Grandia Sucks

Feena is in one of the tents, and she doesn't know why. We talk to Leen. She warns us that Gaia will destroy Zil Padan and wants to stop him by combining the Icarian powers. Apparently, this will destroy the city. Justin thinks he can save everyone, so we head to Zil.

But I wanted to do a little side quest. The Tower of Temptation is in the Savannah Wilderness. It's four floors and filled with enemies that aren't worth fighting. They give terrible EXP, awful rewards, and almost no skill levels. But, boy, are there a lot of them. They group up in four to six together and resist all magic. They have a lot of HP, so it takes a while to dwindle their life down. To make matters worse, the item rewards in the tower are terrible. A staff for a mage, super? The Herc Ring? I don't know what action does. "The Best Axe"? That's kinda cool, I guess. That took me two and a half hours, but I did it. I got everything in this terrible maze of a dungeon. I did all of that, only be ambushed by a bat at the very end and get one shotted by it. My entire team got wiped in one move before I could even defend myself. Two and half hours of my life, in the terrible, optional dungeon, for nothing. All the time, experience, and gold are now lost. Do you know what else is lost? My patience with this game.

You should have probably seen the writing on the wall for this, but I am not enjoying this playthrough. I find the characters to be middling, at best, or useless on the regular. Justin, Feena, and Sue interested me for a while, but why is Rapp here? Why is Liete so bad? And we don't really get to know anyone for that long because we move maps. How is our mother dealing with our travels? Sue is eight! What about her parents? Did the Adventurer's Guild leader get his comeuppance for kidnapping a woman? Which reminds me: Feena gets kidnapped too often. Dear game devs, don't let your main heroine gets kidnapped a million times. It's a trope that's done too often, so limit it in your games.

The music is garbage. Up and down the OST are annoying, repetitive, and some of the worst tracks I've ever heard. Some of the early stuff are non offensive, but I doubt, even with nostalgia, I'd remember any of their melodies. And everything on the last disk was terrible. It's rare to find a video game with terrible music, but we have a clear winner here. Some games have bad soundtracks, but Grandia is straight terrible. I listen to a lot of video game mixes on Youtube, and I don't remember how often any Grandia tracks have passed by.

The dungeons are among the worst I've ever seen. They go on forever, are filled with boring, reused mobs, and are limited in puzzle frequency. It's just you walking around a maze for an hour trying to find the McGuffin. And there are so many of them. The transitional areas don't need to be so long or exist at all. Brinan Plateau didn't need to be two sections, even if it had good music. The End of the World is fine because it was built for the first half of the game. I didn't mind the Misty Forest, and it's not even that most of the other smaller ones were bad. There's just so many. Why are there a million plotless dungeons? The areas before Laine were when I ran out of patience, but they kept it up with the Grandeur, The Underground Ruins, and whatever they had planned next.

Item inventory management shouldn't be a thing in "modern" RPGs. At least not like this and the limited space. A weight limit like in open world RPGs? I understand that. But here? Does it make sense: yes. Is it fun? Hell no! I love the tedium of sorting stuff!

The ending was an unrewarding and magical mish-mash. It took me 55 hours, and that's all I got. Had I not cheated, I would have felt cheated. What happened to everyone? Why weren't the kids wearing shoes?

The story is kinda average. I liked some of it, but it falls towards the end. Stories about friendship overcoming all obstacles are fun, but it may not be for me. If I were younger, maybe it would hit differently, as they say, but I'm in my thirties. Also, if it were in a better game. But still, a lot of it at the end doesn't make sense. Justin being abandoned by everyone comes from nowhere. Luckily it didn't last long, which kinda makes that a useless plot point. It also goes back and forth from the arbiter of history. Is it mankind or the Spirits? I also had several questions I brought up while playing that never got answered.

The only good thing was the battle system and the stat gains. The semi active time battle makes the combat feel alive and interesting. It really allows you to understand the idea behind casting time by actually seeing your character's portrait move on the bar. The "stand in rows" stuff of Final Fantasy gets stale, but in Grandia, the cast of characters moves around an open field. They don't return to their starting location after an action, nor do they just stand next to the mob. It looks and feels like a battle, which is a strange thing to say about a game. But anyone who lived through the golden age of RPGs will understand. Magic giving you more stats is admirable as it helps to make magic feel even more vital to growth. It's not just a wider and varied array of spells but tangible numbers.

The downside is how grindy it is, though. It can take a long time to build up to new spells, and not all schools are created equally. Water is nearly impossible to get up since there are so few attack spells, and healing is rare and ineffective. I had to constantly put enemies to sleep, which doesn't always work. Earth is another issue I had since a lot of early levels go to Buffs and Debuffs. One can only cast Diggin' so often before you grow mad. And because you're not doing damage, battles take forever to finish. Combine the time in combat with all those terrible dungeons I hate, and it makes a bad game.

I really wanted to like Grandia. It's a classic RPG not from Square that a lot of people liked. I even liked most of it until the second disk, and all of my qualms with it got worse. Maybe I'll turn on more cheat codes and rush the end of the game, but I'm through writing about it. The story was yeoman, nothing to get on a soapbox about, though, but it was just enough to get me through all the negatives. But now, though, I can't. I'm not having fun. I haven't been for a while. It's time to put this to rest.

There's something I've been wanting to do for a while now, so I'm gonna play Final Fantasy III on Friday. I don't want to splurge on the Pixel Remaster, so I'll be using the 3D Remake. I'll be ignoring all the characterization of the playable cast since I don't have female friends, among other reasons. What I really wanted to do was run through it with my friends. I did this with Final Fantasy I, so I'm really looking forward to this, and that is why I'm ignoring what I had planned. Get ready for The Diary of a Red Mage!