Remember the time when Japanese RPGs ruled the RPG world? I do too. Grandia 1 was one of the many games that contributed to the JRPG golden age, and, overall, the game was well-loved. However, does any that still hold up in the present day?

You play as Justin, whose deceased father was an adventurer, and wants to be like his father when he grows up (yes, he’s a kid, though no mention of his age). For the most part of the game, it’s mostly Justin and his adventure, and the ever-developing relations between the characters. The “saving the world” (is that a spoiler? Don’t know. It’s a JRPG, so it’s there by default, and is to be expected) story development starts late in the game, leaving you to think “so what have I been doing this whole time?”. I’m not much of a story person myself, but I’m somewhat glad they kept the “saving the world” part to a minimum, so it’s mostly just adventuring and having fun in general than the depressing and overused stuff. 

The game plays differently than a lot of games out there, but is still quite easy to get into, especially with its helpful manual. The thing I loved the most about the game was its battle system. Even after 11 or 12 years, it still feels fresh and is so much fun.

Basically, the battle system goes like this: everyone on the field needs to wait to get his turn. When you get your turn, you can choose what to do (attack, magic, etc.), and then wait a little more to execute whatever you’ve chosen. During that time between choosing and attacking, you can get your attacks cancelled and need to wait again. The same goes for the enemy. It’s a lot more fun in action than in words, especially when you’re doing everything you can to prevent that boss from doing that stupidly powerful attack that hits everyone.

Outside of battles, it kind of plays like your regular “2D character walking around in a 3D world” stuff. On the top side of the screen, you have a helpful compass that directs you to all the available exits in the current area, and you can switch between exits with the R2 and L2 buttons. Speaking of exits, what annoyed me the most was the fact that it’s hard to tell if the area ahead is an exit or not, especially in areas that have multiple sections, like the first town, which has a port, a northern area, and a southern area. You’ll find yourself running into a different area by mistake numerous times. Also, you may find the number of times you’ll be backtracking through a long dungeon you just completed to be quite aggravating.

You also have the slightly different leveling system. Simply leveling up isn’t enough, because you don’t get powerful enough that way. To make up for it, you’ll have to level up your magic and weapon proficiencies, as each weapon or magic increase a different set of status attributes.

Visually, it is what the game is a 1999 PlayStation game. I did find it interesting that a lot of secondary characters had their own sprites and portraits. By secondary characters, I mean characters that are only relevant for just one hour of the game’s story, and that’s it. Not many games these days have that amount of detail given to them.

The audio overall is a mixed bag. Sometimes, the music would make you want to punch someone in the face, and sometimes you’ll be liking what you hear. The voice acting overall is as awkward as the voice acting in the mid 90’s Japanese cartoons that got dubbed into English. Sound effects overall are good, but I don’t get why some sound effects become different when you reach the second disk, such as the fire spell sound.

What We Think: The game still holds up pretty well in this day and age, but some of the flaws that were apparent from the start got somewhat magnified by time. If you can overlook those problems, you might want to give this game a good look.