SESSION #3

Another day, another Grandia entry! This morning Justin and Sue are clearly on the path to experience combat for the first time! We are leaving our lovely starting town to go visit the Sult ruins, but first we need to go through Marna Road.

A green and open field stands in front of us, where we find the first enemies of the game. Grandia, like Chrono Trigger, has a system where you can see the enemies before fighting them. This may be a selling point to a lot of people. I personally enjoy that sort of system, but not because I dislike random encounters. A lot of people have been praising Chrono Trigger for 30 years on the basis of it not having random encounters. I argue that Chrono Trigger's encounters aren't great because they aren't random (which is also a bit untrue) but because they are consciously designed to immerse the player in the world and better pace the combat heavy sections. However this is the Grandia Journal, not my piece about how a lot of people still haven't got the correct lessons from Chrono Trigger. (This piece will also never happen. Play Chrono Trigger after playing other rpgs from the era and all will be clear, dear reader.)

Okay so back to the topic at hand. Enemies appear on the field, if they see you they turn red. If you go up to them while they are red a normal battle starts, if they walk up to you an ambush starts with enemy advantage. If you walk up to a non-flashing enemy you have the advantage.

Once we are at a battle turns are decided and we are met with this strange bar at the bottom right of the screen. This bar (The IP gauge as the Manual calls it) shows where we and our enemies are. We start in the Wait state, where we.. wait, and after we get to the Action state. The action state has two parts, one where we choose an action and the execution of that action. This sounds obvious but the thing is that you have two types of non-magical non-skill attacks: 'Combo' Attacks and 'Critical' Attacks. Combo attacks are your normal attack, they are two weak hits that combine to do good damage. If an enemy dies from the first hit, you'll use the second hit on the nearest enemy to you. Critical attacks are slower and overall weaker in terms of damage BUT they can 'counter', this means canceling an enemy attack if timed right. This rule applies both ways, as you too can be countered by enemies. I won't get into skills or magic because this entry is already long enough and I haven't even seen magic yet.

It's also important to know that Grandia is not a classic Dragon Quest combat system where enemies and players are static. You are in an isometric field where to attack you have to reach the thing that you want to attack. If the thing you want to attack is far away, they may have an opportunity to attack before you.

So this is me wasting time by explaining to you what a manual, playing the game or watching a gameplay could explain better… why? Mainly so I don't have to explain it later. What do I think of Grandia's combat so far? I don't want to give my opinion before I see what this system can actually do. At this point of the game, like any RPG, it's very simple and easy. I will say that it is very fun so far, but maybe a bit too slow, however that is something that can get better as the game goes. It sounds complex in paper but it's really a very simple turn based combat system with some added coats of paint that change the way it plays just enough to feel fresh and dynamic.

Anyway, this isn't a review or a mechanical analysis. It's a game journal! So yeah, we mess around a bit in Marna Road, level up, get a feel for combat and exploration until we reach the Sult Ruins digging site. This place is filled with soldiers and a ton of fun dialogue. We learn a bit about the dynamics in camp, how everyone idolizes Herr Mullen, the blonde guy from the intro, and how nobody seems to know what the fuck they are actually doing in the ruins.

It's here that we meet Nana, Saki and Mio, the three sergeants that run this operation under Mullen. They are these colorful, simple to explain personality, cartoonishly evil women who subject their soldiers to brutal levels of disciplinary action. The three of them are also madly in love with Mullen. They suck. Like they rip apart Justin and Sue's permission to visit the ruins. They ripped these children's tickets to go to what's essentially a school trip. They suck and I love them. They are very funny.

Of course this won't deter our protagonists and into the ruins we go. We learn through overhearing a speech by Mullen that we arrived just when the final excavation is set to begin, the final stage of some 'Project Yggdrasil' that seems to be looking for some ancient wisdom of the Angelou civilization. We continue to explore the ruins, which is the first proper dungeon. It's very linear but it's also fun in that it's very deliberately paced. As we along fighting enemies and picking up items we overhear conversations from soldiers and the sergeants that give us a better picture of the army and it's characters.

The dungeon layout was a bit disorienting towards the end due to it being a large open space instead of a more 'labyrinth' based structure, but a level of disorientation is to be expected from an RPG of this era. Eventually we reach the end to find a suspicious statue, when we go up to it our spirit stone shines and the statue reveals itself to be a door deeper into the ruins. Here the aesthetics of the dungeon change to a more futuristic style and after a simple button puzzle we arrive at a desolate room where we hear a voice call out to Justin.

We talk to Liete, the ghost of the ruins we heard rumors about. A woman who inherited the history of Angelou. She is the one that lets us know that the Utopian world of Angelou does indeed exist beyond myth, however to answer all our questions we must head east towards Alent, or the New Continent as we know it. The Spirit Stone is the symbol of the promise that once binded Icarians and Humans, and it is the light that will shine Justin's path towards solving the mystery of Angelou. This leads indeed to many questions, mainly concerned with how did Justin's dad get his hand on such important item

So we decide to go home to figure out a way to reach the New Continent but Mullen catches us. He won't kill the kids but he intends to keep them away from his families to serve as army informants, so Justin and Sue make a run for it. We fight a Stone Bird boss (very simple easy fight) and manage to escape. Mullen laughs and commends Justin on managing to leave the place, thinking that having out him in the4 world shouldn't be something to worry about. I like how this humanizes Mullen as not a simple 100% evil villain. One of the soldiers comments on him having concerns about the excavation, so maybe this is building up to some form of contention between him and his father.

We go home for dinner where Lily tells us the best way to figure out how to get to Alent is by asking the people in the port. With this new goal, we go to sleep for the day. This will probably be as long as an entry gets because otherwise I will never finish this game. Also this one is maybe TOO much of a summary of events. I'm thinking of maybe spacing these out more and doing combined sessions that cover longer stretches of the game, but focus more on the aspects that I actually have something to talk about. We'll see.

Date of Session: Between the night of 15/12 and 16/12 of 2024.