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The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

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Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#41

Post by gilrain »

wicket wrote: post #38

> 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.”

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#42

Post by triwats »

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 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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#43

Post by garciansmith »

wicket wrote: post #38

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

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#44

Post by grimgrin »

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.

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

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#45

Post by lukan »

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)

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#46

Post by phantasmish »

gilrain wrote: post #41
wicket wrote: post #38

> 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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#47

Post by garciansmith »

throwaway613745 wrote: post #37

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…

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#48

Post by devinprater »

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#49

Post by rootsudo »

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#50

Post by jerf »

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.)

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