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By Contributing Writer Rob Pecknold Rating: Awesome For a game as great as Grandia, I'm surprised that Sony didn't hype it up more than they did. Not that the game needed it, though. Lots of video game magazines and web sites have been praising Grandia for months now, saying that it's a masterpiece that is even better than anything Square can dish out. And you know what? They're almost right. Grandia was originally released by GameArts (the creators of the Lunar series) for the Japanese Sega Saturn in December of 1997. All five owners of the US Saturn at that time were looking forward to a US version of the game, but Sega of America wouldn't touch it with a 40-foot pole. Instead, those five people who bought US Saturns were given Magic Knight Rayearth (the horror...). GameArts ported Grandia to the Japanese PlayStation earlier this year, and now Sony has ported it to the US PlayStation. After the horrible job that Sony did with the translation for Star Ocean: The Second Story, I was expecting something equally bad for Grandia, but instead I found a very entertaining script. However, the new English voice acting for some characters is so bad that it hampers the story. The first time I heard Sue speak, I knew that no matter what she said, if I could hear her saying it, I would hate her more and more as the game went on. Grandia's graphics look nice in screen shots, but are slightly less impressive in person. Grandia is so graphically intense that the PlayStation and its pathetic 2MB of RAM run the game like a dog with wheels for hind legs. Wait a minute... a dog with wheels for hind legs would be incredibly fast and would have an advantage over normal dogs, so just forget that analogy, okay? Anyway, the slowdown in this game almost never stops, but it does become bearable once you get used to its presence. The graphical details in Grandia's towns are very cool, but I rarely visited houses other than the ones I had to, mainly because of the immensity of the towns themselves and the horrid loading times. It's fairly easy to get lost in some of the bigger towns. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I found that some parts of towns are un-recognizable, which often makes it hard to find your way to a notable landmark. One of the best things about Grandia is its superb soundtrack. Heck, even the tracks that play on the intro and "Press Start" screens are cool. This isn't surprising given that Grandia's soundtrack was composed by Noriyuki Iwadare, one of the people responsible for the beautiful soundtracks in the Lunar series. This man has the power to move people in a way that composers for say, THQ could never dream of doing, and he fully utilizes this talent in Grandia. Grandia's battle system is incredibly fun, and this is coming from a person who doesn't usually enjoy the battles in RPGs too much. You can see your opponents on-screen before you go into a battle, which results in some strategic positioning as you try to ambush your enemies. You can also be wherever you want on any battle field and attack with every character at the same time. If you can get the timing right, you'll find yourself doing some awesome 4-on-1 attacks. While Grandia's main character doesn't have the bad-ass feel of Solid Snake, Squall, or even The Rock for that matter, he gets the job done as a main character, providing some witty one-liners and a good shoulder to cry on for the less-than-stable females he surrounds himself with. Grandia is by no means an epic RPG, at least not in the way that term is used these days. The story is incredibly light-hearted, with the characters doing almost nothing important (on a saving-the-world scale) for the first ten hours of gameplay. But that's the joy of Grandia: Its story is so personal and well-paced, it doesn't need to be epic. It also doesn't have to rely on explosions or large, flashy battles to make you interested (cough, FF8, cough) because it has raw human emotion flowing out of every orifice in its proverbial body. With its sensational soundtrack, likable characters, and excellent story line, Grandia is one of the best RPGs I've played all year. Send your thoughts on this review to rob@mastergamer.com
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