Grandia Xtreme
XTREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEME!Sorry, just felt like doing that.
Grandia Xtreme, being the sequel in name, but not in story, to Grandia II. And let me be frank from the start, I'll be assed if I'm going to play this game again. Hell no. It sucks. As it so happens, I've played and finished this game not too long before I started this project, and I really don't feel like playing it again, so I'm just going to skip it. The scars are still to deep. Don't get me wrong, I did try yesterday, but I started convulsing and retching like mad, so I decided it would be in the best interest of my physical health to stop playing.
The sequel to Grandia II indeed. The name of Grandia is crying, as they would say in Japanese, cos this is a load of tripe unworthy of the series. First of all, this game was released 2 YEARS after Grandia II, and on a much more powerful console, yet it still uses the same graphic engine, albeit with brighter colors and sharper images. They've even rehashed almost all of the enemies from Grandia II, without changeing ANYTHING.
Hell, even the main character Evan looks like an EXACT clone of Rude from Grandia II, it's incredibly cheap. The game seriously looks like it's running off a Dreamcast with a better color pallette, having the same polygon count and everything, it's just a bit faster.
The Xtreme in the title I suppose stands for the fact that this game mainly focuses on combat and dungeon crawling. The combat system remains largely unchanged from Grandia II, with some slight tweaks to improve it, and it remains very very good, but the Dungeons SUCK.
For one thing, they're really HUGE, which would be nice if they knew how to keep your attention, but as it is, the dungeons aren't any more interesting than those in Grandia II, with the added disadvantage of being 5 times larger AND HAVING NO SAVE POINTS. Seriously.
Occasionally you'll find a "Geo-gate" which you can use to warp back to town to rest and shop, and equip any new found skills and mana-eggs (used for magic), because you can't even fucking equip them in the menu screen, you have to do that at a shop.
You can only save and restore in the town. Every mana egg has a set amount of MP, which cannot be restored by any means, except for going back to town and sleeping.
Typically, there'll be about one save point per dungeon, which is about half-way through, meaning that there will be NO saving before bosses, unless you want to track all the way back to the geo-gate before tackling a boss. It's just as well that if you should choose to do that, enemies will not respawn, but it's still way too much trouble.
On the up-side, there's a huge variety of skills, and mana-eggs can be fused to create even more powerful attacks; also personal techniques can be combined for combo attacks, in Chrono Trigger fashion, which adds a lot more fun to the already superb battle system, but the rest of the game is so tedious and annoying!
Grandia II knew to compensate it's few shortcomings by having a decent story and likeable characters and voice-acting, but none of those are present in this game.
The story is boring and uninteresting, it merely serves as a coat-rack for the stupid dungeons, characters are unlikeable and have no real affinity to each other, voice-acting is dull, and there are no FMV magic sequences anymore, meaning that magic effect are quite boring now too.
There is absolutely NO reason why you would want to play this game if you've played Grandia II, unless you're so infatuated with the Battle system that you simply can never get enough, which is actually understandable.
Other Grandia fans will probably only be insulted and want to steer well clear of this. If you've never played a Grandia before, you don't know how it should be, so this might provide some light entertainment, again, mainly because of the insanely good battle system, otherwise, you won't want to wade through this piece of muck.
A 6.5, grudgingly, mostly because of it's rich ancestry.
I have serious doubts about Grandia III now...
posted by Ingen! @ 11:07 AM
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