The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
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Unfortunately in my casual playthrough I accidentally broke the combat system and by the end of the game nothing was a challenge; as with many other games there are "resistances" and "vulnerabilities" but also as with most non-Shin Megami Tensei games of the era, they aren't really strong enough or frequent enough to matter. I just pumped all my upgrades into Fire upgrades until eventually my routine end-game battle was one character to wipe all the enemies in one move, move to next battle. You could easily pump an elemental bonus enough to overwhelm the resistances the enemies had. More resistances and immunities distributed around would have helped prevent a degenerate strategy.
And of all the battle systems to have a degenerate strategy for, this one hurts the most because it is otherwise so good.
(Sadly, Grandia III was never completed. It was released... but it was never completed. The game as shipped has visible gaping holes in it, which is sad because what is there was quite good.)
The battle system in the later SMT games, especially after 3 is one of the best turn based systems I've ever played. It was a refinement of FFXs in so many ways. It encouraged you to "break" it as it were.
Then there's games like Grandia 2... And Shenmue. God, I love Shenmue these days. The first one is brilliant in so many ways I didn't recognize when I played it when it came out. Absolutely wonderful game. The track that plays when Ryo and Guizhang fight the Mad Angels at the dock, "Earth and Sea", takes me back. For me, it's the most perfect Christmas game that Sega ever made
There is, of course, a lot of games all around that space but I don't know of anything that quite matches what I'm laying out here.
(Although the cancellation mechanics would need some careful attention. It allows for a whole bunch of weak characters to keep a single strong character down by always cancelling what they're doing. I suppose just turning it into a skill check itself instead of being 100% as it is in Grandia would do the trick, though.)
Even carefully developed modern games like Baldur's Gate 3 have game breaking build options.
Personally, I think devs should embrace some stuff being broken. It's a single player game, it doesn't need balance. One of my favorite RPGs is FF8 precisely because you can trivialize the game if you engage with the character building systems. It feels awesome to stomp things with your broken party.
> Personally, I think devs should embrace some stuff being broken. It's a single player game, it doesn't need balance.
Exactly! Bravely Default & Octopath Traveler's job systems are built around the idea that the system should be breakable. BD2 even has a push-your-luck system that adds a multiplier for one-shotting multiple encounters in a row: you can get like a 50 percent rewards boost from random encounters if your team is able to "go infinite" against the current enemy mobs. And there are skills to remove damage caps, so you know they thought about it.
OT did kinda tone that down some to add the timing and break mechanics; if you land enough hits on enemy weaknesses, they lose their current turn, and go into a stun status next turn (but go first the turn after that, so no stun locking!). But you still get end game builds that max out boost points every turn; you just can't usually one shot bosses.
The RTS part involved moving armies and heroes around to fight Sauron / Saruman’s armies and defend your citadels. There was a game loss condition if you lost something like three citadels in battle.
But if you abandoned your citadels, their subsequent occupation didn’t trigger the loss. So you could simply aggregate all your forces into one giant army and take Barad Dur and Mt Doom by force.
Probably an under-appreciated game, historically.
Grandia 2 was largely just timing things such that if you did it right you would bonk the enemies turn back repeatedly and they'd never get to attack. Way more fun.
For myself, Grandia is one of those games that was part of my childhood so despite having flaws, it transcends ratings in a sense.
It was the first game I ever got on the first home console I ever had, the PlayStation 1. I would only have been about 9 or 10(?) (31 now) and the intro to the game is burned into my mind because I never had a memory card for quite some time so I'd replay the opening hour or two over and over until it was time for dinner or bed.
Eventually I got a memory card and my next entry was Digimon World 2003 and I wonder to what extent that lead to me being interested in computers generally and ultimately becoming a developer as a day job.
To this day, I've still yet to finish Grandia. I picked up the HD Collection on Switch and I'm about halfway. Every time I go on vacation (or particularly during the Christmas holidays), I'll progress a bit. There's no real rush though in that once it's over, it's over. I don't really tend to replay titles, particularly long RPGs.
It's also kind of weird actually seeing the rest of the game too. For the longest time, I had no idea where the story was going. I've still mostly managed to avoid spoilers as well so I conceptually don't know where the story ends up which is nice, given years of reading Wikipedia synopsis only to regret it later.
> A total joy… but one that demands an intense time commitment. A player Justin’s age surely has the time
I found this part funny because I was Justin's age when I first played Grandia and never found the time then let alone now
Hmm, I think the flaws are what generally make games.
I played thousands of hours on a bunch of Quake 3 engine games (Q3:A, RTCW, ET)...
If you moved your mouse in a certain way you would go faster, and as a result there were a class of players that were speed demons.
These flaws are often ground out now, and I think that limits community-driven creativity. Especially since most games are impossible to mod now.
Eventually we found ways to limit this (limit fps in competitive configs as an e.g.) to prevent those with the best PCs have an unfair advantage.
My example of that was Heroes of Might and Magic 2 vs 3. 3 is the legendary one that everybody remembers, but I actually liked 2 better. Sure, 3 is far superior for balance and AI and content... but for me, the unbalance of 2 was its charm. Trying to win with the underpowered knight castle, or against a far superior force with tactics like the blind spell that the AI wouldn't counter... that was the fun of the more primitive Heroes 2 and wasn't quite the same in the more developed 3. Less development in a game can actually make for more fun factor.
I bought my Switch because I found out about the HD collection, so this is remembered from 6+ years ago and may be fixed now, but two problems stuck out with Grandia II: One video crossing the Granacliffs didn't play (with the flying ship), and several magics turn out to be multiple videos played on top of each other - and they messed up the aspect ratio in a few (stretch vs center) so the visuals don't line up.
Other than that it was what I remember on Dreamcast. Oddly, even the snowy area lagged in the exact same way as on Dreamcast.
I recently played Panzer Dragoon Saga on original Saturn hardware and I have to say that was one of the most profound experiences playing an RPG I've had in my life and playing it on the Saturn itself was a big part of it.
It doesn't help that some of the porting studios sometimes just do shoddy work. Aspyr, for one, can be hit or miss. The Deus Ex remake that's coming out, from what I've seen, is particularly egregious. Just based on the footage I've seen the artistry of the game is completely ruined.
On the flipside - Nightdive doesn't miss. They're the only ones that I will buy their remasters without researching the port quality because they just "get it". The Nightdive remasters of Turok, System Shock, Rise of the Triad, Blood and even some of the more niche ones like Powerslave and Killing time have all been fantastic. Even their full remake of the original System Shock is phenomenal.
Definitely agree with you about CRTs. I wish I had the room for one. It's fun to use a MiSTer hooked up to one and a modern flatscreen at the same time to compare.
IIRC, the source code for it was lost, so all they could really do is glorified emulation.
This game was basically a limited release if you will and therefore I don't think Sega thinks it's with the effort to remaster anyway
Shipping them is annoying and expensive, no one wants to lug around heavy ass CRTs and larger ones probably have to ship on pallets.
Small CRTs that are easy to carry will get snatched up quickly, but mostly by retro gamers who have no alternative.
The difficulty of finding CRTs is mostly a logistics problem. Not because they are so valuable that people horde them.
She does this thing where she wants to start games over and over again from the start, play them for a bunch of hours, then start it again.
The soundtrack and the challenge of beating the game at that age was wonderful.
I beat it a few years ago for the first time all the way through again. Really enjoyed it, but never played the sequel.
I find a lot of modern games unisnpiring. Too much focus is on creating a general great game, rather than focusing on story / mechanics.
Thanks for the post!
(There does not seem a story connection, though)
Sent it to said sister. Strange how something can exit your life then re-enter it heavily in the same week (soundtrack, and now HN).
I just went and found the whole soundtrack online. I found this cool live orchestra version too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4fUdY1PGhY
Being 10 years old or so and not knowing much English yet (being Danes), we were pretty clueless about how to progress, but eventually we succeeded and got pretty far into the game. The game is about a great adventure, but for us it was also an adventure into the English language and a new type of game that we'd never tried before. I miss those experiences!
Later I went back to it and completed it in my teens.
The timing of this article is a bit fun since I'm currently playing it for the third time with my son, translating it on the go. It's awesome to see my "friends" also becoming his friends, and the game is holding up quite well and keeping him interested.
Apart from the charming characters, the visual variety is really good with each town having it's own style. There's also hardly a boring moment (admittedly using fast forward for the battles, which otherwise otherwise a bit repetitive later on), there's a new story beat every half hour or so to keep everything fresh.
The combat is also quite good, although easy if you have a bit of slightest experience with these kinds of games.
Great to see that there's an English patch. Christmas is coming up..
maybe there is a way to port them using the saturns mpeg add-on (?)
otoh probably fine to watch them on youtube in parallel
FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes?
This makes replays painful as the story isn't particular interesting and in some places actually quite nauseating to watch (Miles is constantly conflicted on very straight forward things), but the game play itself is quite fun. I've looked for a mod for this game where you can skip all cut-scenes but it doesn't seem to exist.
Except when you use the Knights of the Round summon, then you go grab a coffee while waiting for the animation to finish :).
I wish modern games would have the same feature!
Mmm played any Kojima games? :)
MGS-4 though is has ridiculous cutscene length.
I do generally find stealthiness to be engaging and great fun _as a component of game play_ but as the main draw and, especially, from the jump I just found it to be frustrating and annoying. Maybe I'd feel different these days, though. I'll try it again some day.
Genuinely curious - if you don't care about the story then why play an RPG? When you're speedrunning - sure, skip all of the cutscenes, but when you're playing casually - why would you want to do that?
The point of many posters, I imagine, is that there is too much non-playing parts all at once, it's not strictly about them not being skippable.
This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.
Some games have started to get this right, either by making cutscenes you've seen skippable, or by just automatically skipping straight to the battle if you've already been through it once. I suspect one reason it didn't happen on older games was the need to explicitly save, rather than autosaving.
There are few games where the story has mattered to me, and even basically no games where the cutscenes did.
Edit: the presence of story and cutscenes in a game I enjoy is basically correlation and not causation (for me).
Most games I don’t care about the deep exposition. I’m fine with a vague notion and then starting from the main character’s insertion into it where the gameplay starts.
Not letting the player skip it is just hubris.
These days I want my games to be actual games.
Half of Final Fantasy X (and I think a little later they released a movie both for Final Fantasy VII and the standalone movie the Spirit Within) was Square showing off how good their CGI animation was, which at the time was very good.
CGI cut scenes went from "this is a cool thing I see between levels" on the PS1 to "this is a tedious interruption".
Last couple plays I’ve used zig-zag approach when traveling through random encounter zones, effectively ~doubling distance traveled, and encounters. Stretches those out, but removes most of the separate, dedicated grinding.
(Not defending the game design that makes this necessary, mind you)
Generally. I don't like playable dream sequences or artistic filler sequences in games. I feel like there are a lot of people that working in gaming that couldn't get into Movies/TV and as a result try to insert that sort of story telling into a form of entertainment where it doesn't belong.
The best in game story telling IMO was the Doom 2016 game, where the physicality of the character was done through the short sequences where control was briefly taken away. Unfortunately they undid this (mostly) in subsequent sequels .
I did play FFVII when it came out and I was extremely impressed and couldn't get enough of it. But I could never get into other JRPGs later.
Narrative is one thing, but at least with 90s JRPGs you could go through dialog on the field screen at your own pace, generally. It doesn't take long to get to the action.
But for anyone else who's interested in trying the game, the PS1 version was fine, and is more readily available on modern consoles.
"Additionally, the first Grandia was recently remade for modern consoles with the release of the Grandia HD Collection."
> Grandia is Best on Saturn.
If you specifically blog about how driving down route 66 in a '57 Chevy is better than driving down it in a '57 Packard, I think you have some responsibility to try to justify your claims. Otherwise it's just trolling.
The HD version spruces up the PS1 version but didn't go as far as restoring everything lost from the Saturn one.
So none are really definitive but the Saturn version is usually said to be the best. The PS1 has the advantage of greater availability and can be emulated on a potato. And the HD one is on sale for modern consoles.
This is a pretty bad demonstration since they took literally zero effort in syncing the two side-by-side til the end, but gives you an idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL6Z9xvt7h0
That being said, it's not so much worse that PS1 is unplayable. It's just that if you had the choice between the two, the Saturn version is slightly more pleasant to look at and listen to.
Justin, Sue and Feena feel like old friends.
I strongly recommend anyone getting into retro gaming, try some CRT shaders (or lcd ones for portables)!
That being said there are a lot of emulators and little pieces of hardware now that simulate it really well, which is a very viable option, especially when space is at a premium (or if your poor pet hates the whine of a CRT like my dog did ha)
Then again, I seem to have accidentally started a small GB/GBA cart collection...
My mind immediately jumped to the idea that this is a play on words for the ancient Maya civilizations, and Maya Angelou. Apparently I wasn't the only one.[1]
1: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/197483-grandia/53620555
Grandia 2, released on Dreamcast, released on PS2 due to Dreamcast failure. Same issues for the remakes, the ps2 works great but when compared to the dreamcast there is obvious music/graphics artifacts.
Also Grandia >> Final Fantasy VII
When I grew up, "dropping" something meant "excluding" it; you might drop a player from a team or a feature from a product to exclude it. It turns out that Grandia did actually release in Japan for the PlayStation in 1999.
Am I the only one who struggles with this new, fangled definition of the word "drop"?
“A [whatever] was dropped in Japan. Where is [whatever]?”
“In Japan, for one.”
I think it’s kinda lame in its escaped-containment form, and am surprised it’s been one of those things that stuck around as long as it has, but would place it low on my list of language gripes, personally.