Grandia

a review

It’s a cute entry point for Japanese Role-Playing Games

I think Grandia might be one of the cutest, most charming games I've played in a long time. It's a pretty brisk RPG, roughly 50 hours across two discs, but you pretty much always feel like you have plenty of forward momentum. The characters are somewhat simple, making good use of existing archetypes, but they're given enough personality through the writing that they're still a lot of fun. (I'm actually bummed that none of the cast show up in the sequel since I came to love this bunch.)

Though the controls can be a little stiff and stilted, it's easy to fall into a rhythm. It helps that the game's visual style, with chibi character sprites in an early 3D diorama world, is so cozy and cute. I can overlook some jank if I'm enjoying myself.

What was decidedly less janky was the battle mechanics. I'm stunned at how well it flows, as someone whose only JRPG experiences are watching a friend's cousin play Final Fantasy VII when I was in elementary school, watching people play Pokemon (I didn't actually play any of the games until my late 20s somehow), and listening to a college roommate play Grandia II on Dreamcast while I was desperately sick with the flu. Grandia's battles are, in some ways, conventional: you pick attacks, spells, or items when your turn comes up. But, one great addition is an initiative system, whereby your characters and opponents are represented on a timeline. Depending on your stats, you'll move down that timeline faster or slower, and if you time things right and use the right attacks, you can counter and cancel out your opponents' actions. It's pretty intuitive once you settle into it, and if you wrap your head around how a particular opponent works, you can reliably blaze through encounters without getting hit.

It also helps that the encounter frequency and XP gain between key story events are paced well. So long as you're not actively avoiding battles, you'll naturally level at roughly the same rate as the designers expect, which keeps you from feeling outrageously over-leveled or out of your depth against too-strong enemies. I basically only hit one point where I was under-leveled, but the dungeon had enough fights that I could get to a point where I could take the boss on. Raising each party member one level, and being more strategic about actions and items, got us through!

In short, it's great! The character writing is refreshingly simple and sweet, the character designs are adorable and the world is one I enjoyed exploring. The story isn't anything groundbreaking, but these characters work enough for me that I enjoyed joining them on their adventure.

More to come soon! My wrist is sore today so I'm not gonna go overboard typing. Spoiler alert from this point forward though