If we think about the golden age of JRPGswe certainly think of titles like Final Fantasy and Mana, and we rarely have the patience to dig a little deeper: however, if we ever decided to delve deeper into this world, we would discover many small pearls from the past, among which it is present without any doubt the Grandia series.
On the occasion of the launch of the Grandia HD Collection on PlayStation consoles, we present our review of this small re-proposal project, which includes the first and second chapters of the series, published in 1997 and 2000 respectively. Will these two historic JRPGs have managed to make inroads into the gaming world of 2024? Let's find out together.
A dive into the legend
As previously mentioned, the collection contains the first two chapters of the series: we will therefore put ourselves in the shoes of the young adventurer Justin (Grandia) and Ryudo (Grandia 2) exploring two very distinct eras of the JRPG world: the 2D/2.5D one from 1997 and the entirely 3D one from the early 2000s.
In both cases, however, we are faced with simple but entertaining plots, characterized by a large number of fairly well-characterised characters and situations that alternate between the epic and the comic. In short, the narrative balance of the original titles survives and is maintained well todaybut this does not surprise us.
We underline that, in both revivals, the characters are well dubbed (unfortunately only in English, but consider that the original 1997 game was only in Japanese) during the cutscenes, numerous but well managed. Despite being a title intended for a rather wide audience, we advise you to embark on this adventure only if you have a reasonable knowledge of the English language, as in the dialogues there are numerous idioms (and, among other things, in the cutscenes these they flow quite quickly).
As for the gameplay, we are faced with a “dynamic” turn-based JRPG setting, with characters moving around a battlefield and performing different types of actions: attacks, combo attacks, magic, defense strategies. This is a model that has inspired many modern projects (think of the Trails of Cold Steel saga).
Our party of colorful heroes can obviously level up, use tools and equipment that can be obtained by exploring the game worlddivided into small areas well characterized by variety of settings.
This, however, is not intended and should not be a review of the original titles, which appear to be among the best of the genre from the end of the 90s and the beginning of the new millennium. Let's go now and see if the re-proposal work turns out to be satisfactory for the needs of today's gamer who comes across this little forgotten saga for the first time.
A careless re-presentation
Let's start from the assumption that we are talking about one collection and not of a remastering or remake work: the changes made compared to the original titles, in short, are minimum For definition. Given the age of the games, we believe that a work of re-proposal of this type it is not very effective to bring new JRPG fans closer and push old fans to replay the two titles.
Specifying our opinion on the type of choice made by the developers, we try to understand what the positive and negative aspects of the product are: the positive thing is, without any doubt, the work of restructuring of cutscenes and backdropswhich we consider both a clear improvement on the basic project and an extremely faithful and never out of context remake.
As for the aspects that convinced us little about this re-proposal, we can only mention the menus: be the menu start that the game menu (the one to quickly view parties and equipment) they definitely needed modernizationhowever minimal.
Another aspect that makes us turn up our noses is without a doubt the lack of elements that make the experience lighter and faster: things like a system to make dialogue more fluid, the ability to skip or speed up cutscenes and other little things that are now standard for this type of game they are not present in any way in the collection, and to say that it would have taken so little to add them…
They are also completely absent, unfortunately, those little options that delight the most avid fans: menus to listen to the soundtracks and see the artwork were not taken into consideration by the developers, despite us.
In conclusionalthough the attempt to bring this forgotten series back into vogue with an official translation into English and evident improvements on the frame rate side (an aspect that caused quite a few problems in the original version on PS1) is appreciable) we believe that this work of revival, given also the important segment of the JRPG player community who would like to get closer (or closer) to this saga, is not sufficient given the standards to which modern players have been accustomed.
HP 304 Black and Tri-color, 3JB05AE, pack of 2 original HP cartridges, compatible with HP DeskJet 2620, 2630, 3720, 3730, 3750 and 3760 printers, HP ENVY 5010, 5020 and 5030
€24.99 (starting from 2 April 2024 18:53 GMT +02:00 – More informationProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase it will apply to the purchase of this product.)
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