The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

Posted by tosh 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by jerf 19 hours ago

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.)

Comment by thrownaway85 17 hours ago

Im probably a fool for posting this but this thread and these responses warm my heart. It's good to see so many people were affected by this era of gaming from Sega the same way that I was.

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

Comment by jandrese 16 hours ago

It's very common with RPGs of that era (and all eras really) that the developers don't test every edge case and end up leaving ultra-powered (and just as many or more close to useless) builds in the game. Every feature added increases the possibility of breakage by some quadratic factor. Once your battle system hits a certain level of complexity it's close to inevitable.

Even carefully developed modern games like Baldur's Gate 3 have game breaking build options.

Comment by gh02t 12 hours ago

To be fair to e.g. Baldur's Gate, finding game breaking builds appeals to many people in the core audience of that sort of game along with classic TTRPG players. Making those builds harder to achieve by accident is a good thing, but doing away with them entirely would probably be detrimental for the intended audience. True brilliance is also have systems that make that sort of build still fun to play, e.g. BG3 has some pretty amusing hidden interactions if you steamroll events you're not supposed to be able to win.

Comment by twoodfin 10 hours ago

Reminds me of a game-breaking strategy in the (interesting, flawed) hybrid RTS/RPG War in Middle Earth (1988).

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.

Comment by jldugger 14 hours ago

IMO the way around that is to make breaking the game a requirement. If it's already an accidental part of the fun, might as well make it intentional!

Comment by smj-edison 13 hours ago

I'd put Noita in that category. I usually describe it as "broken both ways", because (as a rogue like) you have very little healing, and the enemies are punishingly hard. Not only that, but it's a full falling sand+physics simulation, so certain elements will randomly combine and kill you in the most unexpected and spectacular ways. On the flip side, the wand system is near turing-complete, and gets abused in the most crazy ways, to the point that you can do millions of damage per tick. One of the most chaotic and fun games I've played!

Comment by bigstrat2003 14 hours ago

That makes games that aren't fun unless you're a wizard with the systems. They have their place, but I'm not a fan.

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.

Comment by jldugger 12 hours ago

Perhaps "requirement" was a poor phrasing of the idea. "Feature?"

> 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.

Comment by jerf 13 hours ago

I think Disgaea fits into that class. The solution to every problem is "more levels", but the game is basically built around that. I think it's also fun to craft your own challenges out of the raw materials given to you... to get as many levels as quickly as possible, to win at minimum levels, to win with only X, to ignore Y and Z, etc.

Comment by p1necone 15 hours ago

I think besides the mechanics, the other thing that makes the grandia/grandia 2 battle system so fun is how snappy all the animations and interactions are. You never really feel like you're waiting for things to happen even though it is semi turn based.

Comment by donatj 15 hours ago

Grandia II is the only JRPG I've ever really truly enjoyed the battle system of. I feel like with a lot of JRPG's I'm sitting around doing math.

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.

Comment by Izkata 11 hours ago

The very first area at the start of the game actually encouraged this if you experimented even a little: Combo is the default attack but it doesn't defeat those early enemies so they'll hit you back, but the battles start with just the right timing so if you use Critical first it'll knock them back so your next Combo would hit and defeat them without you taking any damage.

Comment by alexchantavy 10 hours ago

Grandia II's battle system was really great but the story and voice acting was so rough haha, I ended up not caring about any of the characters and skipping all that I could to get to the combat

Comment by KolibriFly 15 hours ago

When the core mechanics are that good, it's frustrating to see them undermined by soft balancing

Comment by Marazan 17 hours ago

Grandia II battle system also breaks when you get Teo. An area effect Critical? Basically allows you to completely control every battle even if you haven't invested in a board wiping Uber character.

Comment by jajuuka 17 hours ago

My first experience with Grandia was Grandia II as well but on PS2. I ended up getting the PC version as well, which at the time was fairly novel to see JRPG's on PC. Grandia II is still one of my nostalgic favorites. As you mentioned the typical turn based combat with positioning was a fun addition that could change your combat experience each time. Was like an evolution of the Chrono Trigger combat system.

Comment by jerf 13 hours ago

I find myself designing a TRPG (Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea) with Grandia time & space mechanics in my head; take position even a bit more seriously than Grandia did, but build on a TRPG balance and skill structure. Basically end up with a much more dynamic take on the TRPG, which has always been a bit of a static experience. The canceling mechanics coming from Grandia would be banger in that sort of more dynamic TRPG.

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.)

Comment by bena 15 hours ago

Try the Lunar series. It has something similar.

Comment by spondyl 22 hours ago

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

Comment by layer8 18 hours ago

Did they ever fix the HD version? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UokSL_j7Ot8

Comment by throwaway613745 17 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by triwats 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by Izkata 11 hours ago

> Nice comment! How is the HD collection?

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.

Comment by vikingerik 16 hours ago

I agree, on where the flaws often make the games.

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.

Comment by qingcharles 16 hours ago

It warms my heart knowing that there's others that enjoyed Grandia as much as I did. It always felt very underrated and forgotten.

Comment by KolibriFly 14 hours ago

It's kind of poetic that you've been slowly chipping away at it over holidays, bit by bit

Comment by throwaway613745 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by garciansmith 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by AdmiralAsshat 15 hours ago

> It's too bad it never got a rerelease of some sort to make it more accessible to people

IIRC, the source code for it was lost, so all they could really do is glorified emulation.

Comment by Grazester 13 hours ago

Do any remastered games actually use the original source code from the OG games?

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

Comment by klaussilveira 19 hours ago

Finding a good CRT locally has been pretty difficult. I think everyone is caught on the "this is worth gold now" trend.

Comment by ethagnawl 17 hours ago

Where are you located? I've been grabbing them whenever I see them (roadside, e-waste, yard sales, etc.) for years and honestly have too many. Some of them, like my 36" Trinitron, have become an albatross.

Comment by deadbabe 18 hours ago

It’s not worth gold, a lot of CRTs are dead or dying, the tubes have limited hours. After that, they just become junk. Most have been disposed, so you’re going to struggle to find a local one.

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.

Comment by KolibriFly 14 hours ago

There's something fundamentally different about playing these games on the hardware they were designed for

Comment by Apocryphon 16 hours ago

Nightdive's Blade Runner Enhanced Edition is pretty infamous, so they've had a few bombs here and there. But not often.

Comment by triwats 20 hours ago

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!

Comment by lukan 19 hours ago

I only know the second part of grandia, but it is great!

(There does not seem a story connection, though)

Comment by Izkata 11 hours ago

There's a fan theory that Grandia II is a prequel to Grandia set in the far, far, far distant past. I think the main basis is from one of the final scenes in Grandia II, involving two people with wings - possibly be very first Icarians (Grandia's ancient nonhuman civilization).

Comment by qingcharles 17 hours ago

The soundtrack to Grandia lives rent free in my head. I've not heard it in 20 years but I can still play it back.

Comment by triwats 16 hours ago

Happily found out on Monday that it is available on Spotify!!111

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).

Comment by qingcharles 3 hours ago

Thank you! I think I had this on CD decades ago that I found in a comic book store.

I just went and found the whole soundtrack online. I found this cool live orchestra version too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4fUdY1PGhY

Comment by jeppester 14 hours ago

I got my hands on Grandia because one of my friends' younger brother thought it was Digimon and begged their mom to buy it.

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.

Comment by robin_reala 21 hours ago

Site’s currently down, here’s a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20251209110317/https://www.segas...

Comment by jamesbelchamber 23 hours ago

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..

Comment by tosh 23 hours ago

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

Comment by KolibriFly 15 hours ago

А strong reminder of why emulation and fan translation efforts matter. Without them, this version of Grandia would remain lost to time

Comment by devinprater 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by KolibriFly 14 hours ago

Emulation isn't just about convenience or preservation, it can literally unlock experiences for people who were previously shut out

Comment by anthk 18 hours ago

Dragon Ball it's one of these games where for the blind it's much better to be played in a MUD (and some of them describe scenes in an incredible way) that you will get almost the same as a sighted reader with the manga. Parries, locks, grabs, ki beam exchanges, magical techniques... everything it's there.

Comment by TavsiE9s 22 hours ago

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.

Comment by jeppester 22 hours ago

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!

Comment by TavsiE9s 21 hours ago

Fair point, I was playing on MiSTER.

Comment by jamesbelchamber 22 hours ago

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?

Comment by FieryMechanic 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by kokada 21 hours ago

> 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 :).

Comment by ozbonus 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by FieryMechanic 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by phantasmish 20 hours ago

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)

Comment by FieryMechanic 19 hours ago

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 .

Comment by Izkata 11 hours ago

On the switch there were only two of those walls that I hit, I didn't really do any grinding outside of those points. It turned out the first one had a trick to beat it, grinding didn't actually help that much, and the second was the final boss...

Comment by TavsiE9s 21 hours ago

I think at that point I'd call it and mark that one as "finished it".

Comment by FieryMechanic 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by bigstrat2003 14 hours ago

Look, complaining about unskippable cutscenes is one thing. Everyone has that complaint about FFX, I even know what boss you're talking about because it's so infamous. But saying that JRPGs aren't "actual games" is ridiculous. They are games, whether or not you personally enjoy them.

Comment by FieryMechanic 11 hours ago

I am not saying they aren't games. What I am saying is that I enjoy stuff now that has basically no plot and let's me get on with the game.

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".

Comment by pcdoodle 20 hours ago

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Comment by kouteiheika 21 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by xandrius 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by JoshTriplett 16 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by ThrowawayR2 18 hours ago

Unlike a movie, when done well, the combat/grinding add to player engagement because it places the player in direct charge of the characters' growth from a nobody to a legend. You can't get that from a movie.

Comment by opan 21 hours ago

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".

Comment by hombre_fatal 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by YurgenJurgensen 10 hours ago

10 minutes is a long time now? Is this what TikTok does to a person’s brain? Cartoon Network typically had 11 minute episodes, so you’re complaining that you don’t even have the attention span of a child.

Comment by jccalhoun 14 hours ago

For me, it isn't about not liking the story, but about having to watch a movie when I want to play a game. Don't show it to me. Let me do it.

Comment by butlike 11 hours ago

Dopamine only hits when the numbers go up. So no min/maxing when the cutscenes are playing

Comment by TavsiE9s 21 hours ago

Oh I do care about the story, but please don't front-load the credits and make me sit through them.

Comment by rkomorn 21 hours ago

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).

Comment by erfgh 16 hours ago

JRPGs are like movies that you can interact with. If you don't enjoy the cutscenes then it will be a drag.

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.

Comment by nottorp 21 hours ago

> 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly

Mmm played any Kojima games? :)

Comment by FieryMechanic 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by phantasmish 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by FieryMechanic 21 hours ago

I never finished it. So I wouldn't know.

Comment by TavsiE9s 21 hours ago

Nope, MGS was big on Playstation when I was growing up and the whole stealth gameplay does not appeal to me.

Comment by ethagnawl 17 hours ago

I haven't seriously tried playing it again since it came out but it didn't appeal to me either and my friends all thought I'd lost it. I also remember the clerk at Electronics Boutique being gobsmacked when I wanted to return it.

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.

Comment by lanfeust6 15 hours ago

Yes, and for as much as that's an annoyance, games are far worse now. This has infected everything AAA, not just JRPGs. See: the God of War reboot, Tomb Raider, etc.

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.

Comment by AdmiralAsshat 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by wffurr 18 hours ago

They really didn't cover at all why this game is better specifically on Saturn than PS1 or any modern remake / emulator.

Comment by yesb 11 hours ago

IIRC it was originally built for Saturn and there were a number of graphical downgrades in the conversion to PS1 along with reduced sound quality. Loss of shadows on 3d buildings, loss of various 2d effects, issues with textures, less stable frame-rate, maybe more that super fans have documented online. It also came with a couple minor upgrades e.g. better video bitrate. Nothing is different enough to affect playing the game. The completion of the English patch is relatively recent so that probably explains the renewed interest in the Saturn version.

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.

Comment by zoeysmithe 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by rendaw 16 hours ago

Immediately after mentioning the Playstation port, the article explicitly states (in bold, on a line on its own)

> 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.

Comment by wffurr 18 hours ago

You could spend a little time singing the praises of your '57 Chevy and what makes it particularly joyful to you.

Comment by hnlmorg 17 hours ago

...which almost always ends in flamewars with people arguing over something that's entirely down to nostalgia and personal preference.

Comment by grimgrin 19 hours ago

in that vein, https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/grandia-hd-collec...

Comment by qingcharles 16 hours ago

It's bad though, isn't it? I saw some videos saying they did a really low effort job on it.

Comment by grimgrin 16 hours ago

maybe, but the blog post mentions it, sorta:

"Additionally, the first Grandia was recently remade for modern consoles with the release of the Grandia HD Collection."

Comment by snvzz 3 hours ago

For modern options, miSTer's saturn core is known to be very accurate.

Comment by robin_reala 21 hours ago

Worth pointing out that a Grandia 1 & 2 HD bundle came out earlier this year: https://www.grandiahd.com/

Comment by qingcharles 16 hours ago

Are they garbage? All the videos I've seen say the remasters are dogshit and ruin the game :(

Comment by robin_reala 16 hours ago

Honestly, I’ve not tried them. PS Store has the unremastered Grandia 1 available, which is what I’ve been playing.

Comment by nticompass 21 hours ago

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).

Comment by chromehearts 4 hours ago

I never heard of the game but the visuals look so good. It reminds me a bit of Octopath Traveller

Comment by kbenson 13 hours ago

This point is driven home by Justin’s insatiable desire to uncover the mystery of his Spirit Stone, and the ancient Angelou civilization.

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

Comment by haolez 18 hours ago

I think Grandia was the biggest case in my life of a game that starts slow and finishes in a very high note. Crazy experience. Some unique story traits. It probably didn't age well, but I have fond memories :)

Comment by komali2 20 hours ago

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)!

Comment by Forgeties79 20 hours ago

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)

Comment by komali2 20 hours ago

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...

Comment by Forgeties79 15 hours ago

it would be a terrible shame if you learned about all the various ways you can mod a gameboy

Comment by tmtvl 12 hours ago

Grandia 2 on the PS2 was a lot of fun, it displaced Legend of Dragoon for my favourite battle system in a jRPG. Vagrant Story and Parasite Eve are also pretty neat, but I prefer Grandia 2 and Legend of Dragoon's party-based systems over the single character-based systems of those two.

Comment by drooopy 14 hours ago

Grandia's battle system is the best turn based battle system in a jrpg, ever.

Also Grandia >> Final Fantasy VII

Comment by rootsudo 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by hnthrowaway0328 20 hours ago

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.

Comment by test6554 12 hours ago

The “nostalgia” of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

Comment by Marazan 21 hours ago

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.

Comment by sentrysapper 21 hours ago

looks like the host is getting too many requests, anyone know of a mirror?

Comment by 16 hours ago

Comment by wicket 20 hours ago

> 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"?

Comment by ThrowawayR2 18 hours ago

Try thinking of it in the sense of "airdrop", which is not a new usage of the word "drop".

Comment by garciansmith 19 hours ago

I feel like I heard it used in that way since at least the '90s.

Comment by gilrain 20 hours ago

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.”

Comment by phantasmish 19 hours ago

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.

Comment by pnut 20 hours ago

I read that as "playing Grandma" and thought that was a pretty clever game concept.