Grandia Review (OTHER)

Justin just doesn’t give up

Every gamer, however old, has a little 8 year old child encased in a reverie of when games were at their peak, with a collection of games to which nearly every game past that point is to be compared. For me one of those games was Grandia.

Grandia is set in a spectacularly beautifully designed world where technological advancement is rapidly extinguishing the need for adventurers and dreamers. Following the fall of the ancient civilization of the Angelouvians centuries before, a young boy called Justin inherits the Spirit stone – a unique artefact that has a mystical link to the forgotten Angelouvian race – given to him from his father who left on an adventure years ago and never returned. With his childhood friend Sue they will meet other likeminded adventurers to find the forgotten Angelouvian City of Alent and battle the antagonist of the story General Baal of the Garlyle Army who is desperate to scour the world in order to find pieces of Spirit stone to find the ancient forgotten city of Alent for himself.

Grandia is a wonderfully childish and cheerful game pushed along with the aid of the sometimes Laurel and Hardy-esque relationship between Justin and Sue – with Sue playing the Ollie Hardy character. The dialogue is superbly acted out (might seem cheesy to some) with the musical score adding to the very well executed story – the orchestrated pieces are especially well suited to the games hopeful and endearing nature.

The rest of the cast of characters have been written with distinct and vibrant personalities (General Baal being my personal favourite – Scott Beers plays Baal so well!) The Trio of Mio, Nana and Saka add the clumsy group of Army sergeants that are just never clever enough or strong enough to surpass Justin, and always fail in their attempts to foil his quest but they are really fun to fight. Feena is the ‘seasoned’ amateur that is out to teach Justin all about adventuring but realises she can learn a thing or two from him.

Grandia is the adorable, plucky, annoyingly determined underdog

The battle system is basically the same as most RPG’s but is different enough to keep it from being monotonously annoying. Enemies are in plain sight on the field and a fight is initiated by walking into them. The enemies and party members are placed randomly on a battle field with an action bar resembling the old fashioned horse races you find at the arcades with each character’s image moving along to the ‘Action’ part of the bar and that’s when you get to act, neat huh? Special moves are split into different types of weapons with each character being able to use different weapons and level them up to learn new moves. The special moves are then integrated with the magic levelling up to create elementally based special attacks which ensures hours of enemy bashing to level up and gain cool fancy moves.

The graphics are reminiscent of games like Xenogears, and are a showcase of what the PS1 could do and currently I am playing this game through a third time and still can’t get enough of the gleefully chirpy, bright colours and cheerful graphics that add to the endearing quality of this game. The music scores are fantastic with the soaring Main Theme and upbeat fighting pieces maybe not as good as FFVII fighting melodies but will still get your blood pumping to whack some’eads. The cinematic FMV’s are far preferred personally to the rendered cut scenes I see even in today’s gaming goliaths such as Halo – I like to see different styles of animation in games, especially in RPG’s for cinematic effect. The spells and Special Moves aren’t as Stylised or on a par with FFVII but suit the game well and are still satisfying to execute once learned.

Grandia as an RPG, is just as good as the best RPG’s I have ever played. Final Fantasy VII is the big fish here but, Grandia is the adorable, plucky, annoyingly determined underdog with a charm and endearment unique to itself. If you feel like modern RPG’s just haven’t got the rich, deep characters and hearty genuine story that you loved in ye olde storytales gone by, then this is the game to get your teeth into.

Available now on the North American and Japanese PSN for PS3 and PSP…I’m still playing it on my old PS1.