#Grandia ps1 rom full#
#Grandia ps1 rom series#

The icons will move toward the right side until an icon reaches the COM point in the gauge at which point the battle will freeze and a menu will open up allowing you to chose a command for the one character that has reached the COM point. In here you can see an icon for each one of your party members and for each one of your enemies. Once in battle there is a gauge on the bottom of the screen called the IP gauge. In other words you will be able to attack first, if in the other hand the monster surprises you, he or them, there can be as many as six at a time, will have the first turns to attack your party. If you run into a monster and touch him from behind (without the monster noticing you) you will have a tactical advantage in the battle. Avoiding the monsters of course is not recommended because like in every other RPG success on Grandia depends on how high your level is, and the only way to gain levels is by fighting monsters. So you can either avoid the enemies or fight them. The battle system works this way: There are no random encounters, instead you are able to see the enemies on the environments. The system feels like an action RPG but with turns.

The battle system in Grandia is today the industries best as it obviously was in 1999. I always saw the lack of a real time world map in a game as a product of slacking in the developers no real time world map kills the Immersion in the game world and the exploration.

#Grandia ps1 rom series#

Yet it now makes my blood boil when Game series like Suikoden and Final Fantasy went on to follow this approach. Obviously this is one of the worst things that could have happened to the RPG industry it was fine when Grandia used this approach as it was the only game at the time to use this. Since Grandia was perhaps the most revered game to start the tradition of ditching a real-time over world map in favor of a drawing with dots that connect to the places you want to go. The world might have the Grandia series to thank for the lack of true over world maps in today’s RPGs. The gameplay in Grandia is your standard RPG fare one, in fact like in Grandia 2 there isn’t much to discover in the over world, but at least in this game there a few hidden swords and equipment in treasure chests. In the sound department the game is way below the Square RPGs of that era. There rest of the cast is terrible too with the possible exception of Mullen’s and Baal’s voice work. I have some bad memories of a scene in which Feena cries or so it seems since it sounds more like she is trying to laugh but she is constipated. However the same cannot be said for the voice acting, Justin is just plain annoying and Feena does a good job as long as she is not in a dramatic scene. However the songs get the job done and are never particularly annoying. Musically the game is on par with its sequel Grandia 2, some of the sadder compositions are great however the rest of the soundtrack is good but not great and I dare say not very good either.

#Grandia ps1 rom full#

However the back grounds take a dive as they look pixilated and flat almost as if they were drawings, they seem to lack life, which is annoying considering that the over world back grounds are full of it. The visuals in the battles are sort of uninspiring, the characters and the monsters sprites retain the same visual quality as in the over world back grounds. This slowdown was not present on the Saturn version, a testament to that defunct system’s power. If there is one flaw graphically is the fact that a noticeable slowdown occurs in the screen when there are many sprites moving at a time, or when the are many effects on the screen at once.

The environments are full of details that can be interacted with, for example, glass bottles in a kitchen can be knocked down, and brooms resting on walls can be knocked over. However I have to say that after playing both of these games, graphically they are about in the same class, Grandia’s artwork however is more colorful, with amazing water effects as far as 32-Bit graphics go. Graphically Grandia follows the same visual style that Xenogears follows, fully 3-D backgrounds that are viewed from a top-view perspective, the characters and enemies are 2-D sprites. However thanks to collaboration between Gamearts (the developers) and SCEA about two years later in 1999 the game was released in the States as a PS1 game. This caused much suffering to true RPG fans that had been eagerly waiting for this masterpiece. Grandia was Sega Saturn’s answer to the PS’s FFVII, it was an RPG that was promised to eclipse any RPG before it, and while it’s not as good as FFVII, it comes close and it is one of those few RPGs that can be defined as a classic.īeing that the Saturn was almost on its deathbed in the US at the time Grandia was about to be released, the game was canned for the states.