Lunar Threads

Never used PSN before but I might so I can try out Grandia. I've always wanted to try out at least one of the Grandia games. The local mom n' pop game shop did have a physical copy of the game but it was around 40 bucks...

you should all do yourselves a favor and stop playing this game at the halfway point. you'll thank me.

Why do you say, Kefka?

Grandia seems to be one game people like it, but never finish it.
At least from what I heard. Most people I asked said the exact thing "I liked it, but never finished it."

Even I put it on hold like halfway through.

Why? Does it get boring? Or is there some annoying mission you have to do near the middle?

The second disc had too many dungeons, and they were all too long. Nothing particularly boring happens, but the game just starts to wear at you. The pace of the first disc is "town dungeon event repeat." In the second disc it's more like "dungeon dungeon dungeon town event repeat," and the gameplay isn't quite interesting enough to keep most people interested. It's very much worth finishing, though. Grandia has one of the best endings of all time.

The series in general has been kinda weird like that. Grandia was a bit on the too long side. I clocked 60 or 70 hours when I would have been satisfied with 40 or 50. Grandia II was way too short. I beat it in just over 20 hours. I'm hoping Grandia III is nice and in the middle.

In other words, once you get to the second half, Grandia starts to wear you down. I'll keep that in mind. -.-'

Jasonb12 wrote:Why do you say, Kefka?

Well, lets see how to go about this. The appeal of Grandia, to me, is the very specific way it goes about building its world. Many (most) RPGs star a little goofy kid that has to leave home for one reason or another, travel the world, discover some Ancient Power, blah blah blah blah. Grandia, when it tries, does this better than any other RPG ever made. The first half of the game offers a tremendous sense of place. You really feel like you're that little kid, that there's always something interesting around the corner, and that the world is a lot bigger than it really is. You spend a long time in the first town (Parn). You get yelled at for playing stupid little kid games. The town itself is really fantastic--it's got that real sprites-on-polys lived in feel that the best RPGs of the time lived on, and it pulls it off better than the rest. When you leave Parn, it's an event. Like, you get pretty excited. You're not really sure where you're going. You take a boat ride to the other continent, only unlike most RPGs it doesn't just show the little boat sailing for a couple seconds--maybe with a scene or two on the boat interspersed--and then boom, you're there. No, it takes a long time. The boat is another town, another dungeon, another place to explore, another group of people to hang out with.

So when you finally hit your destination--well, that's some hot -Dragon Diamond-. And the game knows that its hot -Dragon Diamond-. The second town (trying to keep spoilers down) is portrayed as on the frontier. It's a New World. This is genius, because to the player it really is a new world, and you've really felt like you lived in the old one. So this area is fantastic, because you're taking that idea of poking around the corners--so innocuous on Parn and the boat--and you're magnifying it, applying it to Real Grownup Work. It's pretty unique. I don't know if it holds up to my memory, to be honest, because it's been a long time, but yeah.

ALSO

Grandia takes the Lunar idea of having your party members Actually Talk to Each Other and runs with it. There are several scenes in the game that are just your guys shooting the -Dragon Diamond- over dinner, or at camp. It's great. Really enriches the experience.

So Grandia has all this going for it.

Then you hit the climax, at the end of the world, the total frontier, ready to see things that haven't been seen...!

And the game just falls off a cliff

(in more ways than one lol)

It turns into generic gotta save the world, look here's the ancient power, hey here's a couple towns to be ferreted through while Doing Something Important and great it's an EMPIRE and a GREAT EVIL and--snooooooooze. In many ways, it's a different game.

Seconded, Kefka. For a large chunk of the game, let's say two thirds, what keeps you going is this amazing sense of adventure and exploration. More than anything, Justin wants to know what's over the next hill, and the game is amazing at conveying this excitement and desire to the player. It's when the save the world stuff is introduced (coincidentally, around when the game gets too dungeon-y) that the appeal wears off.

One of the awesome things that Skies of Arcadia had over Grandia was that it never let go of that sense of fun and adventure even when you were saving the world. [/shamelessplug]

The second disc had it's moments (like the ridiculously difficult end boss) but it did kind of feel like they didn't know what to do with the story after a while.


REALLY MINOR SPOILER SKIP IT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW:
Grandia does a lot of little things well, but one of my favorites is they way they handle characters leaving your party. Like FFIV characters in your party get swapped out through the course of the game (though MUCH less frequently) and when a character does leave you get a percentage of their experience to allocate to anyone you want, so if you spent time leveling them up it wasn't for nothing.

That was one of the things that bothered me about Final Fantasy games to the point where, especially in FFIV I didn't want to level characters or buy them equipment because it would just be gone without warning.

Don't let our posts stop you from getting Grandia, its still a great game.

And the second part isn't bad, its just that I stopped it halfway. But I do that often, I even put Lunar 2 on hold, and its my favorite jRPG. I guess I get bored fast?

If I could play through Grandia in Japanese, then you should have no problem dealing with the second half of the game. It seems to take longer in the second half merely because of some of the more difficult dungeons. I don't know if they tweaked anything in the US release, but it took me a long time to get through the Star Moon Pagoda or whatever it was called.