The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

I haven't played the first one but I played Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I think it's still my favorite battle system in a JRPG to date. Not only does it have the obvious details you can see on a YouTube playthrough, but higher-end play with it also requires managing positioning, which is easy to miss as an option at all in the menus, or to think it has no purpose. A low-level challenge run would probably be a lot of fun.

Unfortunately in my casual playthrough I accidentally broke the combat system and by the end of the game nothing was a challenge; as with many other games there are "resistances" and "vulnerabilities" but also as with most non-Shin Megami Tensei games of the era, they aren't really strong enough or frequent enough to matter. I just pumped all my upgrades into Fire upgrades until eventually my routine end-game battle was one character to wipe all the enemies in one move, move to next battle. You could easily pump an elemental bonus enough to overwhelm the resistances the enemies had. More resistances and immunities distributed around would have helped prevent a degenerate strategy.

And of all the battle systems to have a degenerate strategy for, this one hurts the most because it is otherwise so good.

(Sadly, Grandia III was never completed. It was released... but it was never completed. The game as shipped has visible gaping holes in it, which is sad because what is there was quite good.)

I was just about to go to bed and what a surprise seeing Grandia trending #1 on Hacker News of all places.

For myself, Grandia is one of those games that was part of my childhood so despite having flaws, it transcends ratings in a sense.

It was the first game I ever got on the first home console I ever had, the PlayStation 1. I would only have been about 9 or 10(?) (31 now) and the intro to the game is burned into my mind because I never had a memory card for quite some time so I'd replay the opening hour or two over and over until it was time for dinner or bed.

Eventually I got a memory card and my next entry was Digimon World 2003 and I wonder to what extent that lead to me being interested in computers generally and ultimately becoming a developer as a day job.

To this day, I've still yet to finish Grandia. I picked up the HD Collection on Switch and I'm about halfway. Every time I go on vacation (or particularly during the Christmas holidays), I'll progress a bit. There's no real rush though in that once it's over, it's over. I don't really tend to replay titles, particularly long RPGs.

It's also kind of weird actually seeing the rest of the game too. For the longest time, I had no idea where the story was going. I've still mostly managed to avoid spoilers as well so I conceptually don't know where the story ends up which is nice, given years of reading Wikipedia synopsis only to regret it later.

> A total joy… but one that demands an intense time commitment. A player Justin’s age surely has the time

I found this part funny because I was Justin's age when I first played Grandia and never found the time then let alone now

I almost always try to play on original hardware on an appropriate display (CRT) whenever I can. The deluge of remasters and remakes we've been getting can be nice - but I find a lot of the time that they can be hit or miss. They often feel like they've lost a lot of the magic created when the developers of the era had to work with the limitations of the hardware of the era. Pixel art on those old CRT's vs pixel art on new games with modern displays is a good example, when working on those old CRTs you just had to create your art in a specific way that just doesn't look good when you slap it onto a modern OLED display. Even the modern pixel art that's designed FOR the new displays just doesn't quite capture the same feel.

I recently played Panzer Dragoon Saga on original Saturn hardware and I have to say that was one of the most profound experiences playing an RPG I've had in my life and playing it on the Saturn itself was a big part of it.

It doesn't help that some of the porting studios sometimes just do shoddy work. Aspyr, for one, can be hit or miss. The Deus Ex remake that's coming out, from what I've seen, is particularly egregious. Just based on the footage I've seen the artistry of the game is completely ruined.

On the flipside - Nightdive doesn't miss. They're the only ones that I will buy their remasters without researching the port quality because they just "get it". The Nightdive remasters of Turok, System Shock, Rise of the Triad, Blood and even some of the more niche ones like Powerslave and Killing time have all been fantastic. Even their full remake of the original System Shock is phenomenal.

My sister picked this up from a random supermarket in 1998/1999, and I sank 100s of hours into watching her play it through.

She does this thing where she wants to start games over and over again from the start, play them for a bunch of hours, then start it again.

The soundtrack and the challenge of beating the game at that age was wonderful.

I beat it a few years ago for the first time all the way through again. Really enjoyed it, but never played the sequel.

I find a lot of modern games unisnpiring. Too much focus is on creating a general great game, rather than focusing on story / mechanics.

Thanks for the post!

I got my hands on Grandia because one of my friends' younger brother thought it was Digimon and begged their mom to buy it.

Being 10 years old or so and not knowing much English yet (being Danes), we were pretty clueless about how to progress, but eventually we succeeded and got pretty far into the game. The game is about a great adventure, but for us it was also an adventure into the English language and a new type of game that we'd never tried before. I miss those experiences!

Later I went back to it and completed it in my teens.

The timing of this article is a bit fun since I'm currently playing it for the third time with my son, translating it on the go. It's awesome to see my "friends" also becoming his friends, and the game is holding up quite well and keeping him interested.

Apart from the charming characters, the visual variety is really good with each town having it's own style. There's also hardly a boring moment (admittedly using fast forward for the battles, which otherwise otherwise a bit repetitive later on), there's a new story beat every half hour or so to keep everything fresh.

The combat is also quite good, although easy if you have a bit of slightest experience with these kinds of games.

Site’s currently down, here’s a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20251209110317/https://www.segas...

I am determined to play this on Saturn at some point. I had the Playstation version as a kid and I didn't notice any of the flaws, it was just a brilliant game with a much more interesting and fun battle system than Final Fantasy. But now I see all the mismatched textures which have been ported right up to the modern HD "remasters".

Great to see that there's an English patch. Christmas is coming up..

А strong reminder of why emulation and fan translation efforts matter. Without them, this version of Grandia would remain lost to time

I never heard of the game but the visuals look so good. It reminds me a bit of Octopath Traveller

Thank goodness for emulation. With OCR, and now AI screenshot descriptions, I can know what menu I'm in, what menu option is selected, dialog on the screen, stuff like that. Case and point, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the Playstation 2. On original hardware, I had no idea what I was getting when I'd finish a battle in story mode. Now, with NetherSX2 on my phone, after a battle, I can have TalkBack describe the screen, listen to the description of what I won, press B to exit the description, press A to advance the game screen, read the next thing I won, and so on. Of course, the app has to have an accessibility element that TalkBack can grab onto to describe, so ironically, Retroarch doesn't work for this, and either does Lemuroid, but I mean it's a start, and hopefully one day TalkBack can grab the entire screen for a screenshot without needing an element onscreen to latch onto.

I've tried so many times to play the classic JRPGs only to be met by loooooooong cutscenes before even allowing me to control the characters. Grandia is unfortunately no exception: 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes.

The site appears to be a Sega Saturn fansite, so obviously they have a slight bent towards playing it on the Saturn.

But for anyone else who's interested in trying the game, the PS1 version was fine, and is more readily available on modern consoles.

Worth pointing out that a Grandia 1 & 2 HD bundle came out earlier this year: https://www.grandiahd.com/

I never played the 1st Grandia, but I had Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I absolutely loved that game. I'll admit that I was never the best with (J)RPGs and never played it for that long per-session as a kid, but I did eventually finish it. Though, it did take many years to finally get to the end and finish the game, but I enjoyed it! (I also enjoyed Evolution 2: Far Off Promise).

This point is driven home by Justin’s insatiable desire to uncover the mystery of his Spirit Stone, and the ancient Angelou civilization.

My mind immediately jumped to the idea that this is a play on words for the ancient Maya civilizations, and Maya Angelou. Apparently I wasn't the only one.[1]

1: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/197483-grandia/53620555

I think Grandia was the biggest case in my life of a game that starts slow and finishes in a very high note. Crazy experience. Some unique story traits. It probably didn't age well, but I have fond memories :)

Grandia 2 on the PS2 was a lot of fun, it displaced Legend of Dragoon for my favourite battle system in a jRPG. Vagrant Story and Parasite Eve are also pretty neat, but I prefer Grandia 2 and Legend of Dragoon's party-based systems over the single character-based systems of those two.

I've been getting more and more into retro gaming lately, and something that really made it click for me is leveraging shaders (or overlays) to simulate period-accurate displays. For a Sega Saturn, that'd be some kind of CRT. The art direction in these games are designed to take advantage of the quirks of the CRT, and often look significantly better on a CRT. Noodle just did a decent video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

I strongly recommend anyone getting into retro gaming, try some CRT shaders (or lcd ones for portables)!

Grandia's battle system is the best turn based battle system in a jrpg, ever.

Also Grandia >> Final Fantasy VII

I find it a bit of a course - Grandia, released on sega saturn, remastered due to the saturn failure.

Grandia 2, released on Dreamcast, released on PS2 due to Dreamcast failure. Same issues for the remakes, the ps2 works great but when compared to the dreamcast there is obvious music/graphics artifacts.

Oh I rememeber in one of the games, one of the girls would say ganba ganba something at the end of each battle. I didn't understand it back then but I loved it.

The “nostalgia” of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

Grandia is a beautiful game. Both visually and from a story telling perspective. A simple, sweet coming of age tale told without cynicism.

Justin, Sue and Feena feel like old friends.

looks like the host is getting too many requests, anyone know of a mirror?

> Game Arts subsequently ported Grandia to the PlayStation, dropping it in Japan in the summer of 1999.

When I grew up, "dropping" something meant "excluding" it; you might drop a player from a team or a feature from a product to exclude it. It turns out that Grandia did actually release in Japan for the PlayStation in 1999.

Am I the only one who struggles with this new, fangled definition of the word "drop"?

I read that as "playing Grandma" and thought that was a pretty clever game concept.