Grandia Extreme Review
ah yes i remember when i got hooked on grandia... i was 17 and a junior in high school.. it was xmas and dreamcast was still a system.. i asked for grandia II and i got it. popped it in and it consumed my life for the next 3 or 4 weeks until i beat it... i loved it. so i went on to purchase the first grandia and while i enjoyed the 2nd one better part one took about another month of my life. so then i didnt hear anything more about grandia until last year when i was working at a EB games and grandia xtreme was released. bought it and once again consumed a good 3 weeks of my time. this game is good but part 2 is the best of the trilogy. there is also a game boy grandia titled "grandia: parallel trippers" and while i am not familar with the story i know it is only avaible in japan... which sucks.. would be nice to have sometime to tide me over until grandia 3!!
Grandia Extreme Overview
Grandia Xtreme, the first original Grandia title for PlayStation2, is a dramatic story-driven adventure featuring a sophisticated AI engine and deep character skill-development system. This new installment of the franchise features a highly refined battle system that captures the chaotic nature of group combat, and combines it with the elements of real-time and turn-based combat systems.
Grandia Extreme Specifications
Grandia Xtreme, the first original Grandia title for PlayStation2, is a dramatic story-driven adventure featuring a sophisticated AI engine and deep character skill-development system. This new installment of the franchise features a highly refined battle system that captures the chaotic nature of group combat, and combines it with the elements of real-time and turn-based combat systems.
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Customer Reviews
Xtreme-ly Unmemorable - Eric King -
Grandia Xtreme is the black sheep of the series. It shares a battle system with the other Grandia games, but little else. It's primarily a dungeon crawler. You spend most of your time slogging up and down a few relatively boring dungeons and have very little world exploration or character interaction compared to the first 2 games.
It's story and characters are so uninteresting, that I can't remember a single character or location name. Whereas I can still remember most of the characters and places in the first Grandia game, even though I haven't played it since the year after it was released (years before I played Grandia Xtreme).
If you want a mindless, fairly easy dungeon crawler, or you just want another game with the Grandia battle system, then this is your game. But most likely, you're better off looking elsewhere. Had it been the first Grandia game made instead of the 3rd, it might have gotten better ratings.
ok, but much worse than the original grandia - T. P. Le - fairfax VA
i bought this game because grandia for dreamcast was one of my favorite games ever, because it was so simple and fun. grandia extreme however, was a major disappointment. though the graphics are a little bit better (the characters have mouths) and there is voice acting, the game itself had many flaws which prevented it from being enjoyable. i just liked to battle for the most part, and the battle system, which is why i like the game so much in the first place, is the same, which is a good thing. however, there are very few save points, and you could be running around for hours without being able to save (which you could only do in the village); some of the battles are pretty hard and you have to battle A LOT before you fight any boss, so theres a high chance of you dying and therefore wasting 1-2 hours of gameplay easily. also, you cannot upgrade skills or mana eggs, or even equip such specialties unless youre in the village which gets kind of annoying, since the actual equipping of these items take forever to get a hold of. another thing is the camera angle of the game; unlike grandia of DC, there is a very small area that you can see, it takes way too long to rotate view and it wouldve been a lot better if there were a button you could hold down to walk (or run) like in the DC version. as a result, playing this game, just moving around gives you a big headache. finally the story is just horrible, it made no sense and gets on your nerves; while the story of DC's grandia wasnt amazing, it was enjoyable. also the voice acting is terrible. i give it 3 stars because the battle system. if you just love to beat up on stuff, rent this game first.
I've had better... - T. LaPonte - Connecticut
Graphics. Fine, some load times are a little slow, but pretty normal for a PS2 RPG.
Gameplay. Interesting changes from the previous Grandia games. It's a little annoying that you have to be in town (of which there is only one), to change magic or skills, but all in all an enjoyable system. Bosses are actually challenging in this one. A few of them I had to play over again because I got whooped (including the final boss). As an aside, there are only 5 dungeons, of which 4 you are required to play through more than once to acquire all side quest items, and level up enough to actually be able to defeat the final boss.
Story. One word. WEAK. There is virtually no character background. You are not given more than a few snippets of how the "team" interacts with each other. At the beginning of the game, it was much more interesting. The different characters from different cultures who were once at war are thrust together to achieve a common goal. They fight and the hero, being the only one with virtually no national bias is named the leader (of course). But then we hear NOTHING about any of this for the rest of the game.
The whole Ranger thing was described so much better in the GAME MANUAL than it was in the actual game. You see, these Rangers, of which our hero is, are the only people who are able to travel through Geo Points. It's the only way to get out of dungeons and to get into certain ones. Anyway, Evann (the hero)'s father was also a Ranger, and at the beginning of the game he is not very good at doing the whole Geo Stream thing, and he is conflicted about it because his dad was apparently a great Ranger or something. But the thing is, once the gameplay begins Evann has abslutely no trouble using any Geo Point and nothing is ever said again about his doubts in his abilities.
We get these hints of character backgrounds and motivations at the beginning, but once the game gets going nothing develops of them. A handful of the other playable characters have personal feelings about the mission, as their lives were personally affected by it, etc., but once they have told their bit we hear nothing from them for the rest of the game. I got more of an insight into the characters' "character" from their battle behavior than I got from cut scenes.
And the cutscenes themselves were a bore. Once we get into the REAL mission (because there is always a REAL mission) it is just the same recycled garbage for the rest of the game. I don't think I will ever care to hear anyone ever say anything about "human individuality" again (this is an obviously anti-communist propoganda game, possibly made by the Japanese government to brainwash it's populace into fearing socialism, so it can continue it's post WWII tradition of comsumer culture and passive American attention, an idea that seems silly until you realize how sucky this game is, and how it obviously was developed by people who had no idea what they were doing, ie, goverment politicians). See, the ancient people of this world were trying to create perfection. Paradise on earth, (futuristic distopia? *nudge nudge*, eh?) you know the drill. So they experimented and created this being (Quanlee), who of course becomes the villain, because the only way he can make the world perfect is to make everyone his mind slave. Honestly, I started muting the game and not bothering to read the script anymore after the first ten times Dean Cain, er, I mean Evann started arguing with Quanlee about it (though I have to say, All-American voice actor boy, Cain, is the perfect choice for representing the Western World's symbol for Capitalism over Communism in this Japanese government's cautionary tale of giving too much power to socialists).
Oh, and the voice acting... I don't think I have ever played a game with worse voicework. Dean Cain, as we all know and not so much love for his Television role as Superman, sounded like he was reading the script for the first time when they recorded. He put pauses-where-pauses-shouldn't-go, and he EMPHASIZED-the-last-word-in-every-SENTENCE.
Luke, er I mean, Mark Hamill, did a much better job, though I stopped seeing Krutz, Kertz, er, Kroitz, yeah that's it, because after a while I started closing my eyes whenever he started talking and imagined The Joker from the Batman animated series. First, because that's the voice he was doing (yes, people, that was him doing The Joker), as it was impossible to avoid knowing this fact, and secondly, it made everything he said that much more entertaining.
Lisa Loeb. I liked her a lot more when I realized she did the voice of Lutina and not Diene. Not only was Diene terrible as a character (and as a name, "Diene?!"), her voice was also terrible. Lutina was a little better, and I can't blame Lisa for the fact that Lutina's character was under-developed and had weak combo attacks...
That said, the only redeeming characters in the game are the lovable Titto and Myam. Titto, as his name would suggest is a young adorable knife wielding elf who hits three, count em, three times every attack, instead of the standard two. He is the most honest and likable character when lame discussions are going on between the parties. He's kind of like the son you see crying when mommy and daddy are fighting. You just want to reach down and give him a big ol' hug and pinch on the cheek. Then there's Myam, who absolutely rocks. She is by far the most fun of any character in battle. Her pouty antics in storyline scripting aside, when she falls flat on her face after shooting her arrow attack, NEVER GETS OLD! And when the battle goes quickly and she is the one who does the final blow, her statement is priceless (I won't spoil it here, because I could not possibly do it justice in written form, all I WILL say about Myam's battle tactics is... "Vroom Vroom Vroom!").
And finally, Side Quests. Or should I say, Side QuesT. It's just the one, with no real point. You are charged with collecting sound bites (and incidentally ryo-ohki-esque animals called carros, who dance to music made from said sound bites) for a group of incompetent musicians who are incapable of composing anything worthwhile unless some teenaged Ranger brings them objects that make odd noises... After you beat the game another mini-game opens up (as well as another song to be made from sound bites, but we won't go into that here). Oh, yes people, the fun doesn't stop just because the evil has been vanquished (where did Kroitz go, anyway?), oh no. You get to keep going because Quanlee lost his heart, it's in music form at that... *rolls eyes* Ok, I lied, I got into it, but anyway, this mini-game is just that, mini. You get to go to Juston (possibly an allusion to the first Grandia game's hero, Justin, though he shares no other real similarities after the name and red hair)'s house and play an over-priced slot machine to never win under-valued items...
So, if Grandia Xtreme were a student in a class that I was teaching (keeping in mind I am not a teacher) and I gave it an exam, here is how it would score:
Graphics: 7.5 (average)
Gameplay: 8.0 (innovative but sometimes annoying)
Storyline: 8.0 (a suprisingly high potential)
Plot: -5.0 (when you get high marks for story potential and you don't follow through with a decent plotline you lose points)
Character Development: 0.0 (there is none)
Voice Work: 5.0 (hit and miss)
Side Quest and mini Game: 5.0 (virtually pointless, difficult and unrewarding)
Bonus Questions: 3 of 5 correct (I figure it would have to know some general knowledge to give it an edge in my grading criteria, as I do not like to use the grading on a curve method IN MY CLASS!)
Total:
~3.91 + 3 point bonus = roughly 7.0
-1 for dropping the "E" in "extreme"
+1 for being a pre-Squenix Enix game...
=
a whopping 7.0 ladies and gentlemen!
It passed, barely...
Fun, but a step down from its predecessors - John Markley - Oak Lawn, IL USA
First, the bad news. The story of this game is almsot nonexistent, and what is there is pretty dull the characters are all utterly one-dimensional. That's a huge disappointment, considering how strong the previous Grandia games were in those areas. Also, the voice acting is hilariously bad.
However, the combat is a lot of fun, and all the different stuff you can do to improve your characters is pretty addictive. It definitely falls short of previous Grandia games, but it kept me playing anyway.
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Sep 15, 2010 14:20:05
