Cardinel 最近的评测

Ahh yes, the wonderful feeling of nostalgia. I love it!

Grandia is a classic JRPG, designed in a 90's anime style and you can still feel it's charm years later, if we don't pay attation to the few graphical failures, of course. Developed in the early days of 3D Modelling, Grandia using a lot of 3D maps with no fixed camera angles alongside with many well-made animated 2D sprites. Sure, Grandia's graphics may appear quite outdated, but with each step through Messina and Elencia you can still feel it's filled with brightness and personality.

Longer Review and some spoilers ahead!!

Grandia is a happy, bright, and colorful game, which isn't afraid to show it. Its story is quite basic; if you've played some JRPGs, it's similar to others, following the classic JRPG progression of your protagonist rescuing someone's pet from danger to kick the mightiest enemy you ever saw in the butt. In our case here, a boy named Justin is one of our protagonists, along with a childhood scavenger hunt as our rescued pet. The biggest enemy is a, well, giant soul-sucking insectoid quasi-deity who is also the personification of humanity's selfishness.

Between those two "minor" events, Justin goes on an archeological dig and discovers that an ancient civilization that most people thought was a myth actually existed, thanks to his little inherited stone called the "Spirit Stone," which could be the main magical item as well as an ancient symbol and covenant between Humans and the Spirits of this world. From there on, Justin decides to go on a globe-trotting adventure to find this ancient civilization, meeting with fellow main protagonist Feena as he travels across oceans, plains, jungles, some more ancient ruins, and much more. In each location, you can feel its uniqueness with its beautiful designs; sure, some of the monster designs are recolored and reused, but if you look at the whole picture, it's still well-made.

Many of the characters are wonderful, like Justin, his younger friend Sue, and Feena too. All three of them are delightfully earnest and well written. Justin appears to be genuinely good-natured, maybe a bit rash at first, but he matures along his journey. Sue, Justin's "voice of reason" as I like to refer to her, is still more mature in some ways as Justin evolves and realizes that she may not be ready to tag along on adventures with them and decides to return home. Feena, our third but not final party member, enjoys adventures just as much as Justin, but she knows a lot more about them, as we learn right at the beginning of meeting her. Through their journey and some beautiful scenes, you can see how their friendship and relationship are growing. They all talk to one another and share their opinions and relationships, and that's one more aspect that makes Grandia so great. Apart from them, some people are coming and going; everyone, even the town's npcs, have their own dialogues, which makes the world of Grandia more alive and interesting.

But enough talking about the world of Grandia; let's look at the game's features and mechanics. Grandia comes with an interesting turn-based action combat system using an action gauge, unlike the traditional way you may know. As you encounter different types enemies, while you traverse the map, you'll be thrown into an 2D arena fight sequence, where your party gets a place on the arena and the gauge. Your position on the map and gauge, as well as the enemy's, are determined by how you approach the enemy. While all combatants traverse the gauge, nothing really happens until one of them reaches the ACT part. One of your party members reached it? Well, now you can determine what the character can do, be it attacking, defending, using an item, a skill, or casting magic. The choice is yours.

The combat system still gets more complex as everyone influences each other's actions and position on the gauge. Your party members are getting hit after you decided, what to do? Well, to bad, you lose your current position, get pushed back on the gauge, and your action gets canceled; in a less bad case, you simply freeze on the gauge. Same for the enemy if they get hit, of course. At the highest point of combat, you'll measure which enemy to attack to prevent their movement or attacks, while preparing your own combatants for enemy attacks. Or you're like me in my second playthrough; you level everything and everyone to much and stomp any encounter into the ground.

Speaking of levels, leveling is simple. Simple and very unbalanced. The levels of your characters are separated into three categories: character level, weapon level, and magic level. Every character can equip one or more specific weapons like swords, axes, maces, etc. and learn four types of magic. Attacking enemies with either gives them individual EXP; 100 EXP equals one level and a little stat boost; the boost depends on what you're leveling. Anyway, such level systems may are somewhere interesting, but unfortunately, in Grandia, they are very unbalanced, and while you follow Justin and co. on their journey with every step to the end, the grind gets more intense because the amount of EXP you get gets smaller and smaller. To somehow avoid the grind, there's only one way: you need to acquire a pair of special trinkets to boost the rate of EXP you're getting.

Other gripes are fairly small, like your inventory. Everyone has their own, limited inventory, so making another tiny challenge while you're playing.

Overall, I had fun with Grandia and the small extra feeling of nostalgia was fine too. Doing all the dungeons, leveling up and learning what works best against the various types of enemies, collecting and re-exploring everything, and the plethora of different dialogs Grandia's story may be as simple and cliche as they come. A game from another era that doesn't hesitate to say adventuring is fun and what jerks the bad guys are give it a try, you won't regret it, I'm sure!

So I am overall recommending this game. It's a shame the steam rating system doesn't go beyond yes or no.

First the graphics and voice acting: Beautiful! SO much details and easter eggs in some episodes, I loved all of them. You can see a lot of work went into level design. Voice acting and overall sounds are very well done, I'm impressed how everyone in this game has it's own lines for everything you interact with, none generic crap stuff. The little bit of music you get is also well placed and well done.

Its a horror game but not over the-top-terror like many horror games or which you literally can guess the next jumpscare. Just the right amount of creepiness and uncomfortable sensation imo.

The story is what kept me going to finally finish this game. By the end it was the only thing that kept me going through the levels.

Time to talk about those damn mini games. Despite earlier reviews from other people and experience I made, they all work now. They are not that hard but if you're someone struggling with timing maybe it's a bit frustrating and I'm recommending to set the difficulty lower or to the lowest. One of the biggest issue during the mini games are the most horrific parts at the same time, they looks great and bring on excitement, but...why making a mini game that makes you focus so hard on icons or one point of the entire screen so you have no way to pay attention to the actual horror taking place? The only ones that you sort of can still see the horror going on are like "shut the door"- or "presence folk dragging"-mini game. It's a shame but they all get more tedious as the game drags on too.

So speaking of dragging on. Holy crap this game its slow. I don't mind about slow games. I actually look for something like that, but this is slow, snail slow to by accurate at some points. Especially if you're trying to beat the game without a walkthrough. For example: the collecting of items. To proceed sometimes you has to go through an entire area over again just for one item or interaction because you needed it to do to get a certain thing somewhere else that you've already been to, probably more than once.

The puzzles, some were fun, some less and felt like work. Many people play games to enjoy them and not feel like they're at a real job or whatever. Its not that they cannot be solved, thankfully. For me some of them they just tried my patience. But still many of them been fun.

Yet in the end I did want to complete it and see if Daniel succeeds or not. And now at exactly 24 hrs later I'm done! The story? Well made! The level design? As already told good also, most of the time! But some mechanics are just horrific. If there was more depth to the story I could understand being dragged through this long, but no just no...none of the bad elements that kept the game moving along slowly were just not enjoyable enough for a story that, again, although fantastic, could've been explained in a third of that time or less.

So much potential, so much to be wasted on things that have been complained about since release, but well it is what it is. I really appreciate the devs constantly working on the game to improve it and yet they overlooked the major areas where the game starts to fail. But at least it was a unique game I've played for a long time and I am grateful to all devs that think outside the box to bring us new experiences.

I found this game on sale. And for this price I bought it, it was a nice experience. In the end I think everyone should take the chance and try it out, everyone has their own preferences and thats fine, so again, in the end, if we had a rating system beyond thumbs up and thumbs down, I will recommend it at 7/10.

So muss Early-Access funktionieren!
Dieses Spiel ist ein hervorragendes Beispiel dafür wie Early Access eigentlich funktionieren sollte (Wir wissen alle es gibt auch hervoragende Negativbeispiele, aber darum gehts hier nicht). Man hat schon mal ein Klasse gerüst um das herum die Entwickler immer wieder mehr tolle Sachen bauen. Und auf die Vorschläge der Community wird auch eingegangen. Find ich spitze! Weiter so.

Das Kampfsystem finde ich wirklich ziemlich toll. Close Combat mit einer Mischung aus Baseball.
Durch die Bälle ergeben sich auch außerhalb der Kämpfe echt tolle Möglichkeiten für Rätsel (Was die Entwickler scheinbar auch gerne zu Nutzen scheinen). Man muss manchmal schon etwas "um die Ecke denken" um die Rätsel lösen zu können oder es wird einfach probiert bis es klappt.
Was man auch brauch und mir stark aufgefallen ist, ist viel Zeit und Ausdauer, die Rätsel sind teilweise echt gut und schwer gemacht. Da hab ich schon viele gesehen die an dem ein oder anderen Rätsel lange gesessen haben und immer wieder gescheitert sind ^^ An sich aber sehr spannend was die Entwickler sich haben einfallen lassen.

Die Bosse sind auf Ihrer Weise gut gemacht, den alle (die ich bis jetzt gesehen habe) waren auch sehr anspruchsvoll im Schwierigkeitsgrad. Was mir besonders gut gefällt ist, dass jeder Gegner seine eigenen Schwachstellen und man immer drauf achten muss: Wann kann ich angreifen?, wann muss ich blocken? Sachen die man nur herausfindet, indem man es immer wieder probiert. Einem Casual Gamer der mal eben so was einfaches für Zwischendurch braucht ist hier wohl eher an der falschen Adresse (Ob von den Entwicklen auch gewollt ist...wer weiß)

Der Look gefällt mir auch sehr gut. Hat man erst die richtigen Einstellungen gesetzt sieht das Spiel wunderbar aus trotz (oder gerade wegen) Pixelgrafik. Die Animationen sind flüssig und nett anzusehen.
Man merkt wirklich dass die Liebe der Entwickler in viele kleine Details geflossen ist. Und hin und wieder findet immer kleine Anspielungen über die man schmunzeln kann. (Hmm, wie war das mit dem Avatar und dem Herrn der 4 Elemente ;) ) Auch das immer wieder neuer Content geliefert wird, zeigt die Liebe und Hingabe zu diesem Spiel.

Was mir auch gut gefällt ist die hervorragende Controller-Unterstützung, ich spiele mit einem Xbox-360-Controller und es spielt sich klasse. Mit Maus und Tastatur hab ich es auch bereits gespielt, aber meiner Erfahrung nach ist in den meisten Dingen ein Gamepad zu empfehlen.

Alles in Allem ein runder Early Access Titel, der mir bisher sehr gut gefällt. Das Geld war auf jeden Fall gut angelegt, von diesem Spiel könnten sich einige AAA-Titel ne Scheibe abschneiden.

Radical Fish Games klasse! Macht weiter so, bin schon wirklich gespannt wie das Spiel sich weiter entwickeln wird. :)