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The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
81–90 of 127 posts
Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
#82I 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…
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.
Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
#83My 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…
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.
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).
Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
#84I 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…
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.
Try the Lunar series. It has something similar.
Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
#85I 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 ev…
> 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.
Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
#86I 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.
Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 emu…
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...
it would be a terrible shame if you learned about all the various ways you can mod a gameboy
Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
#88I'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.
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.
Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
#89I 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…
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.
Re: The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
#90А strong reminder of why emulation and fan translation efforts matter. Without them, this version of Grandia would remain lost to time