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I played Granstream Saga when it was first released at the turn of the century.  I didn’t get very far into it, but looking back now, I couldn’t remember exactly why.  I recall it being an exceedingly ugly game….. like you  know how you say some people were hit with the ugly stick?  This game took a walk through the ugly forest.  I mean ugly as in its physical presentation is not pleasant to look at.  It’s early PS1, so the characters are blocky and lack any sort of features that make them look human.  They are blobs that are vaguely human in form, I guess, but their faces are blank white squares, bereft of eyes or a nose or other things humans have.  It’s disconcerting to go back to a game after so many years and see these miniscule evolutionary missteps on the way to creating graphics that actually resemble the things they are meant to resemble.

Anyway, my first thought was that the game looks god-awful, and that might’ve been the reason I gave up on it so long ago.  But then I tell myself that I’m a more evolved gamer than most, and graphics are probably the least important part of the package when it comes to my ability to stick with a particular title.  I’ve played plenty of games to completion that look like complete ass- NiER, Paladin’s Quest….. huh….. those games often pop up when I have to discuss games with qualities that many would find subpar.  It’s a testament to those two that, despite the myriad issues, I consider them two of the best role-playing games I’ve ever encountered.  I’ve mentioned this in other posts before, but I’ll mention it again- both NiER and Paladin’s Quest immerse you in their alien worlds, and use their meager aesthetics (and phenomenal soundtrack) to create an atmosphere that begs you to stick around and uncover some mysteries.  I took the roundabout way to my point, but here it is- I knew Granstream Saga looked like shit, and it didn’t bother me then or now.  I figured, however, playing it in 2013 would allow me, as a more mature (ha!) gamer, to appreciate its winding plot and unique world.  I thought with a glimmer of hope that I would walk away from the game thinking it was another hidden classic in the mold of those two I mentioned earlier.  So far, it has let me down.

Now, why would I think that Granstream Saga had a shot in hell at being anything but an early-era PS1 title that was thrown onto shelves to capitalize on the nascent RPG boom?  It was created by Quintet, the developers of some of the best SNES adventure-RPGs ever devised: Terranigma, Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia.  I’ve read reviews (looking at the otherwise stellar Hardcoregaming101) that say that Granstream Saga is loosely connected to those three classics, and that in fact, this is the best of the four.  To say that I’ve seen nothing to corroborate this claim is an understatement; I’d go a step further and say that while this isn’t one of the very worst RPGs on the PS1, it is much closer to the bottom than the top.  It possesses none of the charms of Quintet’s SNES trio, nor does it boast particularly compelling gameplay or plot.  Granted, I am only half way through the game, but I believe I have played enough to lodge a few complaints.  And here we go…..

Let’s create a composite RPG.  It’s made up of every hoary trope and generic character-type you can think of, combined with uninspired dungeon design and stock anime cutscenes.  Your hero will be adopted and will come into contact with some mysterious object that is the only fucking thing that can save the world.  He will meet a priestess who is so chaste that her square purple bangs cover her entire goddamn forehead and her white dress covers every inch of her body from her ankles up to her neck.  She is naïve and thinks the best of everyone; she’s constantly amazed that there is such evil out there in the world, and gets into trouble by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.  Of course she follows the main character without question after he rescues her.  There is another sassy female character who you meet when you hide in her apartment and catch her exiting the shower.  She’s more of a take-charge-type gal, and gets into trouble because she picks fights with everybody.  I can’t figure out one reason why she follows me around, but I’m sure the plot will require it at some point.  Finally, there is a wise-cracking bird who is actually a giant phoenix (when the story needs it to) and who comments on just about everything in a sarcastic tone.  He started the game with the sassy girl, but ended up tagging along with the hero (even when the girl goes off on her own) for no given reason.  The banter between the bird and the hero is forced and unearned, but oh, how they get along!

I’m going to mention some examples of things the characters have done to piss me off.  I enter a town at night and a kid greets me at the gate.  He says the equivalent of “Hey!  It’s really late and I doubt you’ll find some place to sleep.  You are welcome to stay at the house with me and grandma.”  Kid just says that out of nowhere, and for the record, it’s no surprise when the sprat becomes the focus of tension between evil cultists and the town resistance.  Anyway, the kid turns around and goes over to his house, giving control over to the player.  The characters talk to each other briefly, culminating with the sassy bitch saying something like “Geez, that kid is obnoxious, but what choice do we have?”  What choice do you have?!  You are standing at the town gate for the first time ever!  Maybe there’s an inn, maybe you can rest at the church.  Who the fuck can tell, but you won’t know until you actually enter the town.  And what’s up with calling the kid obnoxious?  He basically went up to a bunch of perfect strangers and offered them a free place to stay!  Maybe I just don’t know what the word means, but that seems the opposite of obnoxious to me.  It’s just such a lazy piece of dialogue that I have trouble getting over it.  If they want to use the archetype of the precocious youngster, I may not be thrilled, but I’ll get over it.  But at least give the kid some lines that make him appear the slightest bit annoying.  Having him offer kindness to the party only to have the surly one-line slinging sass-master say that he is obnoxious does nothing to sell the idea.

When I first met that sharp-tongued girl, I was sneaking onto a pirate ship and hid out in some room that just happened to be the place where she was showering.  She’s a pirate herself, and is understandably angry when she steps out of the tub, covered only in a skimpy towel.  So of course she immediately calls for guards or pulls the alarm or whatever, right?  Sigh….. well the game writers wanted three things out of this encounter- titillating fan service, to show the gamer that this is a girl who can handle herself, and to give the player a reason to scour the ship despite the fact that the main character is just stowing away and waiting for an opportunity to exit.  For fan service, we see her in that towel, done.  The game needs to inform us that she is a tough chick, so instead of screaming for help, she hurls an axe at your head that misses your hair by half a millimeter as you belatedly duck out of the way.  Once she misses and blabbers on about some other crap, instead of turning you in to her betters, she instead decides to betray the band of pirates she has presumably known her entire life and asks you to steal a jewel from the cargo bay.  Christ!  What a piss-poor introduction to a character who stays with you for just about the entire game!  Gosh, she sure is edgy with that “act first think later” murder attempt.  And you can tell that she is supposed to be a fan favorite- a tough-as-nails piratess who knows what she wants and how to get it.  She could star in a 70s sitcom with that backstory!

Hahaha.  How many times has this happened to you, right guys?

Here’s another.  I wanted to scout out that cult that seems to be converting a lot of the townspeople in the water village.  I’m invited into their hideout as a guest, and witness a speech by their leader detailing how they must vanquish the nonbelievers and sacrifice something something to the god who will grant them eternal joy or whatever.  This is a dangerous situation for my party to be in!  Clearly something here is amiss, and the beautiful young leader seems to have her congregation hypnotized.  They are up to no good….. I’d recommend nodding perfunctorily before returning to town and whipping up a plan of action.  But that’s not what happens.  The priest girl immediately jumps in front of the raging throng and denounces the false savior and says that hurting other people is bad.  How can they not see that they need to help each other, not to single out those with different beliefs!  Yup, so into the dungeon I go, and the girl is taken for sacrifice.  Ah, but if not for her outburst, I wouldn’t have gotten to explore the mines where they put the nonbelievers to work.  Hey, you know how I escaped those mines?  I worked there for two straight days, mining obsidian for them until my fingers bled, if you believe the dialogue.  On the third day, they take the priestess off to be sacrificed, and I’m stuck mining that obsidian again.  What shall I do?  Oh, no problem.  Luckily the guards who have been blocking the exits have all fallen asleep for some reason, so I just slip on by them and get the hell out.  I guess sacrificing heretics occurs so frequently that it’s just boring to them.  Lazy, lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazylazylazylazylazylazylazy………

There’s more character stuff, and I could go on, but I’ll save it until I’ve completed the game.  I’ll talk now about the game’s mechanics, and why they aren’t doing much to compensate for the execrable characters.  Despite the fact that two anime hotties and a sarcastic parrot tag along with the hero, all battles and most exploration are done all by your lonesome.  You see enemies patrolling the various dungeons, and when you run into one, the camera awkwardly transitions into a wider overhead mode that gives the player a greater view of the field of battle.  Here the game becomes something of an action RPG, where you control your character’s attacks and defense in real time as you attempt to avoid the enemy onslaught.  Sometimes it’s as simple as hacking away at some gigantic golem, but sometimes you deal with enemies so lithe and agile that no amount of strategy will prevent you from getting creamed.  There is one particular enemy that runs around spastically, jumping over you every time you swing your weapon, and counterattacking with uncanny precision.  It’s the type of monster who can strike twice in the time it takes your lumbering hero to swing his sword, and so you are always worried about it depleting your meager HP supply with a cheap hit.  To this end, you keep your finger stationed on the block button, waiting for the creature to swing so you can counterattack.  Sometimes you sit there blocking for thirty seconds (that’s a long time!) and the thing just stares at you, blocking himself.  It’s tedious, and of course not the worst part of it.  You’ll get tired of playing the blocking game, staring at this pixelated blob for minutes of gametime, and you WILL get impatient and go for an attack.  But that’s what the computer was waiting for, you fool!  The second your character goes into attack animation that fucking turtle-thing will slash out at you, depleting a quarter of your hitpoints.  Oh, here’s the other thing- battles are sometimes a matter of positioning.  As in, sometimes your enemy runs around and your character is not facing it.  So if you do not press any buttons on the controller, the game will automatically rotate your character so that it is facing the enemy.  You have no control over a camera, or anything like that.  This is pre-camera, utra-hardcore gaming!  It’s awkward, time-consuming and leaves you open to attack.  Anyway, when the blob-guy knocks you back, it negates all that time you spent even getting your hero in position to attack.  Some battles are 90% forcing your character into the correct position and orientation to land a blow on your enemy, 10% getting the one attack in that will kill the goddamn thing.  Is this how the designers intended the battle system to run?  If so, can I fucking kill them?

Every battle is a Sisyphean struggle.

ALERT!!! ALERT!!! RED ALERT!!! I beat the game.  This is Dave returning after a week to finish writing this review.  You don’t know this about me, but I write reviews in two parts.  I like to jot (lololol, type, this is the internet, stupid!) down initial impressions, write a little bit about where I think the game is headed, stop playing the game if it’s shit…..  Then I come back to the review after the game is completed, or the game has completed me, if you know what I’m saying, wink wink.  I’ve completed the game!!!  ALERT!

Here is a scene from Granstream Saga- I get to the end of a cave and the big boss is waiting.  She says, “I’ve repented; please take pity on me.  Yes or no?”  I say no.  Eh, fuck, long story short- you can’t say no, you know the bitch is going to betray you but you have to play along with what the game wants.   So I say YES and then she is like “hahaha, you trusting fool, I’m throwing you in a mega-dungeon that’s even worse than the dungeon you just traversed to get to me.  Mega-dungeon time!”  So the floor drops out, I fall, and I’m in a room with two statues.  They come to life and fight me.  They are the same enemies I’ve been facing the entire way to the boss (in statue form!) so I down them pretty easily.  I exit the room, and there’s the boss, sitting there.  I talk to her, and she has the nuts to say to me, “I am impressed you’ve made it this far…..”  I’m ready to lose my shit at this point, and I’ll tell you why. 

Let’s put aside that she just delivered THAT line.  The hoariest, laziest, shittiest line of dialogue in any and every RPG.  That awkwardly translated Japanese-ism that doesn’t quite make sense to us (we?) Americans.  I mean, when the big bad guy says it, we all sort of get the meaning, even if it does tickle us in that place we get tickled when something sounds not right.  He’s saying, “Hey guy, you’ve overcome a lot to make it here.  I threw the kitchen sink at you and still you persevered to make it to this point.  You’re awesome!”  But what does it mean to “make it this far” exactly?  Like if life was a journey with a single start and end point, I could fully understand the sentiment.  Then maybe you’d make it like half way, that’d be how far you made it.  If you were reading a book and you read twenty pages, I might comment, “I didn’t think you’d make it that far…… through the book”.  The statement just doesn’t make complete sense when blindly attached to some character’s  journey through life’s unexpected twists and turns.  I mean, did the boss mean that he didn’t think I’d make it through the fire caves and the flying tower and the ghost ship that I accidentally had to enter because my ship broke down?  Did he mean that he didn’t think I’d make it through the town of magicians because the elder droned on for so long about releasing the ultimate evil?  Did he think I wouldn’t make it through the secret town where I found some awesome weapons……?  How did he even know I’d make it through the secret town?- it was entirely optional and tangential to my quest!  Oh, and lest you think I am still referring specifically to Granstream Saga, I want to be crystal clear that the game does not contain any secret town or secret anything.  Everything in the game is decidedly nonsecret.  When the boss says “you’ve made it this far”, he is specifically referring to himself, and the fact that you made it to HIM.  Snicker snicker, it’s like he knows that you are some video game character on some linear journey from start to finish, thus feels justified in commenting exactly how far you’ve made it.  You’ve made it 98% of the way!

He looks cute and innocent...... but my oh my..... the things he says!  

So this minor boss says those damned words to me.  And forget about the awkwardness…… has she earned it?!  Let’s analyze it.  I went through a cave filled with some minor baddies to get to her, but maybe she thought it was difficult.  She says nothing about getting anywhere, simply begs me to forgive her, then deposits me in a room with two really easy foes.  I walk like ten steps and reach her again, and THEN she busts out the classic line.  Like, is she surprised I made it through the room with two enemies?!  Was that what impressed her?  Color her easily impressed!  Was she impressed that I fell for her trap and lived?  Is that something she pulls on every asshole stupid enough to click YES when she asks for forgiveness?!  She hits a button and you fall through the floor, walk ten steps and reach her again?!  Do some people give up and say, “Fuck this.  It’s all just so much walking!”  What was she impressed about exactly?  That I immediately saw through her transparent schemes and ran after her?  I just don’t get it!  Does not compute!  What was she impressed by?! 

Here’s the thing- it’s just something Japanese people put in games.  Like “I’ll try my best!”  Cringe.  It’s awkward, it feels unearned, but who gives a shit?  They gave us Katamari Damacy and Gitaroo man; I can take a few annoying repetitive quirks.  Wait a second, why hasn’t there been a Gitaroo Man sequel?  Anyone?  Ouendan is fucking amazing, but it isn’t a sequel.  So, in conclusion, I give Granstream Saga five Ouendans and two Gitaroo Mans.  Just kidding, the game isn’t that good.

Let’s talk for a brief moment about graphics.  Graphics are on your screen, and if they are doing their job, they help you SEE what is going on.  Suffice to say, Granstream’s graphics are such a mess that you rarely have any conception of what the game world is supposed to look like.  At one point, a character was lying in bed under covers, and the graphic was a rectangle (for the bed) with a blue square (representing the girl’s hair peeking out from under the blanket) at one end.  I had a friend over at the time, and he is not a video game player.  He looked at the screen and honestly had no idea what the graphics were trying to convey.  This is a true story; he could not even, with copious use of his imagination and hints from in-game text, figure out what the fuck was going on.  And in case you were wondering, I was only playing it in front of him because he got to my apartment twenty minutes early and I had no opportunity to save.  What kind of graphical drivel must you be producing if you can’t properly determine what any object is supposed to represent?!  The camera doesn’t help, it is pulled so closely to the main character.  You can rotate it in increments of 45 degrees, but even so, you will never have a great idea of where you are in relation to other objects.  Walking around town ends up being a tedious chore where you try to guess where the various shops are located, because no physical markings are a good indicator of which is the Apothecary and which is the Weapon Smith.  Ha!  As if there are weapon shops; there are not.  Dungeons are worse.  The camera is so tight and constricting that by the time you notice an enemy it is already on top of you, and you have no hope of escape.  Oh, by the way, you can’t run from battles, so have fun plugging away at the same two monsters again and again and again.

I can take poor graphics, but this strains even my tolerance level.

But wait, you say!  Grinding is an essential part of any RPG experience.  Sigh.  You don’t gain levels in the traditional way in Granstream Saga.  You level up at set story points that cannot be missed.  Your HP bar increases only by finding missable (but never far off the beaten path) treasure chests with that desired property.  Enemies sometimes refill your MP and sometimes give you gold, but it isn’t a guarantee.  This makes the slog through dungeons even more unbearable…… You aren’t accomplishing anything by fighting these guys, and yet there is the rare occasion in which a fallen foe will drop some vital quest item like a jail key.  So fight you will, tediously, interminably, and with no sense at all of character progression.  Don’t play this game!

Home stretch time.  I have a few more things to say about the game, and this may impact whether or not you play it.  There are four spirits that control the magic in the world- earth, wind, water and fire.  Inspired storytelling, yes?  Here is another actual spoken line of dialogue from the game: “Some people think that you are only a magical floating tower, but you are also a good friend.”  Holy shit, right there.  Go back and reread what I just wrote.  That was spoken in earnest by a character in Granstream Saga….. like I was supposed to feel an emotion when I heard that.  Joke’s on the games’ writers though- I’ve long since stopped feeling emotions of any kind.  Honestly, though, that line of dialogue is a piece of shit.  Here’s some more shit the gave shovels at you- at one point, a character you’ve met once and have absolutely no investment in gets brainwashed by the enemy, and is now your enemy.  For some reason the evil empire makes this brainwashed character the supreme commander of their most powerful warship.  Sounds like a plan!  Nothing can go wrong there.  To commemorate his turn to the dark side, this character dresses identically save a masquerade-style eye cover.  That’ll fool everyone!  I’m pretty sure that this character is supposed to be the “cool” one; you know, the guy that all the fellas wanna be and all the ladies wanna be with.  He has like ten spoken lines in the entire game.

The game takes a strange storyline turn in the last five minutes (sorta like Xenoblade Chronicles, a game which is the anti-Granstream Saga) but by then you’ll be so disinterested that you will literally be jamming the buttons to skip cutscenes entirely.  So I’ll ruin it for you- your character is the resurrected form of some bad guy you learned about by searching some bookcase, and one of the girl characters is the resurrected form of some princess he loved.  I’ll leave you with this parting piece of crappy dialogue that comes directly from the ending.  Your past life character and the girl’s past life character are involved, so keep up please.  Your guy was a soldier who fell down a hill and got a boo-boo.  She is a princess who wanders around the forest outside her castle in the middle of a pitched battle.  She stumbles upon you and patches you right up, and the two of them seem to have some sort of cosmic connection.  As a search party of the main guy’s friends close in on the couple, the hero and the girl talk about how they are enemies and should not trust each other and how the next time they meet it will be as opposing blah blahs.  He says “I cannot let them see me talking to you!” or some shit like that.  She responds, “Will I ever see you again?”, and I swear to you, this is his reply as he runs off to meet his soldier buddies: “Nothing could keep me away!!!”  Fade to black, game over.

First of all, HUH?!  Do I need to analyze why that is just stupid writing?  He said they couldn’t be seen together, and that they’d be enemies next time, but then she is like “But there will be a next time, right?”  Stupid stupid.  And he is like wild horse couldn’t drag me away and shit, but didn’t he also run off to avoid being spotted with her?  And if nothing could keep him away and they have this bond, why didn’t he just stay with her?  He had to finish destroying her castle, I guess.  Maybe he used the secret entrance the princess used to escape into the forest.  But you know, nothing is going to keep him from leaving her to go back to his army to go back to destroying everyone and everything she loves so that he can be with her again in the ruins of her old city.  Yup.  Logical writing at its best. 

So, uh…… don’t play this game!!!  Ignore the Hardcoregaming101 review that says play this game.  Don’t!  Don’t do it!  It’s bad; it’s not the best in the series of games made of Illusion of Gaia, Soul Blazer and Terranigma.  I mean, what the fuck?!  Play those games instead.  Play Ouendan, you’ll love it.  Play Xenoblade Chronicles, it’s awesome.  Ahem.  Granstream Saga is the 170^th best role-playing game of all time, which means that there are sixty really bad role-playing games out there.

OVERALL SCORE: (18/40) Quintet’s Fifth Best Game