenogears if only due to the detail and interactivity found in the game’s interiors. For example, if you touch some dishes on a table they will clatter, or if you touch a tea kettle steam will shoot out of it. It’s small touches like that which really bring this game to life. There are also some big, cinematic moments to be found in this game, like when you reach the top of the wall. This game’s presentation is definitely not one of its problems.
Sound:
I’ve made the Xenogears comparison with the graphics, so I guess I’ll do it with the sound too. A lot of the villages have fun, Gaelic-inspired music themes that are very reminiscent of something you’d hear in Xenogears. Overall this game’s soundtrack is much inferior to Xenogears, but I couldn’t help but notice a lot of similarities. One of my favorite tunes in the game is the jingle that plays when you win a battle, and I am really mad that they changed it about halfway through the game. The voice acting though…. yikes. It’s best if I don’t even mention it any further. It is bad. Good thing it isn’t utilized very often.
Overall:
If it feels like I’ve been pretty harsh on Grandia, I have. This is a game with a lot of flaws and pacing issues. It does a lot right, however, with its fun battle system and its unique way of leveling up your characters. It looks good, it sounds good. I was interested in its story, even though it meandered a bit too much for my tastes.
I just feel as if there are too many negatives to be found here- and these negatives are so strong that they begin to overtake the positives. The loading times, the grinding, the fetch quests, the unavoidable enemies, all the meandering and going off track that the plot does. I haven’t even mentioned the confusing nature of the dungeons and how everything looks the same. I shit you not, if you added up all the times I got lost trying to leave a dungeon or combat area it must have added up to about 5 or 6 hours. There is no map to reference. Your compass is useless. Way too much time is wasted unnecessarily in this game.
I also hated how characters would randomly leave the party. I’d spend hours and hours leveling people up only to have them leave and never come back. Such an obnoxious waste of time. That seems to be the theme here. From the long loading times, the endless battling and leveling up, the getting lost, the fetch quests, the backtracking – everything this game does seems like it is designed to waste your time. It’s not fun. It’s not cute. It’s fucking tedious.
There’s a reason it took me so many months to beat this game: I didn’t want to play it. Firing up the game was a chore each and every time. Grandia began to feel more like work than play – and that doesn’t fly with your homie over here.
It’s such a shame too, because buried under all my complaints is a game that at its core is worth playing. For the first time in the history of this blog, I feel bad giving a game a poor score. I have heard that there is a remaster of this game that came out sometime in the last few years. I really, really hope that the remaster fixes this game’s flaws. Even adding a simple speed-up option (like in the FF VIII remaster) would do wonders for this game. Truly: I really wanted to like Grandia. I really did. For that 16 year old kid in me who was so crushed when the Saturn version wasn't ported stateside. I just… ugh. Since you can’t see me I want you to know I am shaking my head right now.
No, this is not a horrible or unplayable game. Like I said there is a lot of good to be found here. But will I play it again? Absolutely not. And that’s pretty telling right there. I have heard this game's sequel is better, however. I am still very willing to check it out someday. This game hasn't completely killed my interest in the series.
Final Score:
D+
If you liked this review, check out some of my other game reviews:
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