Moving away from the 16-bit era, its time once again to discuss a PS1 era RPG. It’s no secret that there were tons of these on the PlayStation and while many of them are considered all time classics, many more have fallen into obscurity.
The Granstream Saga definitely falls into the latter category. What we have here is an action RPG released towards the middle of the systems life-cycle that was intended as a spiritual successor to Japan-only Super Nintendo (well, Super Famicom) game Terranigma. Thanks to the wonders of emulation and fan translations, Terranigma has established itself as a cult classic in the West. It’s pseudo-sequel, despite having actually been released in the U.S., is still just a footnote.
Starting with the story, you play as a young man named Eon, who is responsible for cutting pieces off of his home continent to help it float. The surface of Eon’s world is covered in water, with what’s left of humanity living on a series of four floating continents. Those continents are sinking and their inhabitants are taking extreme measures to prevent that. Eon does his part thanks to the magic powers granted by the green bracelet (the game calls it a scepter) that has been on his wrist since birth.
In the process of doing his job, Eon meets a young girl named Arcia, who possesses two very important qualities; a sweet bowl cut and the ability to recite “lifting refrains” to stop the sinking. Unfortunately, the words to these refrains are hidden in monster filled temples. As you probably guessed, its on you to recover the refrains. The duo enlists the help of sky pirates, including the enigmatic Laramee and her pet bird Korky, to help them move from island to island and also comes to discover a creature/living tower/Zordon impersonator called Airlim, which helps them stay one step ahead of the evil Imperial Wizardry.
The story is well told, though its a bit simple, and the characters are all pretty likeable. The translation is solid so there isn’t a lot missed like in Legend of Dragoon. Anime cutscenes are featured from time to time and they look great, although the dubbing is a little off. All of the voice actors are at least okay, except Laramee’s, who is straight up horrible. While the story and presentation are good, the narrative, really, really goes off the rails in the last two hours. It isn’t that the twist is bad (it’s actually excellent), its just that it gets thrown at you with little to no warning and makes no sense in the context of the whole “raise the islands” thing you have been doing all game. You even get a final boss switcharoo, which always sucks.
The game is laid out more like a traditional RPG, with town sections and dungeons you explore from an overhead view. Touching an enemy triggers a battle, which is where the action RPG stuff comes in. Eon can swing his weapon, block or cast magic. He can only equip one spell at a time though and I found the magic to be mostly useless. There are three types of weapons, dagger, swords and heavy weapons. Unfortunately, using a dagger makes the game take forever and using the heavy weapons make it impossible to hit anything, so you are pretty much limited to the swords.
I won’t say the combat is bad, but it is pretty simplistic and the controls are very, very stiff. You have to lay on the buttons to get Eon to do anything and the inputs feel a little delayed. If you want to win fights, you need to block first and then attack, but you swing your weapon so slowly that the enemy often has their own guard up by the time your inputs register. It’s annoying and it bogs the game down, but at least it doesn’t get you killed. I also have to give them credit for the camera, which is usually a nightmare in games like this. The biggest thing here is that it re-orients Eon, and the screen, to the direction you were facing before battle. Sounds dumb, but it makes it way harder to get lost and speeds up the game.
Graphics are a bit mixed. The environments and backgrounds are awesome. That really makes the dungeons feel dangerous and the towns feel lived in. Unfortunately, the character models aren’t great, as they are very blocky. Also, I find it creepy that no one has a face. The character portraits are well done at least and the anime cutscenes are well drawn. There was definitely a lot of effort put into this game, but I did notice a handful of stupid-yet-hilarious mistakes. Apparently, no one on the localization team knew how to spell “barrier” and Laramee’s name is spelled three different ways throughout the game. Errors like that are forgivable in an indie game like Cosmic Star Heroine, but they really shouldn’t have happened here.
I had a lot of fun with Granstream Saga, but I wouldn’t say it was particularly great. You could certainly do worse, but you could also do better. It’s a relatively short RPG (under 20 hours, so no two part blog) and a nice diversion for action RPG fans, but the slow pace and stiff controls will be offputting to most gamers. For what its worth, I think this game could have really used a sequel. They got the hard parts right (compelling characters, interesting world) while dropping the ball on easy-to-fix things (stiff combat, blizzard faceless character models).
6.75/10
Play this game if:
You are an action RPG aficionado
You can overlook the stiff movement
You are looking for a quick RPG
Avoid if:
You are easily frustrated by stiff controls
You really hate out-of-nowhere boss switches
The faceless character models creep you out too much
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