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Episode 14: Grandia 3
59 Plays1 year ago
Poly and Kj played Grandia 1 as their first podcast game and it was a hit! Come see how they felt about the final entry in the series!!!
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Transcript
Introduction to Turn Based Tangents and Grandia 3
00:00:00
Speaker
We are live, so welcome everybody to the first episode of Turn Based Tangents in 2024. So, obviously I am KJ. Polly!
00:00:12
Speaker
And we're reviewing Grandia 3 today. So Grandia 3 for the PS2. It was, I believe, developed by Game Arts as well, but published by Square Enix. So you will see Square Enix on the cover. And that, I think, will at the very least pull people in. So we'll see.
History and Series Context of Grandia
00:00:39
Speaker
Hopefully, I mean,
00:00:40
Speaker
It's one of those things where like, so this is the third game in, I guess technically the fourth game I found out. I thought Grandia Extreme came out after this, but it actually came out before Grandia 3. So this is the fourth game in the series effectively. And we reviewed Grandia 1 as our first game on turn-based tangents back in
00:01:00
Speaker
like July of 2022 or June of 2022 or whatever it was. And now we got, now we got this. Now we got the third one. And you know what? It seemed fitting to have the grandiose start us off for the new year because the first, like our first one was grandiose ones. So, um, I know KJ saving two, I believe to stream, uh, and I've already played all the way through two several times. So we're, we were just both like, we both had three and we're like,
00:01:29
Speaker
Oh, you know, we'd never played it. And I played a little bit in college, but I don't remember any of it. I found my save file was like four hours. I played like four hours in college. So it's a it felt fitting to start off the new year with. I wonder. I'm going to put you on the spot. I'm going to put you on the spot immediately. Do you regret that?
00:01:57
Speaker
No, because I think this is going to be a really interesting episode to start with. How about that? There's my decal for your question. Okay.
00:02:07
Speaker
I thought that question was going to freeze you up. I'm not going to lie. You're trying to throw me off. I love it. We got to switch things out. Got to keep things a little different.
Podcast Format and Initial Thoughts on Grandia 3
00:02:19
Speaker
For those who don't know the podcast, KJ and I play a game off stream every month. Sometimes we double up if the game's going to be really long, so we might have two months.
00:02:29
Speaker
Um, but generally it's a month and, uh, we've been doing this since 2022, which is super exciting. Uh, and we play these games off stream and, and then we come on here and review it. And, uh, sometimes it's good. Uh, sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's, we're very scared. We're going to be canceled and is, but it's a bit of fun time. I mean, to this point, our, our opinions haven't gotten us canceled. So there's, there's that.
00:02:58
Speaker
We'll see what happens today, whether or not people are agreeing or disagreeing with us, but hey, I mean, it is what it is.
Analysis of Grandia 3's Story and Character Development
00:03:09
Speaker
I think we should just jump right in. I do think we should, now that we've given a little bit of an intro and everything, so. The kitchen is so anxious for this. It's like, yeah, I am. And it's funny because I actually brought up Grandia 1,
00:03:24
Speaker
because of like, that was, that was a little bit of foreshadowing. I'll just be, I'll just be straight up about that. It was a little bit of foreshadowing because it's definitely a case of like, as you're playing this game,
00:03:39
Speaker
your Grandia III copied Grandia I's homework. Let's just be real. It copied its homework, but it did it in a way where like it got the homework and then like dropped it in a puddle of rain outside. And then it was all like smeared ink, couldn't tell what it was.
00:03:58
Speaker
completely, but then was like, all right, that's definitely it. We got it. Like, that is my, that is the best way for me to explain very vaguely Grandia 3. Vaguely, he says. That is the best way for me to describe that. Like... Oh my god, I'm laughing so hard, I'm crying.
00:04:20
Speaker
Okay, but I will say, Grandia III took that, but then it wrote its name in cursive. So that way it was a little bit fancier with some stuff as well. So that's my very vague brief
00:04:39
Speaker
honestly i'm gonna say the cover of this game is fucking like it's cool as shit like yeah this is cool so like you know what like you know they they they leveled up their cover art and like this what could possibly go wrong from here um yeah
00:05:01
Speaker
yeah that's a great description and honestly uh so how so how long did it take you to think that it went up uh like two seconds three seconds honestly it was okay so like the beginning of the game i feel like
00:05:16
Speaker
It's giving you that vibe of like, okay, you're going on an adventure. I'm cool with that. Like, that's definitely how grandia one started. And I was, I was feeling good about that. I was like, okay, cool. Like they went with the same thing, but then I started meeting some of the characters and I'm like, oh, this character reminds me of this person. This character reminds me of this person. Wait a second. Like this is starting to be just a little too, little too spot on, but I think where it started to deviate
00:05:44
Speaker
was a little strange because then it started getting to a point where
00:05:53
Speaker
they didn't develop the characters that weren't copied. And that was my first thing that sort of stood out to me. I was like, okay, you copied Grandia 1, that's fine. Like you want to go back to sort of pay homage to your first title, whatever, that's fine. But like for the things that you're going to differentiate, for the characters you're going to differentiate or differ from that,
00:06:21
Speaker
you need to develop them. And I felt like that was a consistent problem throughout the game where they weren't developing these characters. And it was a case where it was like, well, now you want me to feel for these characters, but I've seen them on screen three times. And in two of those scenes, it was like this random drive-by flashback where I just saw their face and they smirked.
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah. Um, yeah. Talking to, talking a little bit about like the right start. Um, this, this game is heavy in cut scenes, but in a sense where it wasn't necessary at times, like it was like, it was one of those things where it's like every like few minutes was a cut scene. It was a cut scene. It was a cut scene and it would just be like, Oh yeah, let's do it. And that was the cut scene.
00:07:09
Speaker
And then you go onto the next like little bit and stuff. They even made like in-game mechanics be cut scenes. So when they tried to start setting up the, the mechanics for you and stuff, like, Oh, you chop this thing and let's go. Like you push this boulder to make a bridge and now it's a whole cut scene. Like they, they really went heavy on the cut scenes with this with, without.
00:07:35
Speaker
without the meat that the cutscenes would have needed, you know what I mean? They were like empty cutscenes, more or less, but... I will say, like, the...
00:07:45
Speaker
animation and like the cutscenes themselves at least looked good so there was that the game looks great you start off with the cover and it looks awesome uh the character designs are all really cool um uh i mean there's obviously one of them is like a literal carbon copy almost exactly of a character for one grand deal one
00:08:09
Speaker
but other than that I mean like the designs were pretty cool and like the art style was good and like even just before we went live we found a picture of the concept art and then I kind of dived into the concept art a little bit like looking at more pictures of concept art and stuff like that of a reiteration of this game and it looks really good in fact I like the concept art almost better than the 3D
00:08:35
Speaker
oh no the 3d art that we got um i mean it's still cool and it's definitely like is it but like there's just something really weird about the yes there we go that that concept art but yeah there's something really weird about the mouth the mouse
00:08:56
Speaker
like, of the character. I don't know why that word sounds really weird to me right now. But the mouths of the characters and the way they talk and the way they express is just they go from looking really flat to really like. Yeah, they they go like you said they they go from like no emotion to a lot of emotion. Yeah, it's really weird. And yeah.
00:09:19
Speaker
I do think, so some questions were asked about like, oh, is it similar to like Xenosaga? From what I've seen of Xenosaga, it very much seems like that, which could be a situation of like, it's just part of the era, but also like not every PS2 game was like super heavy on cut scenes like that to the point where it was like,
00:09:47
Speaker
They're filling things that don't need to be filled with cut scenes, right? Like it just, they were kind of overdoing it. But yeah, the cut scenes, the characters definitely had some of the like, no emotion to like extreme emotion really quick, like zero to 200. It was ridiculous.
00:10:06
Speaker
Yeah. And back in the, like back when this was made, uh, obviously technology hadn't like super caught up yet. And I could definitely tell because, uh, I used to do like 3d modeling or 3d character art and stuff. I, I still do 3d modeling. I shouldn't say used to, I still do it. Um, I, I do do 3d modeling and stuff and like in the face and everything, the blend shapes for doing the expressions were done, like not enough, like Polly's in that area to give it a more like.
00:10:36
Speaker
more than just open really wide and closed and open a little bit and closed a little bit. There wasn't enough blend shape and blending of the animation to give it more emotion and more emotional range, partly because of the limitations back then, but also partly because I don't think
00:11:00
Speaker
I know Square Enix published this game but I don't know if there was like a super ton of funding put into it because it definitely felt like they were cutting corners even in the animations and stuff like that for the cutscenes. There's just like little things like there that I see in other Square titles of like cutscenes being a lot more fleshed out than in this one so I'm like I'm not sure
00:11:24
Speaker
I didn't go that far into the research of finding out like if they considered this like a B team or C team or whatever. But it definitely shows like if you look at the cut, even if you look at the cutscenes between Valkyrie Profile 2 and the cutscenes of this game, there's a little bit more
00:11:47
Speaker
put into the models and stuff like that to help with those facial expressions. So I think that might have been part of it, but it's also, I think they were also trying really hard to keep with the anime style. Which, I mean, they kind of, I don't know. So I haven't played Grandia 2, right? I've seen Grandia 2, but like all three of these games kind of look different to me.
00:12:08
Speaker
Like they don't they don't all look the same. And like it's interesting because I do think that I do think it's the case where with Grandia three, they kind of tried to go back to a lot of the things that they did in Grandia one. Right. Like we said that. And part of that is like capturing the same charm as they had in Grandia one, it being like an adventure, stuff like that. But
00:12:37
Speaker
do you think that that was something that they kind of just completely was like, okay, we're gonna go with sort of what the norm is for all of these PS2 era RPGs in terms of like how we're gonna model this and everything like that, when they could have kind of leaned more into what they did for like Grandia 2, for example, right? Because at the end of the day, Grandia 2 did get ported to the PS2. So like, they definitely could have just kind of stuck with a similar style as Grandia 2.
00:13:07
Speaker
But then concept art does look similar to the concept art of Grandia 2. I think the concept artist was the same or very similar or somebody like referencing it, but you're absolutely right. The 3D portion of Grandia 2 versus Grandia 3 is very different. Grandia 3 looking more like they were trying to go for more of the generic route, whereas Grandia 2 was more their own style as a 3D model.
00:13:34
Speaker
kind of idea. And I think, I think for their art style and portion of the game, the concept art was definitely the best like the little pictures of the characters when they're talking when they weren't in cut scenes. Those I found super expressive. Like they were done like there was all kinds of different emotions and stuff. And like they had this like
00:13:58
Speaker
kind of like how Grandia 2, where they had their own style and everything, but then when you go shift to the 3D models, mostly in the cutscenes, it's kind of gone the opposite way, where it's more like generic and more like generic anime
00:14:13
Speaker
you know, PS2 sort of look to things. And I feel like that's where they lost a little bit of the charm aesthetically for me is they lost the charm of the, even if they were referencing the first game with a lot of the story and characters and stuff like that, it would have been really cool if even if they went with that bright cartoony sort of like bright colors. I think you could have done that.
00:14:40
Speaker
Yeah, and and you could see the concept art. The colors are really bright and really vibrant, but when you're playing the game, they're quite dull. It looks like somebody put it through a saturation filter and like dropped it immensely. Yeah, that is a lot of that color and vibrate is a very good point. It is a very like muted game.
00:15:01
Speaker
It kind of reminds me of like how Valkyrie Profile 1 and 2 went from. You went from a beautiful bright pixel game to Valkyrie Profile 2, which was very muted, very saturated, a lot of grays, a lot of muted tones where they don't have any like sort of bright vibrancy to them.
00:15:17
Speaker
Um, I find this game has the same problem as going from like one and two being bright, vibrant colors and having a little bit more energy and life into it to these very muted, saturated, kind of almost boring, um, scenery that like is just nothing pops out. Nothing stands out. Uh, even the character's hair, like Yuki's supposed to have blue hair, but in a lot of the cut scenes, he's got a blue gray or a blue, black sort of tinge to it. And it's like the blue is muted a lot.
00:15:46
Speaker
It really it really confused me because I like you made the you made the comparison to a Valkyrie profile, too. That is a very like somber game. That game is very much like from the beginning, not a game where it's at all. Right. Like nothing good is happening. So the colors make sense. But this game. Exactly. This is
00:16:14
Speaker
You're an adventurer. You're going to you're going to try to be a pilot. Like they're they're super excited. Like they're super excited to like build these airplanes and try to fly them and everything. And it's like this feels like it should be a much more bright, vibrant world. And like
00:16:30
Speaker
After you get out of the main town, it doesn't really feel super bright and vibrant. So yeah, it's weird. It's definitely weird. It's weird. Yeah. I think it has something to do with maybe even the lighting. Like I don't know if they had very good lighting with it. Maybe that was part of the problem. But even just the character models and the textures and stuff and the cutscene and stuff is just very, it's like you have this concept art with this bright blue hair.
00:16:54
Speaker
He's got this like, uh, almost like a Royal blue, almost slightly, slightly towards the Navy, but more of a Royal. Um, and she's got bright blonde hair and all these stuff. And then when you're playing the game, that's, it's so muted and it's so desaturated when it's not calling for it. So like you said, with Falcon profile too, that can get away with it because you're like, Oh, this is a sad kind of depressing sort of kind of world right now. Um,
00:17:21
Speaker
But in Grandia 3, it's Bright Chipper. Literally the intro cutscene is the main character as a little kid watching a cheesy movie of a pilot going through all these adventures and stuff like that. And it's super cheesy, like super cheesy. But it's also kind of cute because it's like, you know, a little kid watching his favorite like, you know, movie star or, you know, hero or whatever on the big screen. And that's what he wants to be. And he puts on his little goggles and he's like, I'll go be pilot. And it's
00:17:51
Speaker
But the whole art just doesn't fit it. It's saturated and it's muted at times. And sometimes it's just plain, just very plain, boring sort of look. And at other times it is. When you're in the town with the casino and stuff, there's some bright colors there. But it's very hit or miss that the game has that. And it's just kind of weird that way.
00:18:17
Speaker
It's like it tries to be bright and cheerful in like a few areas of the colors. Like with the one guy that comes at you right at the beginning, he's bright. Like his armor's like bright blue. And then you got your main character who's like super desaturated. And I'm just like, it's like, it's like two different styles kept fighting over this game. Like you have the bright colors of like the guy chasing the, the, the, you know,
00:18:43
Speaker
damsel the stress and and then you get to the main character and he's like super muted colors and the damsel super muted. It's just it was just weird. It was just like back and forth. These tried to be bright colors like in Gradio one, but then not. It's like they couldn't make up their minds. And one of the one of the really interesting points I was just brought up in the chat is Eternal Sonata is a very depressing game.
00:19:09
Speaker
However, the colors in that game pop so well. Like that game is vibrant. I always thought that was a happy game because of how bright and colorful it is. Don't go in thinking that game, like that game is not sunshine and rainbows. Game will wreck me emotionally, got it. Must be played this year. It is not sunshine and rainbows.
00:19:31
Speaker
But yeah, so you have this like conflicting art style between the concept art to some of it being bright and cheerful, some of it not. And then a lot of muted stuff. And it just feels like they couldn't, they couldn't pick what they wanted. Um, and so it gives that weird disconnect that I found that throughout the entire game. Um, it wasn't just at the beginning or at the start where you start off at a bright, vibrant village and then it goes to like really like muted forest.
00:19:58
Speaker
colors and then like it just keeps going kind of back and forth and back and forth it's like they had a lot of people doing the art and nobody coordinating like it just feels like everything's like kind of pulled in like four different directions of the art and it makes it really difficult um to look at that and be like this is pretty because at times there was like scenery and i was all engaging i was like oh like i would just stop i'm like oh that's kind of pretty
00:20:24
Speaker
but that was very few and far between because of this weird battle of disconnect with the art style. It just felt like nobody could stick to one thing. I agree.
Soundtrack and Combat System Highlights in Grandia 3
00:20:37
Speaker
Okay, I think we've hammered home the art direction. How did you feel about the music?
00:20:43
Speaker
like the throw to grandia one a lot of the tracks reminded me of grandia one i'm pretty sure some of them were really pulled from the game and slightly arranged differently but still from it um and i honestly liked a lot of the tracks even the battle system that you hear for like the entire first disc and then it's you get to the second disc it changes the battle system which is very common and
00:21:08
Speaker
I like the battle music, even hearing it a million times in both cases. I did actually enjoy the soundtrack. I feel like they fit a lot of the music to how maybe the story was going to be more in-depth and everything. So they had the tracks in the right spots. So I feel like the OST is one of the stronger points of this game.
00:21:37
Speaker
I totally agree. To echo that, again, more of being similar to Grandia 1, it was a case where they switched over the... They switched over that they have a disc 1 battle theme and a disc 2 battle theme, which is totally fine. But no, I agree. Honestly, the battle theme, even though you hear it a lot because there's a lot of encounters and stuff, I thought the battle theme
00:22:06
Speaker
was one of, if not the best track in the game. Those were the two songs that we played in the starting screen. Those were the battle themes, and I thought they were fantastic. I really enjoyed those, and I think that really helped, especially because you end up
00:22:25
Speaker
hearing those so much, right? You do end up hearing them a lot. And it's a good thing the music was really good. I found I never had to, the only time I turned down the volume is when I found sometimes some of the cut scenes were really loud. I didn't have the problem.
00:22:41
Speaker
Uh, but I might, that might've been more of my settings and stuff like that. So on my steam deck. So I had to turn it down a little bit for the cut scenes, but when it came to the music, I never, I never listened to other music or anything. I just like kind of chilled and vibed with the music. I was totally fine with it. The music, the music was good.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was really strong, especially the battle theme. I think the battle theme slaps like it's it's really fun to listen to. And I was like super like right away. You hear the first battle system, but it's like teaching you the mechanics of right away. I was like, oh, oh, this battle has got me like this is this could be good. OK, so I think that's actually a pretty good segue.
00:23:23
Speaker
about let's talk about the combat system. Let's talk about the battle system as a whole. I think like it definitely sticks to a lot of the like previous grandia sort of systems like you have your you have your circle gauge and it's a situation of like you still get the opportunity to cancel various
00:23:49
Speaker
enemy attacks and stuff like that. Like that system I think is very, very good. And I think they I'm glad that they stuck with that. I'm glad that that is something that has been consistently kept through Grandia one, two, three. Like that system is awesome.
00:24:07
Speaker
One of the things that I think really stood out with this game was the aerial attacks, like the aerial combos. Oh, yeah, those are great. I thought that those are really cool. Did you so I do have a question for you. Did you ever chain more than one of those?
00:24:27
Speaker
like how multiple characters would get it involved. Yeah. Oh, so good. I found that out and was so shocked. So early on, they show you like, oh, if you use the critical attack, it'll knock an enemy into the air. And then like if somebody else is very close in proximity in turn, they can attack and then they'll do like an aerial combo. But then I was like fighting something that had like one of those like mini bosses that they throw at you and I hit it up.
00:24:56
Speaker
And two people had the ability. And I was like, this isn't gonna work. There's no way in hell this is gonna work. And I attacked with both. And it was just like,
00:25:05
Speaker
combo in the air and then somebody else came in and I was like, Oh, that is like, that's just like a full team combo. This is great. So yeah. Did you also notice that when you got those team combos that they would go in an order in terms of like, when you had the, when you had the third party member, because his combo is he smacks the enemy into the ground, he always goes last.
00:25:29
Speaker
Yep. Always goes last. And I thought that was such a great point for technical, um, portion of the game, uh, that they, they thought ahead about that, about it maybe chaining a few people and always put him last. Even if he was the first that you clicked onto attack, he would still go last. As long as there was other people being chained into it, uh, which I thought was really cool and such a little, little bit of quality of life. Um,
00:25:57
Speaker
uh standpoint for the battle system where it was like okay yeah you definitely thought this through um and it was super fun as heck to knock enemies in the air with whatever spell or whatever crit you could do and then just like go ham on uh on these combos they looked so cool and uh the timing was so fun to try to try to hit especially for those bosses and stuff like that to try to get as many combos as you can get
00:26:23
Speaker
Definitely had fun with the combo system in this game.
00:26:30
Speaker
And I think they tied it together well with the rest of the system. So like, I was, I was really, really interested because they had like the MP and the SP and random. They were like, Oh yeah, as you level up, so like you level up your magic, you level up your specials, you level up your skills. And it's like, as you're leveling up specials and then you do like a regular attack, you learn a new skill.
00:26:54
Speaker
which I thought was really cool. I mean, everybody has like their set ones. So I was like, oh, this is dope. Like we get to learn different skills. I do wish that it was a little bit easier to see like where you are progression wise in terms of how close you are to like.
00:27:14
Speaker
Leveling up this skill level because it didn't or leveling up the special level because it didn't show that you ever show it an experience bar You just kind of was hoping you were getting close to having it up and it also didn't explain What caused it to level up because sometimes it was just I was just fighting for a while and it leveled up magic But I hadn't even used magic and like
00:27:34
Speaker
10 fights. And I was like, what? I ended up looking it up after I beat the game. Yeah, they have a system. There is a system. So it's like if you win a battle, it's like plus eight experience. So like for special, for example, if you win a battle, it's plus eight experience. If you use a critical move, it's like plus two experience. And if you use a actual special, it's like plus four experience.
00:28:02
Speaker
And each level has like a set thing. And it's the same thing with like if you use magic, it's like the same type of thing. Each of them, it was like if you win a battle with that character, it's plus eight. So it was.
00:28:17
Speaker
I wish that was more transparent. It doesn't even necessarily have to we didn't even necessarily have to see it like like that. But like I feel like that was a step back a little bit in terms of from all the way back in Grandia one, where it was like we didn't see the level at which like we didn't see like a full progression, if I remember, of sort of like the magic or the the weapons that you were using. But you got to see when you would learn things so that it helped you kind of plan things out a little bit better.
00:28:47
Speaker
So in that regard, I think that's, and that's a small nitpick. Like in general, the combat was great. I think the combat definitely, I haven't, obviously haven't played grandia too, but looking at grandia one's combat and then looking at grandia, grandia three's combat, you can definitely see where they evolved and where they, where it got better. I think that's definitely the case. Again, little nitpick things, but those are more.
00:29:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think I think they're like tiny enough that it's like it's still like, oh, this could still, this still has room to grow, but it's definitely improvement over one and two actually. So I played all the way through two. I won't go too much into detail. The KJ hasn't yet. So I don't want any spoilers for him. Um, but it is an improvement. I feel like it is the most improved of this battle system throughout the series. So having played one, two, and three, and then I looked up extreme and it's battle system extreme goes in a different direction. It looks like.
00:29:42
Speaker
It's a dungeon crawler, right? Yeah, it's a dungeon crawler, and it's kind of totally different. So looking at it just at the three games, one, two, and three, Grandia 1 started the battle system, started a unique kind of way of doing things. And then Grandia 2 built up on that and was an improvement. And then Grandia 3, I do believe, is also an improvement over that. I do think it's the best combat system in all of the three games I've played.
00:30:11
Speaker
I think the combo system is really fun like you said. I like that at first I was a little confused on how to deal with like the mana eggs and the skill books but once you kind of get the hang of that and like equipping it to your characters you can make your characters do some real fancy stuff with those skill books.
00:30:28
Speaker
I think it's also cool that what they did was like, I like the balance of, okay, to get the broken skills, you are definitely going to have to turn in some of these skill books. You're going to have to turn in the man eggs. So it really makes you decide. It's like, Oh, well, do I want level three? Do I want level three fire and earth equipped to this person? Or do I want the best earth and best fire spell?
00:30:55
Speaker
And then I'll just give them not necessarily that level of depth. And because of another system, specifically with the mana eggs where the, how much like mana egg fusing did you do? Cause there's two towns. I was able to fuse them all. Okay. I ended up using them all by the end. I had so much fun with it. I thought that was really cool. I thought that was a really good touch. Them adding like, cause I kept finding a bunch of random mana eggs and I'm like,
00:31:23
Speaker
Why are they giving this to me? And I'm like, okay, maybe they're giving me a couple extras so that I can extract them and stuff. But then you, that at one point I found like, what was it? Uh, four Aqua eggs. I was like, why do I need to cast water spells?
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah, apparently. But then eventually they give you the ability to fuse mana eggs where you take like one mana egg and fuse it with another and make something. And it's really cool because it didn't have to match elements. So you could take a water one and you could take an earth one, fuse them together. And it might turn into like something that boosts both water and earth, which I thought that was really cool. And it just kind of keeps going from there until you make some of like the more ultimate ones.
00:32:04
Speaker
And as soon as I made one of the ultimate ones, I was like, oh, I can extract magic from this. And now I have super broken spells. And I'm like, OK, cool. I'm happy about that. You get some pretty amazing magic out of the game with doing the mana eggs and fusing them together and extracting them. It's really, really fun. And I really like that portion of the whole combat system tying everything together. Funny enough, right at the start, Crackle is stupid broken.
00:32:35
Speaker
And I spammed crackle all the time, all the time. It was like my go to move all the time to like knock people in there because it knocks people in the air. So I just constantly. Yeah, that spells that knock people in the air. Yeah, that definitely those were good to be able to tie into the freaking aerial combat system, too.
00:32:57
Speaker
Yeah, and I love that. I loved everything about this bottle system. I love the mana egg thing. And I love the skill books because it really made you think about what skills to have on each character. And as you got further on and you got more skill books, you started to have to make the decision because there's a few skill books you only get one of or you only get two of. So you had to make the decision whether you wanted it there to boost your skills or you extracted it to get the cool skills out of it.
00:33:25
Speaker
Um, and same sort of thing with the mana eggs. And I thought that was a really cool upgrade to the whole battle system concept of everything for grandia series is because you had more control and decision on whether or not they get, or don't get those skills and stuff. And I thought that was really neat. Yeah, no, I agree. I think overall, like.
00:33:47
Speaker
You can definitely. And this is probably foreshadowing a little bit. You can definitely tell they cared about the gameplay. They cared about the combat system. They really put their heart into it. It's the only thing they cared about. And the OST, the OST to come out now is good to you. Like, yeah, that that definitely it was.
00:34:16
Speaker
In that regard, it was great. The combat's really fun. It was really fun. And each character kind of got their own, which was really cool, because each character unlocks their own special skills that are just to them. And it took me a little bit to realize it was based on your three levels you could level up. So your skill, your special, and your thing, it was your special. If you leveled that up,
00:34:45
Speaker
to like level three, you'd unlock the next one of that character. Um, and it took me a little bit to realize that's what it was doing. Uh, and then I was like, Oh shoot. Like as soon as I was like, okay, I'm leveled up to five and I haven't learned the new skill yet. The next time I click attack, I'm getting that skill. Sure enough. I go to click attack and it gives me the skill and I'm like, all right, I get it now.
00:35:06
Speaker
that consistent though. Some of them it was like you're waiting two levels or something like that or you get them back to back. It wasn't every level. It felt like sometimes it was like every other level. Sometimes it was literally the next level. You would get it. It wasn't very consistent. No. I think it was trying to still keep it like you're not going to know for the first play through when you're going to get these skills. I think it's still tried to have that little bit of mystery to it. But it was also like sometimes I was like, OK,
00:35:35
Speaker
Am I gonna get anything else? Or is this character just gonna stay with two skills? Hello? It felt like I was waiting forever sometimes. Especially because, like you said, it wasn't completely transparent in how you level the skill, the special, and the magic. It didn't really explain that in the game or in the tutorial or anything. And like you said, you had to go look it up and see how it actually did it.
00:36:04
Speaker
because of that. It was like, okay, how am I going to level up the special or whatever? Um, so I think I know the elephant in the room is us talking about the story of this game. No, that's the elephant in the room, but there are a couple of other things I personally wanted to highlight. I don't know. And I know you have some research that you did also like, I know we, we separately talked about like the weird difficulty spikes, right?
Gameplay Mechanics, Strategies and Challenges
00:36:32
Speaker
Yeah. And
00:36:35
Speaker
When they happened, I wasn't the biggest fan, but I kind of took a step back and I thought about it. Every time there was a weird difficulty spike, it was kind of after you got access to either a new character or some like brand new set of spells or something. And so I actually kind of, now that I'm kind of thinking about it and reflecting on it, I kind of like that. Like I, I mean, I don't want it to be easy.
00:37:06
Speaker
makes you use them. It gives you a reason to use them. Yeah. I was thinking about it too with those difficulty spikes. And every time they happen, it was right around the time. You got a bunch of like man and eggs and skill sets that you could fuse and a huge track that stuff like that. And literally the two times I got wiped
00:37:22
Speaker
Honestly just required me to go back, level up a little bit so I could use a particular skill or I could use a particular magic ability. Go back into that fight and then I was fine. It was cakewalk. Oh, so I can leveled up. Oh no. I just put my head down and I was like, we're running through this wall.
00:37:40
Speaker
Well, for me, some of the magic you couldn't use unless you are leveled up. Like, for example, some of the spells, it was like, oh, you, you had to, in order to like use that mana egg or whatever, you had to be like magic level seven or whatever. So, or that book or whatever. So there was a little bit of like that. Uh, I also found it and
00:38:03
Speaker
I kind of broke the game a little bit in the sense of like, oh, I did what it was not intended there. It's very easy not to fight.
00:38:12
Speaker
in this game. You just, you attack them to knock the enemy. Oh, so you have a thing where you can run up to the enemy and attack it. And that, and he kind of falls over and sometimes it's a surprise attack. Sometimes it's not. You have a very brief window to hit it, but I would do that and run away. I would run around it and run around it. How did you do that and still end up like four levels higher than me by end game?
00:38:43
Speaker
I don't know I don't know cuz like there was one dudgeon where I didn't kill anything cuz I just wanted to progress the story there was a whole ass dudgeon I didn't kill a single freaking enemy it was actually kind of funny and I I still end up a higher level than KJ by the end and he cried dude the way that I the way that I I went through it was like I fought things and I would go to a new area I'd fight something
00:39:13
Speaker
If the experience I got wasn't worth the resources that I spent or the time that I spent, I stopped fighting that enemy. But I was always searching out for what gave me the most experience per time in the area, and then I'd fight everything that had that in the area. Never was I just running away from fights.
00:39:41
Speaker
And again, I still ended up four levels lower than you. I don't get it like I always ran away from and at one point there's a dungeon like pretty well all of it was the jungle so the jungle I didn't kill anything because all the majority of the enemies not all of them but majority of them were the birds and the damn like freaking I I don't know
00:40:08
Speaker
like lobster things and they always summoned so this is one mechanic of the battle system that made me upset was they would summon allies and you know in other rpgs when they bring in more like like things to make it harder they give you more experience as kind of
00:40:28
Speaker
But in Grandia 3, they would summon more and more enemies, making it stupid hard sometimes, sometimes, especially early game when you don't have the cool big spells yet, especially when you don't have the area effect spells or the area effect specials or whatever. They would just keep calling these enemies in over and over and over again, but you'd still get the exact same experience.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, that was that was really annoying. It was like they spawn other enemies full of that. And it annoyed me so much. I just avoided the entire enemy sequence in that jungle. And but in the the next section, I was killing everything fine because it was just the iguanas and the apes and stuff like that. So those ones were giving me hell of experience. So I was totally fine with that. But yeah, the jungle, I skipped it entirely because there's birds and those damn lobsters who all summon
00:41:18
Speaker
People constantly making it an annoying long fight for no reason because you don't get more experience for it So it's just like a wasted effort and you're like 20 minutes in one battle and you're like, come on like I don't want to do this so it's funny because Any of telling me oh, there's an area I hate I
00:41:40
Speaker
I just want you to know, I full cleared the jungle. Each area in the jungle I full, there were like three areas in that jungle, I full cleared all of them. I fought every enemy in that jungle.
00:41:53
Speaker
Like it's broken because you literally pretty well get the runaway every single time. Like I, I think there was like two times where I didn't run away initially, but I just clicked the next character to run and it ran. Or I would whack them, knock them down over there and the whole jungle. And I was like, nah, I don't got time for this.
00:42:15
Speaker
You told me that I did not there was like a mini boss. I didn't know you could run from them You were like, oh, yeah, I just ran from that like what the what? Gave me like 3,000 experience and you just ran from it In my defense I hit that at level 12 The golems
00:42:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I definitely ran for them and then like circled around knocked them over and got the surprise attack on them That's why I ran while I'm getting swarmed by like four golems. I game over That was the only point that I came over until like I
00:42:59
Speaker
damn near endgame. But I told him he could run from that and he was like, wait, what? Literally, I think that's what you wrote. You just wrote, wait, what? I had just killed this. I was just about to kill the last one. And she's like, oh, you know, you can run from those, right? I'm like, you've got to be fucking kidding me.
00:43:16
Speaker
I just spent all this damn time like I was in a loop because it's it's a if you fight them all it's a gauntlet of four fights it's four mini bosses and they only um they only take magic damage so yeah that was a pain you don't have the appropriate magic set up you're just screwed
00:43:36
Speaker
So I was just like, I was just like, I was getting punched in the mouth and Polly's over there like, oh yeah, I'm on disc two, I just ran from these. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. You got to be fucking kidding me. It was wild.
00:43:54
Speaker
Like to in my defense I did end up killing them But I just I ran from them ran behind them smack them and got the surprise attack because you're right it's like a full like for like four golems to each gauntlet and By the time you got the bite the time KJ got there or whatever. I think you were like killing the third one and I was like Oh, yeah, did you know you could run for those? That was
00:44:19
Speaker
That was like the craziest difficulty spike because I was like I went from walking the game to Oh, those guys here. These are immune to immune to physical hits and two of your characters are useless. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. If you didn't have magic and if you didn't have like Yuki or Ulf leveled up with magic abilities and stuff like that to use like that fight was like hella hard because you had like two characters that could do something while those two just like
00:44:49
Speaker
Like sat there just like, ah, 20 damage. Honestly, like, uh, that, that part of the game was something where I was like, that's when I found out you could. So that's what I found out. You could run from like those like mini surprise, like things that they do to you. And I was like, Oh, okay. And I'm like, I wonder if you could do this. I did try to run from a boss fight. That was actually kind of funny. Um, just a test to see if you could run from everything you cannot.
00:45:17
Speaker
You tried to run from an AM boss fight. Yeah, I most certainly did.
00:45:25
Speaker
mechanics man like I was I was up to a point where I'm like I was we're gonna talk about it why I was so bored but there was there's aspects of it where I was just like I'm just gonna try new things with the mechanics and just kind of push the mechanics to whatever just have some fun with it so it's like something's like I ran away from the enemies who summoned too many more because I was like this is a waste of time I'll just go fight something that doesn't summon enemies
00:45:47
Speaker
and give me the same experience. And like, I was trying like different mechanical things and stuff. Like when I got ambushed by those golems too, after the first fight, I was like, oh my God, I'm going to get destroyed because like literally Yuki. Yuki had some decent fire spells on him at the time. So I was okay with him, but Ulf was completely useless. And I just kind of kept having Ulf crit, but like, you can't knock them in the air because they're too heavy.
00:46:14
Speaker
It literally relied on you using magic. And so after the first one, I got hit with the second one. I'm like, can I run? So I ran and I worked. I reconfigured all to have some like decent things and some magic boosting things, turned around, smacked it, got the surprise attack on it, went and fought it. And I had a way easier time. I ended up clearing them way easier because I was able to reconfigure it. So it's like little things like that. And then one boss fight, I was just like,
00:46:46
Speaker
Can I run? Like can you run and like restart this boss fight? No. Never. Never what I think to run away. But not the main story bosses and stuff like that. Never what you run away from a boss fight. Ever. I was just testing out mechanics. I was just seeing if it was possible.
00:47:09
Speaker
That is mind boggling to me. It's not like it was hard up until like, I think two, two bosses gave me trouble too. And the whole game. Um, give me trouble. I think there's one. Yeah, I think two bosses gave me trouble too.
00:47:33
Speaker
OK, yeah, so we were brought even. I think they were different bosses. The second, the first or the last boss on disk one gave me trouble. Oh, right. The one where it's the OK, yeah, the guy where they randomly are like, hey, all the bosses had like two like four thousand HP. Now we have two that have different armor parts that have eight thousand apiece. And it's like there's four of these with eight thousand HP. I'm like, oh, yeah, this sucks.
00:48:02
Speaker
Um, yeah, that was that one. And then one of the same person you fight them again just by themselves. And that fight gave me trouble.
00:48:17
Speaker
I didn't actually I didn't actually game over at that fight though. I I finished that fight with only one person alive. So I got fucked up. Yeah, you you ended up winning it. Yeah, I got fucked up experience points and then that carried on through the rest of my game.
00:48:34
Speaker
like yeah yeah it's like it punished you hard if you did a boss fight that gives you a lot of experience where a character or two character or three characters were dead because I'm which is fine because it's like it wants you to figure this out without them dying is more or less how it was like set up and
00:48:56
Speaker
the more the more i kind of after i beat it and kind of settle down or whatever the more i really thought about it and i was like they were trying to make it challenging at times and but also encourage you to use your characters and skill books and stuff and kind of mess around with it until you find something that works and i kind of like that because it really focused you on using your mana eggs and your skill books where a lot of the times at video gates i don't use magic at all
00:49:23
Speaker
Because A, you don't have a lot of magic recovery items. In this game, every so often, you get to a save area where it fully recovers you. So I never really had to use items except for, I think, the last boss fight. Oh, you didn't use items in this? I totally used items. I used items with all the MP items. I didn't use any of them. I still had all the MP items. I was spamming magic.
00:49:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's the thing. I spam magic too. But I would get to one of those like fully recover places or I would use seeds. The seeds fully restored your MPSP and HP when you would use them. And I would use those periodically if I didn't get to a save point before I thought there was going to be a boss when I had been spamming magic for so much. Spamming magic during the SP moves and stuff. I didn't use any of the almost any of the SP stuff until like super late game.
00:50:15
Speaker
I was saving it because I was like, this will come in handy in case of an emergency. And it did the final boss fight. I used almost all the SP stuff I had. So I used all the seeds that I had left over. I think I had like eight seeds and I use them all in that and boss fight. I think I had like two or three left over. But yeah, I definitely that was that was definitely a boss fight where I was like, fuck it.
00:50:38
Speaker
Not gonna save any items. Can't take these with me. Can't take these with you, yeah. That was my mentality in the last call. It was the one time I used items extensively. All the other times I didn't feel like I needed them. From the odd occasion I would use a revive. Odd occasion to use a revive, but any of the MP items even, I'd never use them. Even though I used to crackle and heal all the time.
00:51:02
Speaker
I didn't even use healing items because I was using magic to heal all the time. I was. Yeah, see, I was using magic to heal as well. It basically depended on like because I didn't give resurrect to everybody. So it was a case of who had resurrect. And if that person was dead, then I had to use a healing item. Resurrect was OP because it fully restored you every time. But seeing that cutscene over and over then started to drive me mad.
00:51:24
Speaker
I do wish you could turn the cutscene, the animation cutscenes off, because those got to be kind of painful, especially the magic ones, especially if you were continuing to use the same magic. Yeah. Yeah. One of the quick quality of life upgrades I would do if they ever remastered this game was, yeah, exactly. They would be a way that you could press a button and skip it. Because it was cool the first couple of times you'd see the animation, and you'd see really the heart that they put into making it kind of fancy or whatever. That's fine.
00:51:54
Speaker
But after the first couple times you see it, you're done with it. And when you have to sit there, especially in a bad boss fight where you have to resurrect a lot and you have to sit there for the 10 to 15 to 20 second animation to finish before you could do anything every time. And it's like, oh, just let me like, just let me skip this, please. Like they let you skip cut scenes, which I told KJ, which he was like, wait, what?
00:52:19
Speaker
But you have to turn it on. You have to turn it on. It's not on my default. That made me so mad. That made me so angry. In the settings, there was like a skip policy button, but you just not default on. It's not default on. Oh, I was so annoyed.
00:52:39
Speaker
when I told him, I'm like, yeah, there's a skip cutscene. He's like, wait, what? I was like, yeah, it was in settings. He's so upset. And it was just little things like that, where I think going back over it would make quality of life playing the game way better. Oh, great. Being able to skip those long animations and stuff like that, having the skip cutscenes just activated automatically, like, come on. That was a weird one to not have just working all the... Yeah, and it was one of those things
00:53:08
Speaker
It was one of those things where like my game froze. So I had to reload and I'm just like, I just, I watched like 10 minutes of cut scenes. My game froze. Now I have to watch the 10 minutes of cut scenes again. And that was when you had said that there was, that it was in the menu. It was in the options that you could skip. And I was like, Oh, okay. Cause like I looked at the options.
00:53:29
Speaker
when I first started, but I guess I just skipped over the skip cutscenes one, because, you know, I thought that would just be a button that's built in, you know? Yeah, you'd think it was just... 2006? Seems like a reasonable thought. Hey, at least we were able to skip them at all, because some of these old games definitely did let you skip it, and it's just like, which would suck when you would die. You're not wrong there.
00:53:55
Speaker
yeah at least we could but you you're absolutely right the fact that they gave us the ability to do it it should have just been on by default um and the only reason i found it uh at all was i think it was like when we started using the magic and having those animations all the time i was looking for a way to skip them so i was like in the setting seeing being like oh maybe i could like skip these or something and then i saw the skip cutscene button and i was like
00:54:19
Speaker
Oh, why is this default off? And it says a big bold letters being like, Oh, you know, you might miss the story. So don't skip the cut scenes by accident. Thank you. Okay. Okay. I think we've danced around on it off. And I think we've talked a lot about good aspects of the game and all that sort of stuff. I think we need to go into the, the hard stuff, the hard stuff that's gonna like,
00:54:46
Speaker
We're
Narrative and Character Development Critiques
00:54:47
Speaker
sorry. We're so sorry. Because the battle system is really fun. And it's just so disappointing. And then the story hits, but it doesn't hit. Like, I don't know. I think one of the biggest things that stood out to me was this game went from. Again, it tried to copy Grandia one in the sense of like, it goes from. Yeah, adventure, like want to do all these things and like,
00:55:15
Speaker
In the background, you're trying to sort of solve the evil plot to kind of like a love story almost by the end. And I'm just like, no. And my biggest problem with that is throughout that, they're also incorporating various characters that aren't in your party. And those characters,
00:55:41
Speaker
that aren't in your party, get a little bit of screen time. But it's like, they try to make you care about these characters. And it's like, I will say, I'll preface this, because I am about to drop some spoilers. So anybody that does care about spoilers and does not want to be spoiled, just giving you a heads up, feel free to mute or anything like that. But we are gonna jump into some spoilers, because I do,
00:56:07
Speaker
that this is like something I think I feel like really needs to be addressed. Yeah. 100%. I think I know where you're going with it. So there's multiple different characters that so like in the very beginning of the game, you meet like Yuki's best friend and you meet like
00:56:25
Speaker
There's his mom, who's kind of like his sister, but is also his mom. It's weird. They have a brother-sister relationship, but she's his mom. She looks the same age. I thought they were siblings. It's really strange, but hey, whatever. It is what it is. But you have her. You have another party member that you pick up in the game.
00:56:49
Speaker
And those characters just kind of disappear. It's one of those things where it's like, okay, the world might be ending. Why are these capable fighters just gone? The best friend, he ends up showing up later on to help out with stuff.
00:57:09
Speaker
Like the very end. Like why are all of these capable people just to decide like they just disappeared? Like it doesn't make any sense to me. And they never explain in good detail why like rots. He's just like, I'll meet you at the mainland. And I'm like, why are you leaving? Like what? How are you leaving? How are you? What? Like there's no way to explain. And then he just disappears. And then you see him at the end of the game and you're like, what? What?
00:57:38
Speaker
I, oh my goodness. And again, we are going to continue to talk about spoilers. Yeah, we have to. It's the only way to explain the story. Unfortunately, yeah. Yeah, seriously. But OK, so like you get quite a few mysterious characters in this game.
00:57:57
Speaker
And they try to make you feel for these characters. Legitimately, the backstory is like, oh, one of these characters is in love with another character that you do get backstory and some more character development for.
00:58:16
Speaker
That's not enough for me to give any fucks about this character if you kill them off. It's not. Oh no, this character that was in my party was in love with this other character. I don't know anything about their backstory. All I know is that they have some prior relationship and now I'm supposed to feel bad when like... Because they never give you any substance of the character.
00:58:41
Speaker
ever like any of these characters and any of this entire game they never give you the meat they never give you the meat of the character that makes you care like they don't build anything up they don't give you they they they have their characters who have their designated anime tropes
00:58:57
Speaker
but like that's about it like there's no like they have the series character but that you never find what he's doing and then he sort of connects to one of your party members but like it never actually even talks a little bit about like them growing up or them meeting or anything it doesn't give you the meat on any of the characters the entire game
00:59:18
Speaker
Nobody wants you to care. And it's like, there's no, there's nothing here for me to care like about. And it's like, you're missing half the story. Like half the stories missing from this game. It just felt like they didn't do anything. And then like,
00:59:39
Speaker
And the first eight hours of the game deceive you because it feels like you're building up to something and it does feel like people have substance. Miranda, your sister mom has a lot of personality. She tries to kick a box over top of you and crush you with it. She tries to hijack your plane and then ends up making it crash by sneaking on board of it. And apparently the plane can't hold two people.
01:00:06
Speaker
Um, and all this other crap and stuff like that, which is weird because he built it with his friend, like that they never intend to fly together. Like, I don't know anyway. Um, but there's like a lot of little humor bits and it definitely made me feel, feel like it was grandia one with the same idea where it's like.
01:00:24
Speaker
like Justin's mom in the first game is very similar very feisty like you know gonna beat him with a spoon kind of idea like it's it's one of those things where it's like okay there's there's some like humor here and the first eight of the outdoors of the game is very deceiving that way because it does have all of this potential and it does have all this like ramping up like you know the
01:00:46
Speaker
Yuki and Alfina, the main two characters, touched hands accidentally, and then they're in the opposite ends of the room when his mom comes in. Stupid silly stuff like that that still was starting to give you... I mean, yeah, it was kind of giving away the main thing, but it was also giving you something of these characters. And then as soon as your mom and Yuki's new daddy disappeared,
01:01:15
Speaker
a random character that tried to con you out of money. Yeah, the character tried to call you out of the character, like your money and your mom hated somehow because your mom's like new lifeline. It's very fucking weird. Anyway, as soon as they leave, it's like a whole different game, which I felt like that at least was fine because that felt like it was like, OK, we're kicking off the training wheels. It's now no more tutorial and you have
01:01:43
Speaker
You have two party members and like you're starting, you're starting fresh. So that was definitely how that felt. But I feel like, I don't know. I, I really struggled with all of that. Cause it's like, those characters weren't just going to do nothing. Like you had two very, um,
01:02:06
Speaker
sort of strong personality characters, those characters weren't just going to do nothing while like the world was going to shit. Yeah, especially when her baby boy is going to be right in the fucking middle of it. Like, like they just disappear entirely. And that's where I started to feel like as soon as they leave the party, it, yeah, it kicks off like
01:02:29
Speaker
Now you got to kind of like start thinking for yourself and everything with the gameplay. But it also at that point never has the substance back. It doesn't have the goofy antics anymore. Like when you first meet off, he like bites you in the arm and it never explains why so weird. It was so I was like, why did this character just bite him? That's yeah.
01:02:52
Speaker
Yeah. That's never explained why or whatever. Just this weird sort of jarring like sort of thing. And then as soon as you like make the decision of like helping Alfeida or whatever flying her to wherever and build the plane that can only hold two people. So of course your mom's going to get left behind. You don't have room for her.
01:03:11
Speaker
Like although part of me was like you have a ship like just follow in the ship, but anyway But no they leave or whatever and it's okay. Yeah, she's letting her son go off on his own and like do his own thing But it never it never picks up again from that point it never gives you enough substance or personality of any of the characters to make you a
01:03:35
Speaker
want to care about any of them or care about the story. And they never explain a lot of things that happened in the story. It's just kind of there and it's just happening. Like they don't build anything up. They don't ramp anything up. And it gets to a point where they just make characters that you've been fighting repeatedly in boss fights just disappear and you never see them again.
01:04:01
Speaker
Yo, the fact that homeboy with the like the big arm arm just doesn't show up at endgame confused the fuck out of me. He's in one of the end cuts. He's in a cut seed. Yeah, he's in a cut. He just disappears. And never do we hear about him again.
01:04:22
Speaker
He's in a cutscene where he's like, Oh, I don't know how I feel about this anymore. And they all just ignore him. Nobody answers him. And then the cutscenes over and you keep going through and you keep going up this tower battling all, all the like
01:04:37
Speaker
people's, his minions and stuff like that. The sky just disappears. Yeah. They just wrote him out the end. They wrote him out of the last six hours. He's not even in the ending. He just disappears, legitimately. They could have at least had like a cut scene where like he turned a glass. Like they did that to give everybody else. So like, why not? Or him just piecing out. Like he's like leaving and he's like, nah, I'm not going to fight you. I'm out. And like, he just leaves the tower or something. That'd be hilarious. But like, no, he just straight up.
01:05:05
Speaker
disappears. Yeah. And I messaged KJ after we both beat the game and I was like, did I miss this? Maybe I just kind of like zoomed in the game. Did I miss this ever happening? And he's like, nah, he just disappeared. Yeah, he's in the he's in the cut scene that you get like before you get into sort of like where the final boss gauntlet is.
01:05:29
Speaker
And then, yo, he just disappears. You fight his partner in crime, and you fight her, but then he's just gone. I'm like, what the? And he's the one right at the beginning who's chasing Alfina, where they never actually explain why he's chasing.
01:05:51
Speaker
and he's just chasing you and he's the one that they give you a tutorial on on how to learn the gameplay mechanics with canceling canceling enemies and canceling their talks and he's just goofy the whole time like he gets egg on his head and he falls into a pit and like all the stupid shit and then you fight him in another battle with him and another one of the minions or whatever they're traveling with again they don't ever explain anything apparently that minion was in love with like
01:06:19
Speaker
the like the brother of alfina and it's just really fun they never explain anything or any backstory or anything to give you any care whatsoever but yeah so you do that fight and then they both jump off a cliff and then you see them in the main tower with the other bad guys together he's there and you fight everybody else or or you have some you at least if you don't fight them you at least have some like
01:06:49
Speaker
explanation as to what happened to them. Yes. Yeah. There was one, the teacher guy that he's like the only one you don't end up fighting. Um, but they gave you some sense as to why this guy just straight up just disappears. Like they just, I think they forgot to do something with them and keep it like they probably had a boss fight with him and they just forgot.
01:07:10
Speaker
to put it in the game or something like that and it just it just got forgotten entirely and then I just kept like watching the ending credits being like is he gonna be here he'd be here and he was like never mentioned or never seen again and it's like okay yeah
01:07:26
Speaker
And like 90% of this after the first few hours of the game, after you do this thing, going forward, there's a lot of that happens in this game where they have these characters where you want more from them and you never get them. Like Olf was one of the better characters in the game in terms of
01:07:45
Speaker
his mechanics and his, his style looks like identical from a character in the first game. Um, like he's like a car. He's like, he's like the wish version of rap and grant grant you one. Like, but like he was the one I wanted to know more about. And you kind of get a little bit about him of like how he left, left his tribe, but it's never like fully
01:08:09
Speaker
Like gone into depth of why did there's it's basically just like I just wanted to see the world and it's like And the part that made it worse is like I thought that there was gonna be more development there You get to that town and it's like he's like, oh, yeah, like they they aren't gonna let you in I'm like, okay, we're about to learn we're about to get like thrown in jail We're about to learn a bunch of stuff and then the Guardians just like let them in and
01:08:36
Speaker
And then there's no, there's nothing else. It's just like, let them in. Here's my power. What? Yeah. Like, how is that? Like, how is that a thing? It felt a lot. It felt like they were leading up to everything they were going to do with rap. Like they did with rap and grandia one. And then, yeah, we got the dollar store version of that. It was like.
01:09:01
Speaker
This is this is Grandia one and this is rap at home. Exactly. Like, oh, it drove me nuts. And I felt that way about.
01:09:11
Speaker
Basically, every character. Yuki accomplishes his dream in the first three hours and no longer has a personality. He's the main character of the stupid game and he has no personality past the first three hours of the game. After that, he's just like, we've got to help Alfina.
01:09:32
Speaker
Which also completely flipped with me because every time they said Alfina, all I could hear was, Alfina, lend me your power!
01:09:42
Speaker
That's all I heard every time they said Alfina from there on out. I was just like, I can't get Lunar out of my head. It's the way they said her name a lot that I was like, it made me think of, uh, think of Lunar so much. It was like so close to sounding the same at some times when they would like yell her name and he was like, Alfina! And I was like, let me your power! I could literally- I could not get that out of my head at that point. I was just like, nope.
01:10:10
Speaker
It's just like, I'm just gonna, I just have to accept that I'm gonna every now and again think of that.
01:10:18
Speaker
Yeah. And they start off Alfina as a sense of like, where they're kind of giving me grandia two vibes with her. And then they keep telling her a communicator and that she's special and everything. And you're like, okay, the gods communicate with everybody. She's supposed to be this bridge of communication between like the people and the gods, but the gods could talk to you and they do. They talk to their own people and like talking to her.
01:10:48
Speaker
Yeah, I thought that the communicator thing was going to be I thought it was going to be the same thing because like you're running around and it was poorly explained that this was how it was going to go. But you kind of just got the hang of it. Like you're running around to the different gods, getting their power, whatever. And it was the case that I thought, like you said,
01:11:09
Speaker
or the communicator so like you're gonna be talking to you're gonna be talking to like she's gonna be the one that's interacting with them but like after the first one nope nope yeah it just literally what just talks to yuki yeah exactly i was like okay oh and then and then tells alfina
01:11:30
Speaker
or no, the first one told first one talked to her and they do this whole ceremony thing. Okay. So they do this whole ceremony for her to like, get all dressed up and all pretty, like, and talk to the gods. And at first, like after that introduction, I'm like, what's so unimportant. I forgot it happened. Exactly. Because she says, and they're like, believe in love. And she's like,
01:11:55
Speaker
Okay, it's like you gotta believe in love and then the God doesn't love your brother Don't stop loving your brother and she's like what and that literally watches her brother kill this God literally cutting its head off right in front of her and
01:12:12
Speaker
And then she's like whisked away by the main character to safety, suddenly changes out of her fancy outfit in like between two cutscenes. It's real fucking weird. Like you go one cutscene and she's in the fancy outfit and the next cutscene where they're inside the temple, she's clacking her outfit. It was like some off-scene Sailor Moon shit. She was just immediately back in her regular outfit ready to fight.
01:12:37
Speaker
And I was, I was expecting that dress because I thought the dress was kind of neat. I was expected out. Like there's no way she was hiding that underneath it. Like, like even her hair was different. Like her hair was all done up and like buns and shit. Like it was very Sailor Moon, like in her princess gown kind of outfit. And like, and then suddenly she's just the next cut scene. Um, you see them in the thing and she's in her outfit again. I'm like, what?
01:12:59
Speaker
Are they just expecting us not to remember this? This literally was like five seconds. And then after that interaction with a god, all the other gods talk to you and their own people. They tell their people not to let you in and to not harm you. And I'm going, you gods can clearly talk to your own people. What the hell do you need a communicator for? Like what is their purpose?
01:13:25
Speaker
They did kind of explain that the communicator was supposed to be like the bridge between worlds. Yeah, but like...
01:13:34
Speaker
I feel like it was a little bit of a stretch. It was, especially when they were talking to people and stuff. I think they could have built that a little bit differently in terms of like, they only spoke to the communicator or the communicator was the only one who could speak their language or something, something that made it so that they were needed. Because Alfina was just never needed for 95% of the game in terms of the story. But she was the central person that your main character and everybody was doing everything for.
01:14:04
Speaker
So it's like, how am I supposed to care about this girl and her thing when she's just like entirely useless? And then they never give you the backstory between her and her brother until later, quite late into the game. And it's like, I honestly think they should have started you off as Alfina as the main character, where you start off with building this relationship with her brother.
01:14:31
Speaker
I think it should have started off, now that you say that, it could have started off with you using her to escape.
01:14:40
Speaker
That would have been, that would have been a good way. Like, yeah, that would have explained why she was running. Cause that wasn't really clear ever. And, and why she was like, kind of like running away or going to a thing or whatever bead stopped and stuff. You could literally started with her and it could have started with a little flashback of her and her brother and being like, Oh, I wish you were still here. I don't know where you are, but you get at like, like 25, 30 hours into the game. Yes.
01:15:05
Speaker
Yeah, that that made me mad that you basically get that in the last like five hours of the game, you finally get to see her, her brother go kind of psycho and why it kind of sort of made sense. It still didn't really make sense, but it's still kind of sort of like gave you something for him of why he's kind of weird.
01:15:25
Speaker
But like, you don't get to learn that until like five, like you're five hours away from beating the game. And I'm going, we could have had that at the very beginning, building up off of his character and then having the spontaneous Yuki running into her sort of thing. And then him wanting to be a pilot, they could have built that up a little bit better. And he could have just been always the one supporting.
01:15:45
Speaker
like being there and sort of like just instantly kind of thing like they they could have just kept they could have even just kept yuki the same if they would have started off with alfina and building up that stuff i'm okay with yuki being more of a hollowed character if they gave us a main character the other one which is the the alfina as the second main character thing more of a like
01:16:12
Speaker
substance and build up for her and then she goes from like being somewhat independent but still needing help like obviously needing help but like being like no i'm gonna do this like this is my decision and she's like fighting with raven at the start of the game and he's like are you sure like that scene never makes sense by the way it just doesn't make sense to me that he's like
01:16:33
Speaker
trying to stop her from seeing the god like it never it's never really explained why he's trying to stop her but but she's like i'm gonna i'm gonna do it i'm gonna go on the way and i'm like oh this girl's got a bit of backbone and she loses it within like as soon as you go to the like the temple and meet the guardian for the first time all of a sudden she becomes incredibly whiny
01:16:56
Speaker
and is crying and whining for the majority of the game from there on. Like she just like, Amelia's cry! And I'm like, why are you crying? There's no reason to cry right now, like why? There's just so many times where she just starts crying and I'm like, are we supposed to care?
01:17:20
Speaker
like yeah they changed her character halfway through like like it almost feels like they never could like coherently like land on an idea and I think the biggest thing I think they were planning on hitting us with a bait-and-switch with her as the character
01:17:41
Speaker
at that you're like, you think she's gonna be in the character, and then they're like, but wait, no, there's actually gonna be this character. That's what I thought they were gonna do, but the problem is they do that.
01:17:55
Speaker
Again, like 25 to 30 hours into like a 35 hour game. That part made me so mad. I knew that was going to trigger you. They just like, they, they, they pave the, they pave the groundwork for you to basically, there's two different characters that they could have basically said, okay, we're going to swap her out or another character.
01:18:17
Speaker
And the whole game you're just like they got being like, oh yeah, they're gonna take her away. Like that's like that. We're playing grandia. Of course they're gonna do it. They felt like at the entire game. And I was like, I got to a certain point. I was like, oh, no way. They're not gonna do it. And I got to what I what could have been considered the final boss, right? Like I think that part would have felt like the final boss to some people.
01:18:42
Speaker
Yeah, it was done. I'm going to just say it right now. It was done better than the final boss.
01:18:48
Speaker
I agree. Um, the battle, the battle was hard and you had to really pay attention because you had three things go like, okay. So it's like the, the boss fight, he, it's him. And then his orb is its own thing and his swords and old thing. And then you have the God Slayer sword. And if you ever let that reach the end, it's an instant game over. So you have to constantly watch that and cancel it before it gets anywhere close to the end or maxed out HP. I was like, I'm not even going to attack this.
01:19:18
Speaker
I'm going to fucking cancel that shit. I don't I didn't even know what it did. I would just assumed it was I just assumed it was bad news. I was like, I'm all set. Nope. It tell it starts off. It tells you it like it starts off right away. It gives you that little blurb being like this is what killed Raven.
01:19:35
Speaker
instantly. It's literally what it said. And I was like, yeah. And I, I, it comes up with like a little bubble message above the thing before you click attack. But maybe if you click attack too quick, it goes away. So maybe when you click, Oh yeah, I wasn't even, I didn't even click attack on it. I literally just, like I said, it was any time I saw it, I was like, anytime it started moving and got past halfway, I'm like, cancel that shit immediately.
01:19:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, so it tells you that it's gonna be like an endgame sort of thing. And of course, after I did the fight, I looked it up and I was like, oh yeah, as soon as you let it go to the zero, it would have wiped out your party. So I was like, oh, interesting. But every time it got to about halfway, I always had Donna cancel it. I did her crit and it was close and it just canceled it for me. But honestly, I did not expect them to then hit us with the, oh, we're gonna swap in a new character.
01:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, that point like. And not even a character to swap in for very long. You got the character legit for most of the final dungeon up until you got the character up until the final boss. So from what you got, you got a different character for one dungeon. Why? Why do it at that point?
01:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's like it's like they were trying so hard to be grandia one where grandia one did the same thing but they did it early enough in a lot of cases that it it wasn't like it was still frustrating because you built up this character for so long just for them to go.
01:21:10
Speaker
But it at least wasn't endgame that they did that in. They literally took away Alfina, gave you another character for two hours. And then you get to the end boss and they're like, here's Alfina back. You don't even get to use this new character. You don't even get a choice. You get Alfina and she's the same level she left.
01:21:33
Speaker
No, they leveled her up. Oh, no, they leveled up her up. Yeah, you're right. But her skills weren't leveled up. So whatever level the other character was. Yes, that's right. They did do the carbon copy of the heck thing. But with the new character they gave you, you were like leveling up her skills because I thought in my brain, OK, this is going to be my end party. So I kept trying to like level up her skills and have her attack more because I wanted her to have like the where she can cancel enemies right away and bypass the
01:22:01
Speaker
the the bar and stuff like that like they had for every other character they do that for two hours you get to the end boss uh before you even fight him they give you alfina back and they take her away and you're just like shit like alfina still needs
01:22:16
Speaker
I don't have all her abilities yet. Like, it didn't have all of her, like, moves. That's what I did. I basically went and I, like, as soon as I got her back, I was like, OK, I'm going to see if they leveled up her abilities or anything like that. And I basically I grinded out, like, a level. And then I was like, all right, it's time to fight the final boss.
Comparison with Other RPGs and Target Audience Issues
01:22:37
Speaker
And I think, I think I figured out what they did. So, and it came from what a Comet P-Stone made about Grandia 1 feeling like a 90s kids cartoon show. It dawned on me that they were trying to, in some weird way, recapture that
01:22:58
Speaker
90s kid cartoon show from the first game and they made it like it was for kids in a way like they were going even though the audience that they would attract were way older but it just definitely felt like the the hollowed out characters the hollowed out plot kids don't care about that sort of stuff when they're little right and
01:23:18
Speaker
And like grandia kind of has that like goofy sort of kids charm or whatever. Um, and, and sort of like maybe like a 10 year old sort of thing could play it. And grandia three, I think they were trying to do the same thing, but the problem is, is they, they completely missed the target of their age group because we had where grandia one came out. There was a lot of like 10, 11, 12 year olds playing it.
01:23:44
Speaker
And they're gonna grow with the series. Yeah. And they kind of grew up. Grandia 2 was a little bit of a different kind of plot line and a little bit more mature and more into the teenage sort of thing. And you're like, okay, it's a fall thing. But then you get to Grandia 3 and they go all the way backwards. Even though the age group of the people playing these games and going up to it aren't kids anymore. They're probably adults, if not teenagers.
01:24:12
Speaker
And we need more than just trope reactions of characters with no story and no backstory of these characters to give you any sort of care for them. Whereas kids don't necessarily need that. Like a lot of the times when I'm watching like shows with like my nephews when they were little, they wouldn't understand the plot. They wouldn't understand really the characters. They would just laugh at the goofiness of things.
01:24:39
Speaker
Like the start of the game really had that where the guy gets egg all over his face because the old lady beats him with the bag. And he falls into the pit and stuff like that. He falls into the pit and you find the ship cap in a barrel. And then Yuki basically calls his mom fat. And these stupid things where kids would have lost their shit laughing at it.
01:25:04
Speaker
But it lost everything else trying to appease to children. And honest to God, with that battle system, I don't think I'd want my kids probably would have, like, kids would have probably rage quit. Like, little kids. I'm talking about like the...
01:25:21
Speaker
a demographic felt more like it was like grandia one where it was like an age of like 10 years old and i'm going the bottle system got hard at times it would have been really difficult so it's like it's like they had the battle system made for those growing up with the series and being the age to use it but then they had the story and characters back with like little kids are playing it and i i feel like they just didn't
01:25:46
Speaker
Figure out what they wanted there and I think that's what happened with why the characters and everything disconnected Because kids don't care about that sort of stuff or necessarily they generally don't like they might pick up on a few little things but young kids are just looking for something the fun and entertaining the watch or play and they don't necessarily like
01:26:05
Speaker
Super like process that that character doesn't have this whole fledged out story Whereas the adult watching the kid play the game is going What the heck are they doing that shit like this? This doesn't make any sense and that literally was how I felt throughout the entire game
01:26:20
Speaker
I felt like the adult watching the kids game and going, why in the heck is it doing all this except for the portions that weren't, were very obviously not for kids, which was like the battle system, the comp, like the things that you could do with like the magic and everything was a little bit more complex. Um, and I'm going
01:26:42
Speaker
And that's why Grandia, like, that's why Grandia one did so well is because the battle system was pretty evenly paced. And even though it was made for more for the kids aesthetic thing, it still had enough of development of the characters and everything like that. Anybody could enjoy it. I totally played it for the first time in 2022 and still really loved and enjoyed it.
01:27:05
Speaker
even the characters that weren't necessarily in the party for all that long or even characters that were just like enemies or stuff like that, they had those characters and you really got to feel more for those characters and get more development.
01:27:23
Speaker
for those characters that like, like you had like the sisters, you had the freaking, like the evil henchman guy that was with the sister, with Fina's sister. And it was like, you get more of a feel for all these different characters, even if they're not in your party, like they're getting enough screen time that like, you're really enjoying
01:27:48
Speaker
those characters as well. Or at the very least, you don't have to give a shit about the characters, but at least they're pushing the story, right? Yeah. And they're giving you substance to those characters where they're just not this mysterious thing that never gets explained. And one thing about Emilius being one of the main bad guys sort of direction throughout the whole game is that you never know anything about him until the last five hours of the game.
01:28:15
Speaker
And in that freaking cutscene where it's a flashback to a kid, he looks identical to Dan from Xenogears. And I couldn't unsee it because they pushed his hair so far back that his forehead was really high.
01:28:30
Speaker
And he was very jarring looking and I was like, I couldn't unsee it. So I was literally laughing through that whole cut scene where it's literally him becoming unhinged and you finally figure out a little bit why he's doing what he's doing. You still don't get the full story. And like, and then suddenly they were like, Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's like, like they, they give you him as a thing that he's trying to awaken this, this, the, the guardian. They never explained why the guardian was sealed.
01:29:00
Speaker
They just like, all the guardians didn't like it and sealed it. And then they, they alluded to like those guardians were wrong. And like, there's just so much shit here that they like did not finish. It feels like I would have liked to see them a lot more. Yeah. I feel like if they ever were to redo this game, they would have to remake it, not remaster it and give us a freaking story.
01:29:22
Speaker
Like it just it just felt like they had so many ideas. They never followed through on any of them. And they just kind of hoped you wouldn't notice or that you'd be too young not to notice. It's how it felt. It's one of those things where and I'll make a I'll make this is a this is going to be a criticism that a lot of people are going to be angry about. But it felt very similar to, we'll say,
01:29:50
Speaker
how in Final Fantasy X, you're just bouncing around to get each different Aeon. It felt like that almost. But the whole game, the entire, like, yeah, pretty much the entire game. And there wasn't any like character building or dialogue or any of that much.
01:30:12
Speaker
leading up to those events. It just felt like you were going to get the Aeon. It literally just felt like the process of going to the Aeon is like the process of going to the Guardian. That's it. 100% you're right. If Final Fantasy X was just that without the character building a story and ramping up to anything, people would have hated X.
01:30:34
Speaker
They would have never followed through with finishing it or, and even if they did. Always simulator. I mean, exactly. We were all, that's already a complaint of the game. So when you have it, like basically that portion of the game that is, is more of like very linear, more of an aspect where you're just like, okay, that is basically all of Grandia three.
01:30:54
Speaker
You just keep expecting it to have something and give you something in more depth. And I actually went back, like after I beat the game, I had loaded up with my earlier save files before I went to the final dungeon and I ran around talking to NPCs. Some of the NPCs did give you a little bit more of the story, but there was absolutely no reason to talk to them the entire game.
01:31:19
Speaker
See, I started to talk to NPCs. I started talking to the NPCs in the beginning. And I was like, they're not giving me anything. This is like I'm not getting anything from these characters. I'm going to stop doing this. Yeah. And that's really it. And I did the same thing as you. I talked to a few of the NPCs. I went into some houses looking for some chests, you know, basic RPG stuff, you know, looting, robbing the people.
01:31:47
Speaker
Robin the people, you know, the thing you do in JRPGs and I was talking to this stuff, but you're right at the first few hours of the game, they give you nothing. And so I just stopped talking to them because I was like, well, this is pointless. And there's no reason for me to go into these houses. Even when you go into the glass world, like there's so many houses where they weren't.
01:32:06
Speaker
Like they weren't connected to like the magic shop or the guild shop or the inn. Even the inn was useless because it's like you just go to the save sphere and it would just recover you. So the inn was so the inns were literally just to push progress to say it's the next day. Yeah, and exactly. It was very in what world are you going to an inn in an RPG and you're not resting there and like gaining your health. This is weird.
01:32:37
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. But halfway through the game, they expected you to suddenly talk to the NPCs because the NPCs started giving you some of the plot. If you talk to all the bishops and stuff like that in the church, they actually talk about Emilius.
01:32:57
Speaker
Oh, OK. And but it's still not enough. Like, it's still not enough to give you like super substance to care. But in the same reason, if you talk to all the people in the desert village, they also start dropping hints about Raven and tell you a little bit him. I did talk to the people in the desert village. That's actually how I found out about the about the optional like mini boss that you fight in the desert.
01:33:26
Speaker
Oh, OK. Yeah. Guard tells I just ran into him by accident. Oh, no, I didn't run into the guard tells you that he might that there's like the desert. Whatever is in the like the person's in the southwest part of the desert. So I just walked up in there and was like, oh, there's a big ass monster like sand lion griffin thing. And then I killed it and got like 4K experience and 4K
01:33:51
Speaker
Gold and I was like, hell yeah. Luckily I didn't run into it when you did at like level 12. Yeah, I ran into level 12 and I was like, Oh shit. He like I was like level 23 when I got there. I was like, I'm a fuck this thing up. I super emotion myself. Cause I was like, I hit him at level two. Like I was running around the desert trying to find chests and there he was. And I was like, Ooh, big boy. I'm going to go after the big boy. And so I go.
01:34:17
Speaker
and fight him and I get a surprise attack on him and I'm super excited and I send Yuki out to attack and he's like what damage and I was like oh no oh no regrets made and he like doesn't move he like kills like three out of my four party members and I'm like
01:34:32
Speaker
So like flee, I run all the way back to the village, resurrect everybody, heal everybody back up and I'm like, nope. And then I forgot about it. I forgot about it. I thought to myself, Oh, I should come back here at some point and fight it. Maybe it'll give me something cool. And I completely forgot because I totally like
01:34:48
Speaker
It didn't really give anything cool, but it gave 4K 4K gold. And I was like, oh, that's that is easy. That is. Yeah. As soon as you told me that, I was like, oh, shit. Especially because I was at I had like super crazy spells. So I was just casting it. Basically, I could cast one round of magic and basically kill it. So yeah.
01:35:12
Speaker
Yeah, so it's like, so it expected you to talk to some of the NPCs, but at times it just never gave you anything, never gave you anything, never gave you any plot. But there were like, like I said, I had loaded it up and I was like, okay. And I ran around and talked to like people in the snow village and stuff like that. And they like alluded to things and they like suggested things and stuff. And I was like,
01:35:34
Speaker
Did they really expect us to talk to NPCs but never giving us really a reason to talk to NPCs? I mean, the biggest problem again is that I started talking to NPCs in like the first two or three towns. They didn't give me any they didn't give me nearly enough information. So I was like, OK, talking to NPCs in this game must be pointless. And then I just stop. So by the time I got to the desert, I wasn't talking to NPCs. I was like, fuck this. I'm going to the I went to the magic shop. I went to the skill shop. I went to the general store. Yeah. And I went to the inn to either push progress or save.
01:36:04
Speaker
And that was that. That was it. You wouldn't go in any other houses. You wouldn't talk to anybody else because there was no point to do it.
Engagement and Replayability Concerns
01:36:10
Speaker
Oh, you couldn't loot. You couldn't lose. You never got any items past like one character in the starting village gave you an item. If you talk to them, they're like, Oh, you want to help you in your journey. Yeah. I do remember that. Yeah. And then after that, never again.
01:36:25
Speaker
And I was like, OK, I just stopped talking. And then the one time you do the casino, um, apparently with that like mini game with the casino, I heard you could go back to it to get some stuff. But it took me a while to figure out how to play the mini game. It tells you in the book. If you look in the manual, it tells you how to play it. Oh, it does tell you in the manual. OK, that's one thing I wanted to confirm with you. And I never actually just tell you because I just got
01:36:53
Speaker
Like I figured it out kind of like I figured out majority of the mechanics and I was winning there for a little while. But but then I just kind of moved on with the game and I never thought I forgot to ask you if it was because I couldn't like since I was a kid. So I don't know what happened to my my manual. But hopefully I find it. It's probably somewhere in a box.
01:37:17
Speaker
But yeah, you actually I did end up looking up. You can play that mini like you can fly back there, play that mini game and get like the best skill book in the game. Yeah. Yeah. It's behind like 999,999 medals. And I was like, I'm not playing this for that long. Fuck that. Yeah. It's literally you could get the best skill book of the game and it's like a million medals.
01:37:38
Speaker
And I'm like, I'm not playing this mini game when it's still a little bit RNG. I already put 33 hours into this game and feel like I wasted my time. No shot. I'm putting any more time into this game. So now that we've talked about all like the story and everything like that, what do you think about that final boss? Final boss?
01:38:02
Speaker
was
01:38:20
Speaker
One or two of them were level 43. And from what I've seen now, I was underleveled. From what I've seen, the suggestion says to be at least level 48. Yeah. That's what I ended up being. I think 49.
01:38:40
Speaker
Items canceling the boss when you can and like the super broken orb that stops time. Oh god Yeah, yeah, the orbs were broken like words were very broken. Yeah, but that was like the final boss and then the ending The ending was so dumb. I think We get the ghost of brother past and then and then we get oh
01:39:07
Speaker
Uh, Yuki and Alfina had a kid and because she's blonde and he has blue hair, it has green hair. Oh my God. We took an art class in elementary school. Oh my goodness. I was, oh, I was so frustrated with the end of this game. And when the kid is like, daddy, can I fly someday? And Yuki just goes, eh. And literally I just screamed at the game being like, that's not a fucking answer.
01:39:37
Speaker
I was so annoyed. I was so fucking annoyed. Like...
01:39:45
Speaker
it was apparently if you know you have a blonde um have a baby with somebody with blue hair the child ends up with green hair you didn't know that like yep apparently and the ears were like half the half the size of alfinas i thought that was hilarious the ears they had like little pointy alfiers but they were like little nubs like
01:40:11
Speaker
They're like, oh, they had a baby. We're just gonna fuse them together and then like shrink it. And there you go. Yeah, there's the child. Yeah. And then you thought that's the thing. And then the credits roll. And I just sat there staring being like, is this literally it?
01:40:29
Speaker
And you don't even get a cutscene of animation for like half the other, like all the other characters. Like you see like Dada putting a flower on the grave, but it's a still image. And then you see all surrounded by kids still image. You see your mom with your new daddy still image.
01:40:54
Speaker
Yeah, they all the cutscene was still images except for the the yuki and alphida having a little kid and it's just like And even that cutscene was like two minutes long I will say 33 hours of this game and I got like five minutes of an ending It wasn't even good And it wasn't even good
01:41:22
Speaker
Oh, it made me mad. It made the ending... The ending might have been the worst part. That's the shocking thing. Yeah, I agree. The ending was not worth everything you go through that game. I felt so bittersweet beating this game because I was so happy it was over, but then I was so upset that it happened the way it did.
01:41:50
Speaker
immediately was like, I'm done. I'm done. Like I spam KJ and I was like, beat it. It was like 2 a.m. I was so excited. I'm questioning whether or not I want to just stay up for another three hours and beat the game. And I was just like, no, I'll just do it in the morning. And then I beat it. I beat it literally. I woke up and beat it like two hours after.
01:42:10
Speaker
Yeah. And it's funny because like, I literally was like, yeah, I beat it. And then like 10 minutes later, I was like, yep, that was a game. It's literally all I wrote KJ. And that was my, that's my explanation of the ending. And then he got to it and I was like, he finished. I'm like, so how about that ending? He's like, what fucking ending?
01:42:31
Speaker
I'll tell you what this was a game of all time. That's that's how all this was a game of all time like that That's just it was it was a game game. We played it. It had a good battle system and good music How are you feeling about it so throw you on the spot there
01:42:53
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Um, my next segment where we want to talk about the reviews of the game, we have to actually review it before we do that. Okay. We'll go for it. Um, yeah. So this game, I mean, the sad thing is, is like, the reason my score might be higher is because of the battle system.
01:43:18
Speaker
The battle system and the OST, if I was just going purely by story and character development, and that's what drives you in an RPG is the story, it would be like a two out of 10. I literally put two fingers up. When you said that, I literally put two fingers up. It literally would be a two out of 10. If you are an RPG gamer who is driven by story and you play mostly by story,
01:43:45
Speaker
Don't play the game. If that is the case, don't play this. If you care, if story is going to matter to you in a game, stay away from Grandia 3.
01:43:55
Speaker
because it literally just keeps making, be like, oh, I hope it just gets better. I hope it gets better. I hope I get some sort of story. I hope something happens and you get 33 hours into it where we were both like, you know, we beat the game for the podcast. That's what we're doing. And we watched that ending and we were both just like, I think the ending actually made me matter than the rest of the game. I think I legitimately was like, I was,
01:44:21
Speaker
Legitimately angry when I when I thought that ending just punched me in the gut like it's just it was like we could have just had no ending and I would have been happier with that I Honestly, I think I would have been happier if they would have just rolled two credits right after you killed the final boss I would have been like excuse of an ending just just credits, please
01:44:42
Speaker
Yeah, if you care about story, character development, where anything makes sense, and actually shapes up characters that makes you care, don't play this game at all. If you're somebody who can overlook all of that and want to play it for the fun battle system,
01:45:03
Speaker
the fun mechanics in that sense of the battle system, then yeah, it's a really good battle system. It's really good music. The music sounds so good, you don't end up getting bored of it, even though you hear it a million times.
01:45:20
Speaker
and with the battle music and stuff. And they did a really good job with that. And so the battle system and everything is fun or whatever. And challenging at times, especially with some of the bosses, it makes you think, it makes you reconfigure your character sometimes, and all that sort of stuff. That portion of it, I will say, was fun. My question to you there. The rest of it? Why not just play Grandia I or Grandia II at that point?
01:45:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's a point where, yes, Grandia 3 has the better battle system out of the two, but the other two games have a lot more going for it, even if they are slightly inferior in terms of the battle system.
01:46:02
Speaker
That's the way I'm gonna say it and I honestly just don't remember like I don't recommend people play it I I think it's kind of a waste of time it was and it was it's a long time too It's not like this game was like 15 hours if this game was like 15 hours or 20 hours and it was like this bad Whatever, right? But the fact that I had like 33 34 hours into this game That's a lot of my time gone
01:46:27
Speaker
Get those pretty grandiose three robbed me of 33 hours and I can't get it back and I'm not happy. I kind of want to send a bill for my 33 hours. Honestly, though. Yeah, like I man off. I like to I like Kodalka better than this, like I. I I don't know if I go. They're pretty on par for me, if I'm being honest.
01:46:55
Speaker
The one thing Koudelka has got going for it is that it was only like a 15 hour game. Yes. It was trying something new and didn't really quite hit the mark. It also has going for it. It's connected to the shadow hearts, which is partly why I liked it more. And I keep that. Um, but taking that out aside, yeah, I, at least it was not 33 hours of Koudelka was like 33 hour 40 40 hour game like that.
01:47:23
Speaker
I don't think we would still be doing this podcast if Kudelka was a 40 hour game. I probably would have just let you, I would have given that, we're just not, we're not reviewing this one. We'll change games. We would not have finished that game. We would have changed games. I would not have finished the game if it was 40 hours. So in that instance, KJ, what do you, what do you review a Grandia 3 out of 10?
01:47:50
Speaker
I'm in a community where we're doing like a game challenge thing and you have to like report the games that you beat and then like give them a score. So on Sunday, when I finished this game, I gave it a six. I have now had two days to kind of let that settle. And now I'm more at like a five and a half.
01:48:21
Speaker
So I think I'm going to I think I'm going to sit comfortably at my five and a half out of 10 and go from there. Honestly, man, I am the exact same boat. I literally have written right here five, five and a half.
01:48:38
Speaker
I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. This game broke me in terms of like, it's the first game that we're doing to start this year. I was excited that we were doing a Grandia game because I had so much fun with one. And like it
01:48:54
Speaker
I've been dealing with a lot of medical issues right now. I've been very transparent about it on my own streams and stuff like that, and in a lot of pain. And I had to push myself through this game while I was suffering. And I was like, why does the universe hate me? I just kept asking. I'm like, why do I have physical and medical issues at the same time as playing this damn game right now?
01:49:16
Speaker
My brain was just like, I just want to play anything else. And it just kept leaning over to me being like, you don't have to finish it. Just play something else. And I'm like, no, because I am a stubborn child. And I was like, I was halfway through the game at that point. And I'm like, no, I'm finishing this game. I don't care. I don't care if I have to like drag myself out of bed to play this stupid game. I'm going to beat it. I'm going to finish it. I was so stubborn at that point.
01:49:40
Speaker
And now I like when I beat it, I just kind of was so frustrated with the ending. And I was just so frustrated that we just never had a plot line. And I just kind of sat and I was like, I had to do this while I was in some of the most physical pain I've been in in like my whole life. And I'm going,
01:49:58
Speaker
It made me cranky. So my first score was a four. I'm glad you at least like sat down and thought about it a little bit. Yeah. So I sat down afterwards. I wrote out my notes of it. I kind of went back and forth and thought I even did research and I wanted to bring this up. I went back because this game back when it was released was reviewed seven, seven and a half, eight out of 10, nine out of 10 in some areas.
01:50:28
Speaker
And I was like, I'm convinced those people don't know how to count. How? How is this this high? Don't know how to count. And I went back and I looked at some of those reviews. I could only find some like some of them were up. Some of them weren't up anymore, obviously. I went back. I looked at some of the reviews. I looked at the writing points of the reviews.
01:50:51
Speaker
All of them kinda were coming at it from a growing up with grandia sort of experience. Or they didn't get past the first eight hours of the game. Fun fact, half of those reviews that I found that were eights and nines did not get past the first eight hours of the game. And they admit it in the review. Please do not.
01:51:19
Speaker
Please do not put full reviews of games out into the ether without finishing the game. And that happened a lot back then. It happened a lot back then. You look through like PlayStation 2, PlayStation 2 era of games of reviews, PlayStation 1.
01:51:37
Speaker
A lot of reviews back then did actually admit to never beating the game. In fact, there were whole like TV shows of like X play and reviews on the run where they would do an RPG and be like, yeah, this is great. It's at this and then never beat the game. Never got through halfway through the game and we're just fine with it. And majority of the reviews that review this game so high, either one came from a nostalgia of like,
01:52:06
Speaker
one, two being their childhood. This was also a child kind of cute, kind of game, not cutesy, but like kind of game and whatever came from that core bit. Or they didn't beat the game and they didn't get through past where Miranda and Alonzo leave your party. The reviews stop there. And I suddenly it all made sense. Cause when I really thought about it, that first part of the game,
01:52:35
Speaker
pushed me to keep going for a while. And then I got halfway through the game and I'm like, well, I'm just going to beat it at this point. After that, like up to that point, I was actually enjoying the game. I will be like full transparency, like up to that point, I was like, oh, this is going to be dope. Like this is going to be good. If I didn't get past those eight hours of the game, I probably would have given it a seven or eight too because I was really enjoying it. But my integrity is that I don't want to review a game unless I've actually gotten through it.
01:53:03
Speaker
or beat it or the review is I rage quit this thing and I'm trying really hard not to do that that latter part I want to try to get through to at least the end of the game if not beating the game my motivation is to beat it but like
01:53:18
Speaker
The fact that if I would have really thought about it and only played that first few hours of the game, I would have probably scored it a lot higher because you're right. We both were enjoying it. It was goofy. It was silly. We liked the battle system. We liked the music. We were enjoying it. Figuring it was going to get better and give us more plot and all that sort of stuff. If I would have stopped there and reviewed the game, I absolutely would have reviewed it higher. And that's where all those reviews back in the day came from. They did not get past that portion of the game.
01:53:46
Speaker
or they got a little bit past it but not like they never got to the end or whatever majority of those reviews did not talk about the ending the few of them that did were ones that kept going like oh i you know i love it i played grandia one and two as a kid grandia three you know as a teenager blah blah blah they were they were young they were young when they reviewed it they were young when they when they were engaging into it and i'm like
01:54:12
Speaker
Yeah, I see it. I see why I see why because I felt so bad when when I I had it out of four and I was like, I reevaluated every because I was just really cranky at that point. I was cranky and poor pain. And I knew that was where that was coming from. So I was like, now I got to read redo this bill. A five is the lowest score either of us have ever given. So congrats on that. Yeah. Five and a half. Five and a half. What's that? So I even gave Koudelka a five and a half.
01:54:40
Speaker
I gave Kill Delica, I think a six. Yeah. Yeah. This is my lowest review game that we've played is five and a half. And that's being generous because I did like the battle system so much. That's what gave it the point five over five, a battle system fucking slaps. And I love it. And the music wasn't horrible. It wasn't like, like the chronocross.
01:55:08
Speaker
I love that game to pieces, but that battle theme was hard to listen to for a very long portion of the game. At least the two battle themes that you have, the first disc and the second disc, were great and they were fine to listen to. That's what pulled it up the .5 for me from the fight.
01:55:27
Speaker
I would have given it a flat out five and then honestly I'm recommending people who like story and like to build up characters and stuff to not play it because it's just recommending this game to anybody that like If I recommend this game to you, I probably don't like you
01:55:46
Speaker
I'm not recommending this game to anybody that I actually appreciate and appreciate their time. I don't want people to waste 33 hours of their life hoping there's going to be a story when there's never a story. Like everyone that's in this chat right now, please, I care about y'all. Don't play this game.
01:56:08
Speaker
There are so many better games out there. Don't play this. This is a waste of your time. It's a waste of your time. And it's a waste of 33 hours of your time. Like this isn't even like a 10, 15 hour game that you could be like, Oh, you know, it's you sucky story and characters, but hey, it's short. At least you could get through it. Okay. Maybe, maybe at the battle system. So freaking fun. You just have to play it and do it. But.
01:56:29
Speaker
No, like it's 33, 34 to 40 hours depending on how much you struggle or are good with the battle system. You might be playing it longer or shorter than us. And honestly, I don't hate people enough to do that to them. Like it's just, you keep expecting there to be a story and you keep expecting there to be character development and there's nothing, there's literally
01:56:53
Speaker
Nothing, and I was like this is coming from like I'm usually a positive Optimistic person about these kind of things, but I'm just like I can't I can't do it It was mean I look at I tend to look at the glass half full But also I'm a realist like if something if something is not worth my time I'm gonna be real about it Yeah, and like I understand the mentality of like playing
01:57:20
Speaker
playing to basically say like, I've completed the series.
01:57:24
Speaker
Yes. So like, I can understand that too. In that regard, I'm glad that we've played this because like now when I play Grandia two later on this year, I'll have played all three and I'll be able to kind of talk, talk about that. Um, yeah. And I don't think, I don't think extreme should be thrown into there. Uh, even the developers that was a, it was a bad game and they tried something and it didn't work. And they are, they're very transparent even about that. So it's like that, that I don't even recommend people getting, but yeah,
01:57:52
Speaker
To me, I have now played and beat all three. And I'm like, I'm happy that I've completed the series. I'm just disappointed that it ended on this. And it now makes sense why there hasn't been a grandiose game since.
01:58:05
Speaker
Because I think even with the skewed scores of the first eight to 10 hours of the game, that, yay, this is an amazing game. It gave it seven, eights, and nines, only playing less than 10 hours of the game. Even with those, I don't think
01:58:23
Speaker
Um, it was very well received overall when the consumer got it in their hands and played it and we're like, Oh, um, so I feel like I see this game all the time, like all the time in pawn shops, all the time at retro stores. Like it's usually 10, $20. It's never very expensive.
01:58:42
Speaker
And it's one of those things that is just kind of out in the wild because I don't think majority of the people do enjoy it. I think there's a small group of people that do like either the nostalgia of grandia, playing it as a kid, playing it as a young teenager. And maybe I would have played this game better if I did play it when I was like, when I was just like, I was still, I would have been still in high school when this game came out, when the game came out, but I didn't end up playing it
01:59:08
Speaker
I played it a little bit in college, but then I just dropped it because of college stuff. I think if I would have played it in high school, I might've liked it a little bit better, because I would have been a lot younger and a lot more like less access to good RPGs. And because like a lot of them got overshadowed and pushed away. Like I didn't get to play a lot of these games that I'm playing now that I'm like, holy crap, these are amazing games. You know, playing like like Cito Gears, it's Suikoden and all those things that I never got to play when I was growing up.
01:59:38
Speaker
So this might have actually stood out as something that I had enjoyed if I played all the way through it as a kid I might have actually liked it back then and then if I'd never gone back to play it I would have be preaching to everybody I liked it and then everybody going your opinion sucks after they play it and I'm kind of glad I played this as a much older adult and So I could be very much like um
02:00:05
Speaker
Don't do it. Don't do it. Just play. Just play. You made me so mad because like I'm playing another game that is from the same era. Like this came out and this came out here in 2006. We couldn't five came out in 2006. I'm pretty sure. Oh, it's we could have five looks fantastic. It's like, oh my goodness. It is like night and day. It is.
02:00:28
Speaker
Heck, we reviewed Valkyrie Profile 2 higher than this game, and it came out around the same time. I was going to say, yeah, these all came out around the same, like, end of the PS2, beginning of the PS3 era, and, like, I... Late night and day. Yeah, it's really tough.
02:00:48
Speaker
But yeah, but I'm glad that I did it. And I'm glad that you'll be getting to do Gradia 2 because you get to leave off on a better of the three. Yeah, I will leave the series on a good note. I'm leaving on it on a like my heart hurts. And now I just want to go replay two so that I don't hurt anymore. I know that's melodramatic, but that's how I feel right now.
02:01:16
Speaker
But yeah, yeah, that's that's Grand Year three. All that it meets your expectations. I mean, this is a hell of a way to this is not I did not think this was going to be the worst game that we played this year. It might end up being the worst game we've played. We play this year. Yep. Yep. I can't. I can't see. I can't see Golden Sun, Dark Dawn being worse than this. I really can't.
02:01:40
Speaker
I think I have no idea. I, I really, I play golden, golden sun for the first time and like end of last year for the second one and the first two in 2022, I think. So.
02:01:55
Speaker
Yeah, we'll see. We'll have to see. We'll see. We'll be waiting. We'll be waiting for August for that one. Yeah, that one's not until August, luckily. Luckily, to tell you about our next one, I get out of this grandioth rethought because it's just going to make me mad more.
02:02:10
Speaker
Um, I literally wrote out that just, this is for me. Cause I knew I wasn't going to do this on the podcast. Cause it would be too long, but I literally wrote out how they could have made portions of the game better. Like in terms of like, I'm into that. I know I was like, this game already got me for 33 hours. You're not taking a fucking second more.
02:02:32
Speaker
Like just bits and pieces. That's how I came up with the, if Alfina, we were told by her perspective first, like that would have been already a better start to the game and things like that. But yeah, I, I, then I realized I put too much effort into it. And I was like, I'm not even going to talk about this on the podcast because it'll take too long. And I said, and it's not worth it because they're never going to touch it. They're never going to rebal. They're never going to bring it because they know. And it's like, if they ever do anything with this game, I hope to heck that they just remake it just
02:03:01
Speaker
No, just leave it alone. Let this game die. Make a new Grandia 3 or make a Grandia 4. Let this game die with its mediocrity. Make a Grandia 4 so that at least you revive the series or something on something new. But yeah, to talk about it. So in February, we're going to be playing the last story. This is a game I didn't know super existed until KJ told me about it.
02:03:30
Speaker
I'm super excited. And then I looked into it a little bit and I was like, wow, this game looks beautiful. Um, I'm really excited. Like I really want to try it. So when we were talking, he's like, let's do it for the podcast. Cause I haven't played it yet either. And then I'm, I found the, I found a copy of it. Um,
02:03:47
Speaker
at a retro game store for a very good price. And so I was like, all right, let's do it. We're doing it. And I grabbed it and I'm really, really excited. I'm actually excited about that one. I feel like it's going to be hopefully I hope to heck it's a step up from this. I can't go through another. I don't think we can get much worse from this is I feel like this is a low point. Yeah. For me to score something under a five, the game has to be like both no story and broken.
02:04:17
Speaker
Like it starts to get like to the point where if the game is broken, it goes under a five. You're, you're, you are very generous when it comes to rating things. I'm usually the more critical one. I know. The fact that we both ended up at 5.5 is hilarious. Cause usually, usually I'm higher than you. Oh yeah. I'm just like, this game, this game hurt me. Um, yeah, this, this hurt me mentally while I was hurting physically.
02:04:43
Speaker
But yeah, the last story is our next game. That'll be the February game. It is a Wii game. It's going to be exciting. It's going to be good. It's a Mistwalker game. So anybody that's familiar with Mistwalker, like Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon, good time. But yeah, I think we can generally wrap up here. Are there any closing thoughts on this game, Polly?
02:05:10
Speaker
I now have a game to recommend to the people I don't like. So I'm going to say that. Yeah, I will. If like I said, I said that earlier, if I recommend this game to you, I don't like you just straight up like everybody that's in chat, don't play this game.
02:05:31
Speaker
Everybody in chat right now, we like you. Please don't play this. Don't play this game. I feel like that's going to set off more people to be like, nah, I'm going to play it. I'm going to prove you wrong. I do think this will get some people to play it. But like realistically, they're going to see the story is bad. The combat is good. And the story is.
02:05:54
Speaker
more bad than like the story is worse than the combat is good, if that makes sense. That's the that's the tipping point for me is like, yeah, that's what I said. Five came from the battle system being so good, like I would I would much rather go back to the grandia one battle system.
02:06:16
Speaker
with the Grandia 1 story rather than stay with this garbage story and have the better battle system.
02:06:25
Speaker
100%. It's the same way I feel about 2. Same idea. 2 is a step up from Grandiou 1 in terms of the battle system, but this one's still the better of the 3 that I've played. And I still would rather play 1 or 2, even with the slightly clunkier battle systems of the 2. But the stories are so much better. It's so much more engaging for me. I'm very much somebody who I want the story and the characters to be somewhat great for an RPG.
02:06:55
Speaker
to pull me through it. Like you can have the best mechanics in the world, but if your story and your game suck, you're getting a five, five and a half. And that's what happened with this one. It's like the story and the game, the story, the characters, all of it just was a letdown. Even the jarring, like three different kind of art directions that they were going in was so weird that it's like, I couldn't even give it more points there because I'm like, I like the concept art, but the concept art is in so little of the game.
02:07:22
Speaker
That I'm like I can't even like I can't even be like yeah this and so Yeah, I can I can I rather clunky battle system great story great characters then Amazing battle system and awful story and awful characters Like that's just the way I'm gonna be with these RPGs
02:07:44
Speaker
Agreed. Especially because they're always like, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 hours of your time. Like it's like to invest in that much to just have a good battle system and nothing backing it up is just. Go play a good RPG then. I don't know.
02:08:02
Speaker
That's my closing thought. Play Roddear 1 and 2. That's my closing thought. We're leaving off with Polly being very, very bitter about this game. Thank you everybody that tuned in to the podcast. We'll be back in February. This podcast will go up live.
02:08:22
Speaker
on, um, all platforms. And yeah, we'll be, we'll be back in the end of February last, the last Tuesday in February. So we appreciate y'all. Thank you for being here. And, uh, the 27th or the 29th, I think we're going to go with the 27th though. I think we're going to keep it out of the Tuesdays. I think would be good.
02:08:45
Speaker
Try to keep it on the Tuesday. Yeah. So February 27th is when we're going to do the, uh, the, the last story podcast. Um, and yeah, uh, thank y'all for, for listening and hanging out with us. And, uh, you could join either of our discords. We actually found a way to connect our turn based handouts.
02:09:04
Speaker
We found a way to connect our turn to base tandens chats in both of our discords So even if you join his or mine or both You could talk in there and it'll come up on both both discords, which is really freaking cool So we're doing that for a little while to like kind of build up hype and momentum So yeah, definitely join in so if you've played this game if you haven't played the last story, it's shorter. It's like 15 20 hours So yeah, join us for February with the last story where I'm really excited to be playing it
02:09:35
Speaker
All right. So thanks everybody. And we'll catch off with the next one. Yeah. Hopefully I'll be more positive next time. Have a good one everybody. Bye.