I haven't played the first one but I played Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I think it's still my favorite battle system in a JRPG to date. Not only does it have the obvious details you can see on a YouTube playthrough, but higher-end play with it also requires managing positioning, which is easy to miss as an option at all in the menus, or to think it has no purpose. A low-level challenge run would probably be a lot of fun.
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.)
I almost always try to play on original hardware on an appropriate display (CRT) whenever I can. The deluge of remasters and remakes we've been getting can be nice - but I find a lot of the time that they can be hit or miss. They often feel like they've lost a lot of the magic created when the developers of the era had to work with the limitations of the hardware of the era. Pixel art on those old CRT's vs pixel art on new games with modern displays is a good example, when working on those old CRTs you just had to create your art in a specific way that just doesn't look good when you slap it onto a modern OLED display. Even the modern pixel art that's designed FOR the new displays just doesn't quite capture the same feel.
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.
Panzer Dragoon Saga is a great game: some cool gameplay elements that later games didn't really ever seem to pick up to my knowledge. Really tight too, not long and grindy like so many JRPGs in the '90s. The solitary main character means it skips a lot of the RPG-with-several-party-members tropes too. It's too bad it never got a rerelease of some sort to make it more accessible to people (plus it was stupidly rare even when it was released; Sega even put out baffling magazine ads about how hard it was to actually buy), though as you point out so many of those are terrible anyhow.
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.
I was just about to go to bed and what a surprise seeing Grandia trending #1 on Hacker News of all places.
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
Thank goodness for emulation. With OCR, and now AI screenshot descriptions, I can know what menu I'm in, what menu option is selected, dialog on the screen, stuff like that.
Case and point, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the Playstation 2. On original hardware, I had no idea what I was getting when I'd finish a battle in story mode. Now, with NetherSX2 on my phone, after a battle, I can have TalkBack describe the screen, listen to the description of what I won, press B to exit the description, press A to advance the game screen, read the next thing I won, and so on. Of course, the app has to have an accessibility element that TalkBack can grab onto to describe, so ironically, Retroarch doesn't work for this, and either does Lemuroid, but I mean it's a start, and hopefully one day TalkBack can grab the entire screen for a screenshot without needing an element onscreen to latch onto.
I am determined to play this on Saturn at some point. I had the Playstation version as a kid and I didn't notice any of the flaws, it was just a brilliant game with a much more interesting and fun battle system than Final Fantasy. But now I see all the mismatched textures which have been ported right up to the modern HD "remasters".
Great to see that there's an English patch. Christmas is coming up..
Shrug, if I blog about the joys of driving down route 66 in a '57 Chevy, I really dont have any obligation to give equal time to what its like in a '57 Packard. Its a Saturn fan site, so its just going to be Saturn-centric.
I find it a bit of a course - Grandia, released on sega saturn, remastered due to the saturn failure.
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.
I've tried so many times to play the classic JRPGs only to be met by loooooooong cutscenes before even allowing me to control the characters. Grandia is unfortunately no exception: 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes.
Play the game in an emulator that has a shortcut for fast-forward. It makes a world of difference when it comes to "enduring" overly long cut-scenes, load screens, repeated spell animations, endless combat encounters, etc.
This is very frustrating, but I'm not sure it's a problem only with classic JRPGs - recently I sat down to play Bayonetta 3 and it had a similar problem (along with.. others).
FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes?
It the same with Spiderman: Miles Morales. There are some cut scenes you cannot skip. Worse they they are cut scenes that don't actually affect the main story arc.
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.
Most of the Final Fantasy games have been like that, which is why I've (most of the time) been a fan since since FF4/2. I can't remember how many times I've been turned off by a game when it starts with the protagonist being woken up by his mom, followed by endless wandering around town.
It often gets worse. I stopped playing Final Fantasy X (on the PS2) because there was a boss battle where there was a 10 minute un-skippable cutscene between each stage of the battle and if you died you had to re-watch each one.
FFX’s balance is awful if you go straight from point to point and don’t take some long grinding breaks. You’ll hit exactly the kinds of boss-walls you mention, and yeah, the cutscene placement is simply abusive.
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)
The boss battles weren't that hard. The issue was the un-skippable cut-scenes.
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 .
> 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes.
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?
I agree with your take here that he should care about the cut scenes/story if bothering to play, but this has gotten especially bad in newer games where they try to shove you right into the game before you can tweak settings. I never played through Bravely Default on 3DS because the opening scene used the English dub instead of the original audio, and I had to skip it to access the settings and change languages, then there was no way to rewatch that opening scene. I've similarly avoided their other games like Octopath Traveler as I suspect they have the same issue. It seems like an accessibility issue. I don't think they should ever stop you from getting to the settings first thing. I am not entertained by them trying to be overly cinematic. I don't think it would kill them to wait until you hit "start new game".
Starting off with 10min of exposition is too much and it’s lazy. You don’t even know if you’re going to like the game yet. Do some en media res story telling and get on with it.
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.
I play RPGs for the fun of turning time and grind into more advanced abilities (eg going from getting slaughtered by dragons in Skyrim to being the one doing the slaughtering).
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).
You can typically skip most dialogue and cut-scenes in the MGS games. Also quite a number of the cut-scenes are interactive and can actually help you in game play (codec numbers are show, clues etc).
MGS4 would be like 10% shorter if you had a mod that just cut every line in a cutscene that’s someone repeating someone else’s previous line, but as a question.
I never played the 1st Grandia, but I had Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I absolutely loved that game. I'll admit that I was never the best with (J)RPGs and never played it for that long per-session as a kid, but I did eventually finish it. Though, it did take many years to finally get to the end and finish the game, but I enjoyed it! (I also enjoyed Evolution 2: Far Off Promise).
I've been getting more and more into retro gaming lately, and something that really made it click for me is leveraging shaders (or overlays) to simulate period-accurate displays. For a Sega Saturn, that'd be some kind of CRT. The art direction in these games are designed to take advantage of the quirks of the CRT, and often look significantly better on a CRT. Noodle just did a decent video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
I strongly recommend anyone getting into retro gaming, try some CRT shaders (or lcd ones for portables)!
Or get a CRT if you live in a populous area, have the space, and a strong back! It’s gotten harder since Covid when they were seemingly everywhere, but if you’re lucky you’ll find a good curbed unit. Gave my buddy a 24” trinitron recently I just couldn’t keep around anymore and he is having a blast playing his PS2 on it with component cables. FFX really sings as do racing games.
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)
Hah, I wish I had the space for this and original hardware! For me it's hard to justify the space and cost when I can just have all the videogames ever made on a couple SSDs and run them on emulators.
Then again, I seem to have accidentally started a small GB/GBA cart collection...
Oh I rememeber in one of the games, one of the girls would say ganba ganba something at the end of each battle. I didn't understand it back then but I loved it.
> Game Arts subsequently ported Grandia to the PlayStation, dropping it in Japan in the summer of 1999.
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"?
I thought it was from some music subculture. I first encountered it in the context of albums, around the early or mid 2010s.
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.
I haven't played the first one but I played Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I think it's still my favorite battle system in a JRPG to date. Not only does it have the obvious details you can see on a YouTube playthrough, but higher-end play with it also requires managing positioning, which is easy to miss as an option at all in the menus, or to think it has no purpose. A low-level challenge run would probably be a lot of fun.
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.)
I almost always try to play on original hardware on an appropriate display (CRT) whenever I can. The deluge of remasters and remakes we've been getting can be nice - but I find a lot of the time that they can be hit or miss. They often feel like they've lost a lot of the magic created when the developers of the era had to work with the limitations of the hardware of the era. Pixel art on those old CRT's vs pixel art on new games with modern displays is a good example, when working on those old CRTs you just had to create your art in a specific way that just doesn't look good when you slap it onto a modern OLED display. Even the modern pixel art that's designed FOR the new displays just doesn't quite capture the same feel.
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.
Panzer Dragoon Saga is a great game: some cool gameplay elements that later games didn't really ever seem to pick up to my knowledge. Really tight too, not long and grindy like so many JRPGs in the '90s. The solitary main character means it skips a lot of the RPG-with-several-party-members tropes too. It's too bad it never got a rerelease of some sort to make it more accessible to people (plus it was stupidly rare even when it was released; Sega even put out baffling magazine ads about how hard it was to actually buy), though as you point out so many of those are terrible anyhow.
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.
Finding a good CRT locally has been pretty difficult. I think everyone is caught on the "this is worth gold now" trend.
I was just about to go to bed and what a surprise seeing Grandia trending #1 on Hacker News of all places.
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
Nice comment! How is the HD collection?
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 sister picked this up from a random supermarket in 1998/1999, and I sank 100s of hours into watching her play it through.
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!
I only know the second part of grandia, but it is great!
(There does not seem a story connection, though)
Thank goodness for emulation. With OCR, and now AI screenshot descriptions, I can know what menu I'm in, what menu option is selected, dialog on the screen, stuff like that. Case and point, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the Playstation 2. On original hardware, I had no idea what I was getting when I'd finish a battle in story mode. Now, with NetherSX2 on my phone, after a battle, I can have TalkBack describe the screen, listen to the description of what I won, press B to exit the description, press A to advance the game screen, read the next thing I won, and so on. Of course, the app has to have an accessibility element that TalkBack can grab onto to describe, so ironically, Retroarch doesn't work for this, and either does Lemuroid, but I mean it's a start, and hopefully one day TalkBack can grab the entire screen for a screenshot without needing an element onscreen to latch onto.
Site’s currently down, here’s a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20251209110317/https://www.segas...
I am determined to play this on Saturn at some point. I had the Playstation version as a kid and I didn't notice any of the flaws, it was just a brilliant game with a much more interesting and fun battle system than Final Fantasy. But now I see all the mismatched textures which have been ported right up to the modern HD "remasters".
Great to see that there's an English patch. Christmas is coming up..
It would be great to have the saturn version + translation as well as the improved movie sequences
maybe there is a way to port them using the saturns mpeg add-on (?)
otoh probably fine to watch them on youtube in parallel
The site appears to be a Sega Saturn fansite, so obviously they have a slight bent towards playing it on the Saturn.
But for anyone else who's interested in trying the game, the PS1 version was fine, and is more readily available on modern consoles.
They really didn't cover at all why this game is better specifically on Saturn than PS1 or any modern remake / emulator.
Shrug, if I blog about the joys of driving down route 66 in a '57 Chevy, I really dont have any obligation to give equal time to what its like in a '57 Packard. Its a Saturn fan site, so its just going to be Saturn-centric.
in that vein, https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/grandia-hd-collec...
I find it a bit of a course - Grandia, released on sega saturn, remastered due to the saturn failure.
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.
I've tried so many times to play the classic JRPGs only to be met by loooooooong cutscenes before even allowing me to control the characters. Grandia is unfortunately no exception: 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes.
Play the game in an emulator that has a shortcut for fast-forward. It makes a world of difference when it comes to "enduring" overly long cut-scenes, load screens, repeated spell animations, endless combat encounters, etc.
I wish modern games would have the same feature!
Fair point, I was playing on MiSTER.
This is very frustrating, but I'm not sure it's a problem only with classic JRPGs - recently I sat down to play Bayonetta 3 and it had a similar problem (along with.. others).
FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes?
It the same with Spiderman: Miles Morales. There are some cut scenes you cannot skip. Worse they they are cut scenes that don't actually affect the main story arc.
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.
> FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes?
Except when you use the Knights of the Round summon, then you go grab a coffee while waiting for the animation to finish :).
Most of the Final Fantasy games have been like that, which is why I've (most of the time) been a fan since since FF4/2. I can't remember how many times I've been turned off by a game when it starts with the protagonist being woken up by his mom, followed by endless wandering around town.
It often gets worse. I stopped playing Final Fantasy X (on the PS2) because there was a boss battle where there was a 10 minute un-skippable cutscene between each stage of the battle and if you died you had to re-watch each one.
FFX’s balance is awful if you go straight from point to point and don’t take some long grinding breaks. You’ll hit exactly the kinds of boss-walls you mention, and yeah, the cutscene placement is simply abusive.
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)
The boss battles weren't that hard. The issue was the un-skippable cut-scenes.
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 think at that point I'd call it and mark that one as "finished it".
I don't think I will ever play a JRPG again. In fact it was the last one.
These days I want my games to be actual games.
[dead]
> 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes.
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?
I could ask you a similar question: why play an RPG if you don't care about playing? Go watch a movie.
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.
I agree with your take here that he should care about the cut scenes/story if bothering to play, but this has gotten especially bad in newer games where they try to shove you right into the game before you can tweak settings. I never played through Bravely Default on 3DS because the opening scene used the English dub instead of the original audio, and I had to skip it to access the settings and change languages, then there was no way to rewatch that opening scene. I've similarly avoided their other games like Octopath Traveler as I suspect they have the same issue. It seems like an accessibility issue. I don't think they should ever stop you from getting to the settings first thing. I am not entertained by them trying to be overly cinematic. I don't think it would kill them to wait until you hit "start new game".
Starting off with 10min of exposition is too much and it’s lazy. You don’t even know if you’re going to like the game yet. Do some en media res story telling and get on with it.
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.
Oh I do care about the story, but please don't front-load the credits and make me sit through them.
I play RPGs for the fun of turning time and grind into more advanced abilities (eg going from getting slaughtered by dragons in Skyrim to being the one doing the slaughtering).
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).
> 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly
Mmm played any Kojima games? :)
You can typically skip most dialogue and cut-scenes in the MGS games. Also quite a number of the cut-scenes are interactive and can actually help you in game play (codec numbers are show, clues etc).
MGS-4 though is has ridiculous cutscene length.
MGS4 would be like 10% shorter if you had a mod that just cut every line in a cutscene that’s someone repeating someone else’s previous line, but as a question.
I never finished it. So I wouldn't know.
Nope, MGS was big on Playstation when I was growing up and the whole stealth gameplay does not appeal to me.
I never played the 1st Grandia, but I had Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I absolutely loved that game. I'll admit that I was never the best with (J)RPGs and never played it for that long per-session as a kid, but I did eventually finish it. Though, it did take many years to finally get to the end and finish the game, but I enjoyed it! (I also enjoyed Evolution 2: Far Off Promise).
Worth pointing out that a Grandia 1 & 2 HD bundle came out earlier this year: https://www.grandiahd.com/
I've been getting more and more into retro gaming lately, and something that really made it click for me is leveraging shaders (or overlays) to simulate period-accurate displays. For a Sega Saturn, that'd be some kind of CRT. The art direction in these games are designed to take advantage of the quirks of the CRT, and often look significantly better on a CRT. Noodle just did a decent video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
I strongly recommend anyone getting into retro gaming, try some CRT shaders (or lcd ones for portables)!
Or get a CRT if you live in a populous area, have the space, and a strong back! It’s gotten harder since Covid when they were seemingly everywhere, but if you’re lucky you’ll find a good curbed unit. Gave my buddy a 24” trinitron recently I just couldn’t keep around anymore and he is having a blast playing his PS2 on it with component cables. FFX really sings as do racing games.
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)
Hah, I wish I had the space for this and original hardware! For me it's hard to justify the space and cost when I can just have all the videogames ever made on a couple SSDs and run them on emulators.
Then again, I seem to have accidentally started a small GB/GBA cart collection...
Oh I rememeber in one of the games, one of the girls would say ganba ganba something at the end of each battle. I didn't understand it back then but I loved it.
Grandia is a beautiful game. Both visually and from a story telling perspective. A simple, sweet coming of age tale told without cynicism.
Justin, Sue and Feena feel like old friends.
looks like the host is getting too many requests, anyone know of a mirror?
> Game Arts subsequently ported Grandia to the PlayStation, dropping it in Japan in the summer of 1999.
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"?
It’s a natural extension of the older term. “A [whatever] dropped right in front of me” conveys the original and new meanings just fine.
“A [whatever] was dropped in Japan. Where is [whatever]?”
“In Japan, for one.”
I thought it was from some music subculture. I first encountered it in the context of albums, around the early or mid 2010s.
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.
I feel like I heard it used in that way since at least the '90s.
I read that as "playing Grandma" and thought that was a pretty clever game concept.