PunctualDork

“It’s mid-afternoon on a Tuesday. Why exactly are you interrupting my retirement?” Across the table sat a young, disheveled man. “It’s been a long week, dad.”

His son had studied diligently at the most prestigious schools and mentored under greats of the both aesthetics and design to fulfill a lifelong dream of creating experiences that people would remember. It wasn’t anything the old man could understand; in his day it was more acceptable to take a reliable job at a respected company than dabble in bits and bites for entertainment.

“We gave them everything they wanted.” he sighed. “Revisiting the characters they loved, the locations, the memorable moments – everything. It would all return.”

He designed environments for his company, and this project was both a proving grounds for him and an opportunity to revisit a game he had loved since he was an adolescent. With hard work and some patience, he could breath life into flat landscapes and add a new layer of depth to a classic adventure. Frustration had settled in though.

“What is the problem then?” His father calmly sifted through the same news publication he read every day at that time. “The problem is that they have begged for years for this remake to happen and now that it is no one trusts us to revise our own game.” He poured a cup of tea to alleviate the dark circles crowding his eyes after many long nights of work.

“The characters they say look too different, but we couldn’t have reused the models without them not suiting the game’s setting. They say the combat is too action-oriented now, but it would have been unrealistic to have the characters stand in place and wait to be attacked. Even the logo is criticized for being different. It’s enough to give me an ulcer.”

His father turned the newspaper page. “That’s unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate? We are trying to provide an experience that lives up to over a decade’s worth of anticipation. Hundreds of hours are being poured into taking the old that the fans grew up with and adding the new to make it something more. Something bigger. Yet some call our changes “radical” and damn the experience based on a single trailer. No more than fifteen seconds of what the game really plays like have been seen.”

“Mhmm.” Another page was turned. “It’s to be expected.”

“It’s insane. We can’t just upgrade the visuals and keep everything else the same. There’d be people asking why we even bothered. We can’t make changes either because so many people hate change.” The son’s tea now cold and the beverage ignored. “I just don’t get it.”

The paper was folded evenly and calmly placed on the table. “You won’t please everyone, son.” He looked sharply at his son and smiled. “So don’t even try.”

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While knowledge on the Final Fantasy VII Remake is limited, some details were gleamed from a recent Famitsu interview with producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Tetsuya Nomura. The game will be released in multiple installments for a very specific reason: remaking it with the PlayStation 4 visuals and content would be too significant for a single release. The developers plan to use this approach to allow for more content elsewhere, with one Square Enix representative later confirming to Polygon that “As a gaming experience, each entry will have the column of content equal to a full-sized game.”

In terms of combat, it’s been said that the game has taken a page from Dissidia Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts in order to craft a more kinetic battle system – though that isn’t to suggest that there won’t be room for strategy. ATB will return in some form as it will need to be altered to match the new pace of combat. The developers are still planning on featuring Limit Breaks, Summons, magic, and the ability to control and swap between up to three characters in combat.

Character models have indeed been slightly tweaked to match the stylistic realism of the approach the developers have taken to the game. Previous models are said to have been “too outdated” to use. Close observers of the recent trailer will also notice a seamless shift between character dialogue in cut-scenes and gameplay. This was done purposely to maintain immersion. The game is being developed in Unreal Engine 4, as confirmed in a press release by Epic Games.

Hey friends! We have a new video out for Yoshi’s Wooly World.

I’d be your best friend if you watched it. Any feedback would be great too! :)

In the glow of our early-90s colour television, I would watch my older brother Troy play a number of RPG classics. Final Fantasy VI, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Tales of Destiny, Xenogears – the list is long and varied, but the one that sticks out the most to me is the original Grandia. A PlayStation classic rooted in the feeling of grand adventure, Grandia was something familiar and different. The plot wasn’t wholly original, the art style wasn’t completely unique, and the character development was somewhat predictable. Yet every element sung in unison, none more than the combat that the franchise has become known for.

Whether you played Grandia, Grandia II, Xtreme, or Grandia III, you probably played the games for their unique combat systems. I get that. The classic IP meter and its associated timing and execution mechanisms are iconic, as far as JRPGs go. But there was something more than tight combat to these games that made them work – and the disappointing Grandia III does a good job illuminating that point.

It’s been almost ten years since Grandia III was released and I’m still annoyed by it. I’ve played it start-to-finish at least four times, and while the combat still can feel engaging for the first twenty hours, shit gets tedious and repetitive pretty fast once you hit disk 2. And that’s a problem, as I honestly find that everything else in this game, except maybe half of the soundtrack, just blows.

What the hell happened? Did Game Arts just stop giving a damn?

The camera is unfriendly and at times completely erratic. The art style is dull and completely devoid of life. Textures are more grey than they are colourful and pretty much everything has jaggy polygons. The best characters get the shaft and are pulled out of the plot early on, and your protagonist, Yuki, somehow loses personality as time goes on. It just sucks, and the feeling of it sucking never leaves you.

Oh! And the massive disappointment that is entwined in every facet of this lazy sequel hits you square in the face via that fucking awful opening movie and song. The dickheads at Game Arts that greenlighted using “In The Sky” need to be publically shamed. Just thinking of that atrocious piece of J-pop makes my ears ache.

None of that BS is the real problem with Grandia III, though. Its narrative is vastly contrived, trite, ultimately meaningless, and boring. Voice actors don’t put any personality into their characters, plot threads that should have been tied up aren’t, and the progression of the game is so very slow. So slow that at times you will feel your heart shriveling up as idiot NPCs talk to your idiot characters.

Yuki, as with all Grandia protagonists, seeks adventure. He has a hilarious mother who doesn’t want to let go, a love interest that is a blatant rip off of both Elena from Grandia II and Yuna from Final Fantasy X, and a quirky side kick that I would literally strangle in real life. Yuki’s love interest, Alfina, has a brother that’s killing giant magical animals because he’s gone to the dark side and doing such will destroy the world. Or something. The game doesn’t spend too much time on the finer details.

The evil big bad that Alfina’s brother is serving is called Xorn. He believes that love is the root of all suffering and malice and wants to ride the world of such things. Xorn is a cheap version of Valmar, an infinitely more imposing entity from Grandia II, but unlike Valmar is one-dimensional.

Do you know what the whole Granas/Valmar plight in Grandia II is actually interesting? Because it isn’t really about light versus darkness. It’s not like “Oh, Granas is good because he is made of light rays and Valmar is bad because he’s all shadowy and mysterious.” Please. That bull shit is so played out in RPGs it’s ridiculous.

Throughout Grandia II, characters are exposed to situations that make them question the natural order as they understand it. Members of the holy order who “follow Granas” are actually wicked and evil, while literal pieces of Valmar like Millenia are selfless and caring. Hell, the beast tribes in that game lived without gods and were perfectly happy. You’re given the impression that it isn’t so simple and maybe – JUST MAYBE – what defines a person as good or bad are their actions.

That’s a fucking plot right there.

Grandia III doesn’t go the route of making the player think. Rather, one-dimensional set pieces with poorly delivered, contrived dialogue and underdeveloped motivations are lazily moved from one end of a chess board to the other like pawns. Not people. Because Grandia III doesn’t give a damn about providing you with a good story. Apparently “emotion” and “thematic messages” are luxuries that Game Arts just didn’t have room in the budget for.

God damn.

That’s not all that’s lacking though. No side quests. No minigames. No exploration. You don’t get to travel to anywhere on the world map when you want to. The game walks a foot behind you at all times, constantly pushing you forward from local to local. Your enemies are invariant. They are planned to the last detail. There is no randomness or chance; you fight them because you are planned to. You fight them to be at the level you need to be to press onwards. No more, no less.

GAH! I’m having the stress shakes just writing about this.

You know what bothers me most about Grandia III though? The game ruined the joy that magic and skill development could offer to the player. You know what my favourite thing about Grandia was? Learning and mastering magic and skills by battling with my characters. I would swap weapons or magic-strategies to unlock fucking amazing abilities. Same with Grandia II. I would grind battles in areas with enemies offering a lot of magic and skill coins so that I could buy the best abilities and improve my use of them. Allowing me that degree of completion was so very satisfying. Hell, even Xtreme’s weird ass Mana Egg fusing system allowed the smart player to be rewarded through careful alchemy. So what does Grandia III do? It opts to instead sell you magic at town shops.

WHAT THE FUCK.

Sure you can extract magic from Mana Eggs you collect and fuse, but that’s only something you can really spent time on later in the game. For the entirety of the first disk you almost have to solely rely on what NPCs are willing to sell you. You know, so you have the exact skills and magic to move your ass forward.

As I’ve said, I have played this ga