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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

#51

Post by klaussilveira »

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…

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

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#52

Post by FieryMechanic »

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…

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 .

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#53

Post by FieryMechanic »

TavsiE9s wrote: post #25
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.

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#54

Post by wffurr »

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#55

Post by zoeysmithe »

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.

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#56

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

xandrius wrote: post #21
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?

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.

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#57

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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"?

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

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#58

Post by layer8 »

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…

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

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#59

Post by anthk »

devinprater wrote: post #48

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…

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.

Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

#60

Post by wffurr »

zoeysmithe wrote: post #55
wffurr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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