| Grandia After the wake of the RPG genre thanks to Final Fantasy 7, there has certainly been no RPG drought, now comes this classic and beautiful title from GameArts. First released on the saturn all those years ago, now Grandia is ported over to PSX which will make a lot of people happy....... The story revolves around Justin a normal 14 year old boy until one day he sets out on an adventure of adventures to discover the lost Angelou civilisation, sound simple? Well lets just say it is like looking for a needle in a haystack, oh and how about the opposing trouble? Justin is not Grandias only character, the game is made up with lots of colourfel characters, for example the story begins with eight year old Sue tagging along and a little later on, Feena one of the worlds best adventurers joins you on your quest, and on and on. The story is very easy to understand and might be a little simplistic for some people, but me I like it. The 3D polygonal worlds are gorgoues to look at, colorful, crisp and neat, in some cases 3D backgrounds are a little better then pre rendred ones, simply because they seem to catch the eye a little better, and no im not complaining about the Final Fantasy series on the PSX, it is also beautiful to look at, they both have there own charm. You won't find much relisim in the look and style of the game, characters are the traditional small and Manga looking models with brightly coloured hair and clothes along with beautifully modelled locations, the visuals are nice, nothing but nice. The battle system is perhaps one of the greatest ever put together on any RPG on any format.... enemies can be seen before encountred unlike the Final Fantasy series, you can either try to avoid them or go straight in to battle. When you do battle, the system is very clever, I'll try my utter best to explain it. How can I put this? Lets just say it is a fine balance between real-time and turn-based, wait for the characters turns, when there turn comes up choose what you want to do with them via the small turn-table battle menu. Sounds like the FF series battle system? Yes and no, characters can attack together if there turns are close enough together. The time bar is cool and shows the characters heads, when there heads reach near the end of the scale you prepare there attack, and when they hit the direct foot of the scale they pull off there order, this goes for enemies too, wonderful just wonderful. Characters can be customised with the addition of more powerful weapeons and magical spells Magic comes in the form of Mana Eggs, find an egg go to a shop and swap it for a spell and give it to any of the characters,, fair enough? It's just one of the many great touches to the Grandia experience. Music and sound are up to top notch, music is stylishly good and the characters even speak at key scenes in the game, which is good but yet rubbish because you want your beloved characters to speak continusly through the story, well they do when they battle, but I guess that just ain't the same. Grandia is one of those games that seem endless, crammed on to two discs with hours up on hours of entertainment.Chris Wigham 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 |