Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

segasaturnshiro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#111

Post by yesb »

wffurr wrote: post #54
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #40

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.

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#112

Post by Izkata »

donatj wrote: post #86
jerf wrote: post #50

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…

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.

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#113

Post by FieryMechanic »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #100
FieryMechanic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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".

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#114

Post by Izkata »

triwats wrote: post #42
spondyl wrote: post #7

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…

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 mos…

> 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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#115

Post by Izkata »

lukan wrote: post #45
triwats wrote: post #39

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. Rea…

I only know the second part of grandia, but it is great! (There does not seem a story connection, though)

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).

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#116

Post by Izkata »

phantasmish wrote: post #29
FieryMechanic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, dedi…

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...

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#117

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #35
kouteiheika wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#118

Post by twoodfin »

gh02t wrote: post #106
jandrese wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Bal…

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 so…

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#119

Post by alexchantavy »

jerf wrote: post #50

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…

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
Post reply on HN