Grandia 2: A Deeply Flawed Classic

 

Not too long ago I finished Grandia 2 on the Dreamcast.  It was a game that I had beaten before a long time ago, probably during my high school days, on the PS2 and giving it a revisit in 2024 almost felt like playing it for the first time again.  While my memory of most of the story beats were pretty hazy, going in I remembered pretty vividly really being sick of it by the end and unfortunately by the time I reached the end of the game, that memory had turned out to be correct. 

The game follows the adventures of Ryudo, a "geohound" (a sort of monster slaying mercenary, I think) as he accompanies some chick from the Church of Granas as they go on an adventure to put an end to an evil god called Valmar.  On the way they meet a burly furry, a little boy and a robot and together they have to deal with all manner of evil as they go around beating up Valmar's individual body parts that have been locked away in seals.  It's a simple story with plot twists that you could see coming from several thousand miles away even if you had just suffered massive head trauma in a car accident but for the most part it gets the job of pushing the player from dungeon to dungeon fairly well.  

The game has a number of cool things going for it, mainly in the combat department with one of the most interesting implementations I've seen of the standard ATB that I've ever seen.  Instead of just waiting for a bar to fill and then taking a turn, all enemies and party members in Grandia 2 share the same ATB meter.  The meter is split into two sections with a wait mode and a command mode.  When your character reaches the command line you tell them what to do and then they will either execute right away if you're doing a basic attack or there will be some charge time if you're doing a spell or special move.  What makes this so interesting is that both you and the enemy can knock you out of your command with certain skills so aside from the usual strategizing that one does in every RPG of what to use and when, there's also a timing element to all your decisions.  There was one major boss fight, which I won't spoil, where it had an extremely damaging attack that could bring all of my party members to near death in one go except he was never able to pull it off after the first time because every time I would see him charging it up, I would knock him out of it.  The move I would use to do so would deal less damage, but not having to waste time healing up every time he did it made the fight, overall, much more efficient.  Grandia 1 had the same battle system and the only game I can think of outside of these two examples that does something similar is 2014's Child of Light that basically ripped off the battle system wholesale from Grandia.  

Usually I like to shit on English voice acting in modern games because most of the people that seem to work in that field have about as much vocal talent as a used up kitchen sponge but Grandia 2 has some decent performances going on in the dub.  Mainly because the majority of the main cast is made up of Metal Gear Solid voice actors such as Cam Clarke and Kim Mai Guest as well as many others so even though the script in the latter half of the game is so painfully cringe-worthy I nearly turned myself inside out, its softened by at least having voice actors that are easy on the ears.

But Grandia 2 also suffers from a lot of issues.  The writing is a big glaring one where it seems OK at first but then turns into a 14 year olds first story in the latter half but the gameplay is where most of the bullshit in this game goes down.  The dungeons are short, boring and uninspired.  There's a few cool ones but the vast majority of them require no thinking and don't even have that much in terms of explorability so after 5 or 6 of them they just become sort of grating.  Not to mention that whenever Ryudo has to climb a ladder or push a block the animations for these things are PAINFULLY fucking slow.  You can go and find a life-partner, have a child, raise the child and watch your child graduate university in the time it takes for Ryudo to push a cube a few inches or in the time it takes for you to watch the party climb up or down a ladder one by one.  Thankfully its not to prevalent throughout the game but any dungeon with cubes or ladders can go fuck itself.  

Another big issue is the grind.  You don't NEED to grind to get to the end, for the most part you can just get a couple of things and get to the end if you want but who plays RPGs like that really?  The game throws so many skills, spells and passive abilities at you that all need to be upgraded using coins you get from combat that if you wanted everything you would be grinding for HOURS.  At first I was trying to upgrade everything to max before moving on but the amount of coins needed to stay up to date was so insane that I ended up just finding one battle strategy that worked and then telling everything else to fuck off.  I didn't even unlock a single one of burly furry mans skills except for his first one that could knock enemies out of there charge time because the amount of coins I needed for Ryudo's "win the game" button along side the passive skills to make sure he doesn't eat shit was just too much.

The combat though is where one of the games biggest problem lies though.  As interesting as the battle system is, almost every skill and spell in this game is accompanied by a long, unskipable cutscene of the magic flying around the battle field doing its thing.  I was playing via an emulator for the Retro Achievements and even with the power of emulator speedup, by the time I was at the end of the game I was about ready to eat buckshot for breakfast if I had to watch that fucking ZapAll spell effect again.  This is true for enemy skills too so while you can kind of make regular combat not as tedious by only spamming regular attacks and the early skills with short animations, if an enemy wants you to watch a 90 second cutscene of the sun exploding then you better hope to fuck your cancel skills are ready or your time is being well and truly wasted.   It's a fun bit of spectacle at the start but by the end of the game you'll be begging for a way to skip them.

But despite all of those complaints I did genuinely enjoy my time with Grandia 2.  It's deeply flawed in a lot of ways but its charming and cozy.  Maybe it wouldn't appeal to todays RPG fans who are far more used to either extremely dull real time combat found in the likes of modern Final Fantasy or snappier turned based systems found in games like Persona 5 but if you're willing to exercise a bit of patience then Grandia 2 is a generally pretty good game that's worth checking out. 

One Google Search Is All It Takes

 

We all like to rag on a game journo from time to time.  Despite being members of enthusiast press they often don't seem very enthusiastic about the things they are writing about.  However upon my travels around the internet it seems that it's not only video game press that consists of hack writers that probably failed English in high school and the world of Table Top also seems greatly affected.

Despite how steeped I am in Shin Megami Tensei video games I had no idea that this rule book for a table top game even existed.  To be fair, almost all of my table top gaming experiences to this day have been extremely negative so its something I tend to ignore and turn my back on.  Anyway, the game is called Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Conception and its based on, obviously, SMT 3 Nocturne and was originally released in 2004.  It even has a supplementary book called the Amala Labyrinth or something that adds even more shit to it.  It seems pretty cool and if I could find a table top group that doesn't make me want to fellate the business end of a shotgun then I'd be extremely down to give it a try.

So in swoops Chase Carter of Dicebreaker.com and to his credit, the majority of his article isn't even that bad.  He mentions that there's other SMT table top systems and these things have been around since 1993 which was an interesting fact I didn't know.  Pretty much exactly what I wanted that hack at Gamespot to do when talking about Helldivers (http://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2024/03/gamespot-being-embarassing-again.html) although he then does proceed to refer to the game as Tokyo Connection and Tokyo Conception so maybe a lack of reading is how such a fucking awful headline happened.

"Shin Megami Tensei tabletop RPG based on Persona's video game series" is what it reads and if you know anything about Shin Megami Tensei even just in passing you'll know that what is written here is just WILDLY incorrect.  Just in case I have to spell it out for you, Shin Megami Tensei is the mainline series and Persona is the spinoff.  It's not so much that the information is wrong that gets to me, its that this guy is supposed to be a contributer to this niche interest website and yet can't do even the most basic bit of research to get things correct.  One google search is all it would have taken to know that SMT is the main one, Nocturne is the 3rd game and the Conception is the event that happens at the start of the game which kicks of all of its events.  Its literally on the fucking Wikipedia page and takes about 4 seconds to look up.  Even if you didn't want to look it up you should know that the headline is just wrong because Persona 3 and 4 both had "Shin Megami Tensei" in the fucking title.

If I was willing to be charitable to Mr Carter here I would say that, at best, he's a click harvesting little fuckhead.  Persona is undeniably, at this point, the more well known and more popular arm of SMT so using that in the headline is probably more likely to draw traffic to the rag he's writing.  However I'm not willing to be charitible so I'm just going to assume he's a lazy piece of shit.  You're a niche writer for an enthusiast website.  A website where I imagine its members spend all day pretending to be half-elves while jacking off to pornography of bears or whatever the fuck you weirdos are into.  You aren't so busy that you can see something like this and not look up the absolute basics of what it is and what is is about.

If you're going to take the trouble of writing for a niche topic or in this case, a niche interest within that niche topic, make sure you do it justice.  Instead of just shitting out a crap article to earn a quick couple of bucks why don't you take some time and actually write something helpful to people who may be interested.  But let's be honest, Chase Carter doesn't really give a fuck about what he's doing and gives even less of a fuck about SMT.  Farm clicks, get money and move on

A fucking sad way to exist

Cave Appreciation Post

 

If you were to ask someone who their favorite game development studios are you might get a couple of standard answers.  Square Enix, Capcom, Rockstar, Nintendo maybe Naughty Dog if the person you are talking to is a braindead twat and Activision Blizzard if the person you are talking to is into findom.  However if you talk to someone who's interested in the extremely specific niche of bullet hell shooters the one name that might come out of their mouth is Cave.

Established in 1995 Cave are probably the single most recognizable name in the genre of bullet hell.  Kicking things off with Donpachi back in 1995 Cave's shmups have a unique style and feel to them where you can recognize them right away.  Some of their biggest titles include Donpachi and all its sequels, Mushihime-sama, ESP. RA. DE and Deathsmiles.  For a couple of their lesser appreciated games I would suggest checking out Guwange and Progear as well.   

While shmups are Cave's bread and butter it isn't the only kind of game they have ever put out.  Semi-well liked snowboarding game Steep Slope Sliders was developed by them as well a number of driving games including one Japan only title which I think is about delivering soba noodles to an office?  Its called Delisoba Deluxe and I watched a longplay and couldn't quite work out what the fuck was happening but that seems to be the premise.  They even have what I think is a Tokimeki Memorial clone under their belt called Princess Debut which seems very off brand for them but when I looked up a video to see what it was all about the comments were like "OMG SUCH A GOOD GAME!" and "SO NOSTALGIC" so I guess it resonated pretty well with a few youngin's at launch.  

The one thing that actually blew my goddamn mind was that, apparently, they worked on fucking Shin Megami Tensei Imagine Online of all goddamn things.  If you aren't aware SMT Imagine was a free to play MMO that, was maybe a little barebones but I'm enough of a sucker for MegaTen to have sunk a fair few hours into it.  It shut down and was then kept on life support by some fans running a private server but because the business-men over at ATLUS are fun-hating turbo cunts they shut that down too.  I guess Cave are too busy making more DoDonpachi games to give a shit but I wish someone would bring it back or even just make a new one.

Now that you have read this post you are required to go and play a game made by Cave.  I suggest ESP.RA.DE if you like top down and Progear if you like side scrolling.  Doesn't really matter what you pick in the end anyway because its basically guaranteed to be a good time

Gamespot being embarassing again

 

I don't usually read gaming news websites but every so often an article from one of these rags will come across desk and I was absolutely stunned when I saw the headline of this one inparticular written by one George Yang. 

I had to do a double take when I first saw it and read it slowly.  Helldivers was a game that came out in 2015 that I didn't play.  It was a twin stick shooter with online co-op about shooting stuff, I didn't give a fuck about it.  The game has a lot of positive reviews on Steam, netting it an overall Very Positive rating and yet I have never met a single person either online or in real life who has played it and until its sequel came out, I think a vast majority of the gaming public didn't know what the fuck it even was.  Then Helldivers 2 comes out and the game explodes in popularity and granted, after looking up some gameplay for this post, it does look kinda cool.  I'm not personally a fan of doing online co-op, I'm not into games that are multiplayer focused but it looks like a good time.  It looks like Earth Defense Force.

The first Earth Defense Force game came out on the PS2 back in 2003 developed by a company called SANDLOT and was released under the SIMPLE series.  The SIMPLE series was a collection of budget games for various systems where the number in the title indicated their cost.  For example EDF1 was released under the name SIMPLE 2000: THE 地球防衛軍 MONSTER ATTACK in Japan, the 2000 in the title meaning that the game cost 2000 yen.  This game actually got a western release under the title Global Defence Force and involved shooting a bunch of bugs in third person.

Now I'm not particularly good at doing maths but Helldivers 2 came out in 2024 and I'm pretty sure that is a long time after 2003.  I'm pretty sure, Mr Yang, that your title is the wrong way round.  The title of the article makes it sound as if EDF 6 is cribbing off Helldivers 2 despite not only the series being much older, but Earth Defence Force 6 coming out TWO FUCKING YEARS PRIOR in Japan.  What makes it even more frustrating is that he knows this fact and gives this half assed little paragraph at the bottom of the article about the original EDF but only talking about how the name changed a couple of times before finally settling on the Earth Defence Force title.

This is frustrating in two ways. The first, is that George Yang is such an insipid, crap writer that he's name dropping Helldivers 2, a hot trending game, to drive clicks.  But whatever, that's not exactly uncommon practice in 2024.  What's more frustrating is that George had an opportunity here to educate some people on some gaming history.  "Earth Defense Force 6, the game that helped inspire Helldivers 2, delayed to summer" could have been the article.  He could have spent more time talking about the simple series, EDF and letting people know about a cool series that might have not known about prior.  And let's be honest here, the kind of people who are reading Gamespot are the kind of people who have the most surface level knowledge of gaming, these are the people who could maybe use a little nudge into something about more lower budget and unknown. 

I had a look through George's article history and inspid unseasoned-chicken style writing seems to be his bread and butter.  You're a fucking writer for an enthusiast press outlet, George, why don't you fucking act like one.

Bellend

Consoles Feel Utterly Pointless

 

Back in 2020 the PS5 relased and with a sort of poor lineup of launch games I told myself that I would wait for there to be a better lineup of games before jumping on, also hoping to capitalize on a price drop as reward for my patience but we are now 4 years in and I'm staring Part 2 of the Final Fantasy 7 remake right in the face and I still can't bring myself to buy one, it just doesn't feel worth it at all.

The big problem is exclusivity of titles, it's just not really a thing anymore.  Any game that I think looks interesting on PS5 will, at some point, end up on PC sooner or later.  The one exception to this might be Demon's Souls Remastered but who gives a fuck about that game, really? I'm not about the drop a couple hundred bucks on new hardware and go through the rigmarol of finding space for it under my TV stand and going through all that setup and updates just to re-play a game that I already played to death back in 2009.  Timed exclusivity isn't going to get me to buy it either, the hype surrounding FF7 Rebirth, at least for me, died forever ago and watching streams of the game now that it's finally come out leaves me thinking that not rushing out to get it was probably a good decision.   The Switch sort of deals with this problem by locking a bunch of its games exclusively to that, forever, but a lot of Switch games run like ass-dick and probably would be better on PC.  I'm quite happy, for example that Shin Megami Tensei 5 is getting a PC release so that all the stupid performance hiccups can be squashed and I can play a version of the game that is distractingly shit in the performance department.  Deadly Premonition 2 is another example of a Switch game that saw vast improvements by coming to PC.  Put that stupid fucking rectangle with its flimsy controllers in the trash and just make games for PC instead.

In current day Consoles, to me at least, feel like shitty toys that are aimed at people who have the tech literacy of a 4 year old or actual 4 year olds.  Redundant pieces of hardware sold almost entirely on brand recognition than actually being useful as an entertainment device.  It never USED to be like this, PC gaming and console gaming felt like two entirely different things that offered entirely different types of games.  Look at the libraries of the PS1 and the PS2, for example, and then the PC games that were also being released at that time, there's a little crossover, sure, but it felt like owning a decent PC AND those consoles was a good idea if you wanted to experience the best of everything.  The other thing to consider was that PC gaming back then certainly felt a bit more cumbersome.  It wasn't like today where you can just download a game off steam, click go and it goes, there was usually some form of troubleshooting involved to get the game working and so consoles shone in that department because being able to just slap in a disc and play was great.  But not only is PC gaming significantly easier now in most cases but you can't even just slap a game in a console and play it anymore.  Mandatory updates and subcriptions to bullshit like PS+ and Switch Online hounding you at every turn make the experience very annoying.  Do you want to play Dead by Daylight on the PS5 where you must also have to pay an additional subscription to PS+ to do anything other that the tutorial?  Or do you wanna play on PC where you can play online as much as you want and there's no additional fee to pay on top of your internet bill?  I know which one I'd pick.

Crap libraries, shitty ancillary services that you are pretty much forced to buy into to get full functionality and the fact that you can have a better experience on a more versitile piece of equipment means that consoles are fucking pointless.  Maybe there will be a Switch 2 or a PS6 in the future but unless the landscape of console gaming changes drastically the whole thing can just fuck off

Donkey Konga: The Worst Rythm Game Ever Made

 

No genre is free from it's trash entries and rhythm games are no different.  If you had asked me what I thought was the worst rhythm game before playing Donkey Konga I might have said Parappa The Rapper.  But despite my extremely low opinion of Parappa as a rhythm game, I can appreciate it as being one of the first and the music absolutely fuckin SLAPS but then Donkey Konga comes along and shows me first hand what a really trash rhythm game looks like.

I'm not the kind of guy to get really hung up on UI.  Unless the UI in a game is particularly unreadable or badly made then its not the kind of thing that will even cause a blip on my critical radar.  But right out the gate, the first thing thats very noticable when you hit the start button is that Donkey Konga's menus feel cheap.  This is a first party Nintendo game, featuring one of the companies biggest mascots that's been around since 198 fucking 1 and it has a menu screen that looks like something you'd find on some shovelware bullshit that you'd find at the bottom of a bargain bin, thrice discounted to a dollar.  Zero effort put into these menus at all.  One of them is even called "DK City" or something, the area where you use coins to buy new music and stuff and I thought it make take me to a fun little jungle island interface but no, just the same shit garbage menu to buy nonsense.

But that's just the menus, in the actual rhythm game itself the UI is also trash.  There are 4 types of notes, a left hit, a right hit, a double hit and a clap.  The notes are an obnoxiously bright shade of red and yellow so when you're playing on the harder modes your eyes start to strain trying to read the chart.  There's also no options for speed mods which makes reading charts a pain in the cock but the only reason this isn't more of a problem is because the game is piss easy and even a newborn that's been dropped could clear the highest settings.  Even worse with the UI is that the feedback for successfully hit notes is fucking bullshit.  In literally every other rhythm game that exists there is some feedback for telling the player they hit a note.  Usually the note will vanish and you'll get a little mark that tells you your accuracy, like in DDR you get Marvellous or Perfect or whatever.  In Donkey Konga, though, when you hit a note you get get feedback mark but the note KEEPS FUCKING SCROLLING past the hit zone.  That's behaviour entirely reserved for missed notes, what the fuck.  Not that getting distracted matters even in the slightest because the game isn't tracking full combos anyway.  There are 3 ways to end a song.  Fail, which I have never seen, pass with a silver crown and pass with a gold crown.  The only difference is if your life bar at the end of the song was full or not.  You could go away from your bongos for 75% of a song, then play the last stretch perfectly and end on a gold crown.  It's like the complete opposite of IIDXs failing with a AA rank, it's fucking bullshit.

But all of this is just set dressing, the most important thing is the music right?  Well guess fuckin what? That sucks too.  Nursery rhymes that would even make its target demographic eye roll, terrible covers of pop songs including the worst versions I have ever heard of Another One Bites the Dust and All the Small Things and weird old shit for grandad.  The only good tracks on the game are the Pokemon Theme Song and the DK Rap.  When you're rhythm game has only 2 good tracks in it that is probably  more than any shitty UI and toddler grade peripheral will ever be.

The most frustrating thing about all this is that the template was done for them already.  Donkey Konga isn't even an original idea, it's a straight rip off of Taiko no Tatsujin just with the Japanese drums replaced with bongos

Taiko is great too, it's good good music, plays great, looks great, there's a reason that it's been around for so long and is a staple of basically every arcade, even the shit ones in shopping malls and sports centers, even to this day.  All Nintendo had to do was make it like that and instead we got this low effort, lazy, poorly thrown together dollar store knockoff.

Donkey Konga is bar far the worst rhythm game ever made.  Even the biggest arcade rhythm flops like Museca don't even come CLOSE to this level of shittiness.  An embarassing title from Nintendo that makes a good case for maybe not all video game preservation being a good thing. Fuck this game and fuck anyone who worked on it. 

The Real Problem With A Massive Backlog

I have an absolutely staggering backlog of unplayed games, easily in the quadruple digits.  This is not a flex since I don't care about game collecting per se, it's just a problem that's been festing in the background of my life since I've been old enough to have some kind of disposable income.  Even when I moved to Japan and a big chunk of my physical collection got nicked in transit, thanks to the likes of Steam, Good old Games and now Epic giving me free shit that event barely put a dent in my never ending to-play list.

The most obvious problem with a big backlog is time, a real too many games with too little time situation but I don't feel like that's too huge a problem for me personally.  Sure, I'd love more time to game but I get through a decent number of games every year, usually within the triple digits no problem so it's a pretty minor factor.  Another slightly less obvious problem is decision paralysis that one gets from having so many games to choose from.  There have been instances where I'm trying to decide what to play next and have just sat looking at my steam list or flicking through my discs for hours without being able to land on a single thing.  It usually ends up with me picking nothing and doing something else for a bit before I can decide something.

But no, the real problem comes with me being a massive idiot and not remembering what games I have bought already.  The other day on my travels through Nagoya I came across a small used goods store which I decided to have a quick peek inside because sometimes these places have cheap games to buy.  I was right, and there was a tiny shelf of about 6 PS3 games and a couple of PSP games, all for 200 yen each.  Most of it was crap, multiple copies of some Gundam game I don't care about but I did come across a copy of Front Mission Evolved.  I have heard its not that good and I know its not your usual SRPG that Front Mission usually is but for 200 yen, less than a can of Red Bull or a pack of fried chicken at Lawson? Hell yeah I'll give it a go.  When I get home though, I'm going through my Steam library and there it is, Front Mission Evolved on PC sat right there in the list, I already owned the fuckin' thing and because I have so many games and I have long since forgotten what I've bought already I now own two copies of this potentially shit game.

This isn't a recent problem either, back in my high school days I bought Diablo 2 THREE fuckin times.  GAME, the UK version of Gamestop or whatever, would stock copies of it for 5 pounds and I would see it on the shelf and go "oooh! Diablo 2 for a fiver? I'll take that!" only to get home and find it on the shelf by the computer.  What I probably need to do is make a list on my phone of all the games I own so that next time I'm looking through a used game shop I can quickly scroll through it and confirm I don't own it already before checking out.  Although with the staggering number of games I own and a complete lack of motivation this will never happen 

So that it's.  The biggest problem of having a massive backlog of games is that it turns you into an idiot.  Front Mission Evolved isn't the first duplicate game I've bought and I can PROMISE you, it won't be the last