5 ms·

The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

184 points by tosh 11mo ago

jamesbelchamber 11mo ago
I am determined to play this on Saturn at some point. I had the Playstation version as a kid and I didn't notice any of the flaws, it was just a brilliant game with a much more interesting and fun battle system than Final Fantasy. But now I see all the mismatched textures which have been ported right up to the modern HD "remasters". Great to see that there's an English patch. Christmas is coming up..
- tosh 11mo ago
  It would be great to have the saturn version + translation as well as the improved movie sequences maybe there is a way to port them using the saturns mpeg add-on (?) otoh probably fine to watch them on youtube in parallel
TavsiE9s 11mo ago
I've tried so many times to play the classic JRPGs only to be met by loooooooong cutscenes before even allowing me to control the characters. Grandia is unfortunately no exception: 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes.
- jamesbelchamber 11mo ago
  This is very frustrating, but I'm not sure it's a problem only with classic JRPGs - recently I sat down to play Bayonetta 3 and it had a similar problem (along with.. others). FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes?
  - ozbonus 11mo ago
    Most of the Final Fantasy games have been like that, which is why I've (most of the time) been a fan since since FF4/2. I can't remember how many times I've been turned off by a game when it starts with the protagonist being woken up by his mom, followed by endless wandering around town.
  - FieryMechanic 11mo ago
    It the same with Spiderman: Miles Morales. There are some cut scenes you cannot skip. Worse they they are cut scenes that don't actually affect the main story arc. This makes replays painful as the story isn't particular interesting and in some places actually quite nauseating to watch (Miles is constantly conflicted on very straight forward things), but the game play itself is quite fun. I've looked for a mod for this game where you can skip all cut-scenes but it doesn't seem to exist.
  - kokada 11mo ago
    > FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes? Except when you use the Knights of the Round summon, then you go grab a coffee while waiting for the animation to finish :).
- jeppester 11mo ago
  Play the game in an emulator that has a shortcut for fast-forward. It makes a world of difference when it comes to "enduring" overly long cut-scenes, load screens, repeated spell animations, endless combat encounters, etc. I wish modern games would have the same feature!
  - TavsiE9s 11mo ago
    Fair point, I was playing on MiSTER.
- nottorp 11mo ago
  > 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly Mmm played any Kojima games? :)
  - FieryMechanic 11mo ago
    You can typically skip most dialogue and cut-scenes in the MGS games. Also quite a number of the cut-scenes are interactive and can actually help you in game play (codec numbers are show, clues etc). MGS-4 though is has ridiculous cutscene length.
    - phantasmish 11mo ago
      MGS4 would be like 10% shorter if you had a mod that just cut every line in a cutscene that’s someone repeating someone else’s previous line, but as a question.
      - FieryMechanic 11mo ago
        I never finished it. So I wouldn't know.
  - TavsiE9s 11mo ago
    Nope, MGS was big on Playstation when I was growing up and the whole stealth gameplay does not appeal to me.
    - ethagnawl 11mo ago
      I haven't seriously tried playing it again since it came out but it didn't appeal to me either and my friends all thought I'd lost it. I also remember the clerk at Electronics Boutique being gobsmacked when I wanted to return it. I do generally find stealthiness to be engaging and great fun _as a component of game play_ but as the main draw and, especially, from the jump I just found it to be frustrating and annoying. Maybe I'd feel different these days, though. I'll try it again some day.
- kouteiheika 11mo ago
  > 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes. Genuinely curious - if you don't care about the story then why play an RPG? When you're speedrunning - sure, skip all of the cutscenes, but when you're playing casually - why would you want to do that?
  - opan 11mo ago
    I agree with your take here that he should care about the cut scenes/story if bothering to play, but this has gotten especially bad in newer games where they try to shove you right into the game before you can tweak settings. I never played through Bravely Default on 3DS because the opening scene used the English dub instead of the original audio, and I had to skip it to access the settings and change languages, then there was no way to rewatch that opening scene. I've similarly avoided their other games like Octopath Traveler as I suspect they have the same issue. It seems like an accessibility issue. I don't think they should ever stop you from getting to the settings first thing. I am not entertained by them trying to be overly cinematic. I don't think it would kill them to wait until you hit "start new game".
  - xandrius 11mo ago
    I could ask you a similar question: why play an RPG if you don't care about playing? Go watch a movie. The point of many posters, I imagine, is that there is too much non-playing parts all at once, it's not strictly about them not being skippable. This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.
    - ThrowawayR2 11mo ago
      Unlike a movie, when done well, the combat/grinding add to player engagement because it places the player in direct charge of the characters' growth from a nobody to a legend. You can't get that from a movie.
    - JoshTriplett 11mo ago
      > This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save. Some games have started to get this right, either by making cutscenes you've seen skippable, or by just automatically skipping straight to the battle if you've already been through it once. I suspect one reason it didn't happen on older games was the need to explicitly save, rather than autosaving.
- FieryMechanic 11mo ago
  It often gets worse. I stopped playing Final Fantasy X (on the PS2) because there was a boss battle where there was a 10 minute un-skippable cutscene between each stage of the battle and if you died you had to re-watch each one.
  - TavsiE9s 11mo ago
    I think at that point I'd call it and mark that one as "finished it".
    - FieryMechanic 11mo ago
      I don't think I will ever play a JRPG again. In fact it was the last one. These days I want my games to be actual games.
      - bigstrat2003 11mo ago
        Look, complaining about unskippable cutscenes is one thing. Everyone has that complaint about FFX, I even know what boss you're talking about because it's so infamous. But saying that JRPGs aren't "actual games" is ridiculous. They are games, whether or not you personally enjoy them.
        FieryMechanic 11mo ago
        I am not saying they aren't games. What I am saying is that I enjoy stuff now that has basically no plot and let's me get on with the game. Half of Final Fantasy X (and I think a little later they released a movie both for Final Fantasy VII and the standalone movie the Spirit Within) was Square showing off how good their CGI animation was, which at the time was very good. CGI cut scenes went from "this is a cool thing I see between levels" on the PS1 to "this is a tedious interruption".
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    FFX’s balance is awful if you go straight from point to point and don’t take some long grinding breaks. You’ll hit exactly the kinds of boss-walls you mention, and yeah, the cutscene placement is simply abusive. Last couple plays I’ve used zig-zag approach when traveling through random encounter zones, effectively ~doubling distance traveled, and encounters. Stretches those out, but removes most of the separate, dedicated grinding. (Not defending the game design that makes this necessary, mind you)
- erfgh 11mo ago
  JRPGs are like movies that you can interact with. If you don't enjoy the cutscenes then it will be a drag. I did play FFVII when it came out and I was extremely impressed and couldn't get enough of it. But I could never get into other JRPGs later.
- lanfeust6 11mo ago
  Yes, and for as much as that's an annoyance, games are far worse now. This has infected everything AAA, not just JRPGs. See: the God of War reboot, Tomb Raider, etc. Narrative is one thing, but at least with 90s JRPGs you could go through dialog on the field screen at your own pace, generally. It doesn't take long to get to the action.
spondyl 11mo ago
I was just about to go to bed and what a surprise seeing Grandia trending #1 on Hacker News of all places. For myself, Grandia is one of those games that was part of my childhood so despite having flaws, it transcends ratings in a sense. It was the first game I ever got on the first home console I ever had, the PlayStation 1. I would only have been about 9 or 10(?) (31 now) and the intro to the game is burned into my mind because I never had a memory card for quite some time so I'd replay the opening hour or two over and over until it was time for dinner or bed. Eventually I got a memory card and my next entry was Digimon World 2003 and I wonder to what extent that lead to me being interested in computers generally and ultimately becoming a developer as a day job. To this day, I've still yet to finish Grandia. I picked up the HD Collection on Switch and I'm about halfway. Every time I go on vacation (or particularly during the Christmas holidays), I'll progress a bit. There's no real rush though in that once it's over, it's over. I don't really tend to replay titles, particularly long RPGs. It's also kind of weird actually seeing the rest of the game too. For the longest time, I had no idea where the story was going. I've still mostly managed to avoid spoilers as well so I conceptually don't know where the story ends up which is nice, given years of reading Wikipedia synopsis only to regret it later. > A total joy… but one that demands an intense time commitment. A player Justin’s age surely has the time I found this part funny because I was Justin's age when I first played Grandia and never found the time then let alone now
- triwats 11mo ago
  Nice comment! How is the HD collection? Hmm, I think the flaws are what generally make games. I played thousands of hours on a bunch of Quake 3 engine games (Q3:A, RTCW, ET)... If you moved your mouse in a certain way you would go faster, and as a result there were a class of players that were speed demons. These flaws are often ground out now, and I think that limits community-driven creativity. Especially since most games are impossible to mod now. Eventually we found ways to limit this (limit fps in competitive configs as an e.g.) to prevent those with the best PCs have an unfair advantage.
  - vikingerik 11mo ago
    I agree, on where the flaws often make the games. My example of that was Heroes of Might and Magic 2 vs 3. 3 is the legendary one that everybody remembers, but I actually liked 2 better. Sure, 3 is far superior for balance and AI and content... but for me, the unbalance of 2 was its charm. Trying to win with the underpowered knight castle, or against a far superior force with tactics like the blind spell that the AI wouldn't counter... that was the fun of the more primitive Heroes 2 and wasn't quite the same in the more developed 3. Less development in a game can actually make for more fun factor.
robin_reala 11mo ago
Worth pointing out that a Grandia 1 & 2 HD bundle came out earlier this year: https://www.grandiahd.com/ https://www.grandiahd.com/
- qingcharles 11mo ago
  Are they garbage? All the videos I've seen say the remasters are dogshit and ruin the game :(
  - robin_reala 11mo ago
    Honestly, I’ve not tried them. PS Store has the unremastered Grandia 1 available, which is what I’ve been playing.
  - butlike 11mo ago
    Just got it last night (after reading this post). I'm 2 hours into Grandia 1 and having fun FWIW. Never really heard of Grandia before this though, so YMMV. Bought on Switch
  - yesb 11mo ago
    They're fine but they did basically the bare minimum effort to release them. Some people hate the blur effect they put on the sprites in the first game. There are patches to remove it for the PC version but not the consoles
Marazan 11mo ago
Grandia is a beautiful game. Both visually and from a story telling perspective. A simple, sweet coming of age tale told without cynicism. Justin, Sue and Feena feel like old friends.
robin_reala 11mo ago
Site’s currently down, here’s a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20251209110317/https://www.segasaturnshiro.com/2025/11/27/the-joy-of-playing-grandia-on-sega-saturn/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251209110317/https://www.segas...
sentrysapper 11mo ago
looks like the host is getting too many requests, anyone know of a mirror?
nticompass 11mo ago
I never played the 1st Grandia, but I had Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I absolutely loved that game. I'll admit that I was never the best with (J)RPGs and never played it for that long per-session as a kid, but I did eventually finish it. Though, it did take many years to finally get to the end and finish the game, but I enjoyed it! (I also enjoyed Evolution 2: Far Off Promise).
hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago
Oh I rememeber in one of the games, one of the girls would say ganba ganba something at the end of each battle. I didn't understand it back then but I loved it.
pnut 11mo ago
I read that as "playing Grandma" and thought that was a pretty clever game concept.
komali2 11mo ago
I've been getting more and more into retro gaming lately, and something that really made it click for me is leveraging shaders (or overlays) to simulate period-accurate displays. For a Sega Saturn, that'd be some kind of CRT. The art direction in these games are designed to take advantage of the quirks of the CRT, and often look significantly better on a CRT. Noodle just did a decent video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI I strongly recommend anyone getting into retro gaming, try some CRT shaders (or lcd ones for portables)!
- Forgeties79 11mo ago
  Or get a CRT if you live in a populous area, have the space, and a strong back! It’s gotten harder since Covid when they were seemingly everywhere, but if you’re lucky you’ll find a good curbed unit. Gave my buddy a 24” trinitron recently I just couldn’t keep around anymore and he is having a blast playing his PS2 on it with component cables. FFX really sings as do racing games. That being said there are a lot of emulators and little pieces of hardware now that simulate it really well, which is a very viable option, especially when space is at a premium (or if your poor pet hates the whine of a CRT like my dog did ha)
  - komali2 11mo ago
    Hah, I wish I had the space for this and original hardware! For me it's hard to justify the space and cost when I can just have all the videogames ever made on a couple SSDs and run them on emulators. Then again, I seem to have accidentally started a small GB/GBA cart collection...
    - Forgeties79 11mo ago
      it would be a terrible shame if you learned about all the various ways you can mod a gameboy
throwaway613745 11mo ago
I almost always try to play on original hardware on an appropriate display (CRT) whenever I can. The deluge of remasters and remakes we've been getting can be nice - but I find a lot of the time that they can be hit or miss. They often feel like they've lost a lot of the magic created when the developers of the era had to work with the limitations of the hardware of the era. Pixel art on those old CRT's vs pixel art on new games with modern displays is a good example, when working on those old CRTs you just had to create your art in a specific way that just doesn't look good when you slap it onto a modern OLED display. Even the modern pixel art that's designed FOR the new displays just doesn't quite capture the same feel. I recently played Panzer Dragoon Saga on original Saturn hardware and I have to say that was one of the most profound experiences playing an RPG I've had in my life and playing it on the Saturn itself was a big part of it. It doesn't help that some of the porting studios sometimes just do shoddy work. Aspyr, for one, can be hit or miss. The Deus Ex remake that's coming out, from what I've seen, is particularly egregious. Just based on the footage I've seen the artistry of the game is completely ruined. On the flipside - Nightdive doesn't miss. They're the only ones that I will buy their remasters without researching the port quality because they just "get it". The Nightdive remasters of Turok, System Shock, Rise of the Triad, Blood and even some of the more niche ones like Powerslave and Killing time have all been fantastic. Even their full remake of the original System Shock is phenomenal.
- garciansmith 11mo ago
  Panzer Dragoon Saga is a great game: some cool gameplay elements that later games didn't really ever seem to pick up to my knowledge. Really tight too, not long and grindy like so many JRPGs in the '90s. The solitary main character means it skips a lot of the RPG-with-several-party-members tropes too. It's too bad it never got a rerelease of some sort to make it more accessible to people (plus it was stupidly rare even when it was released; Sega even put out baffling magazine ads about how hard it was to actually buy), though as you point out so many of those are terrible anyhow. Definitely agree with you about CRTs. I wish I had the room for one. It's fun to use a MiSTer hooked up to one and a modern flatscreen at the same time to compare.
  - 11mo ago
wicket 11mo ago
> Game Arts subsequently ported Grandia to the PlayStation, dropping it in Japan in the summer of 1999. When I grew up, "dropping" something meant "excluding" it; you might drop a player from a team or a feature from a product to exclude it. It turns out that Grandia did actually release in Japan for the PlayStation in 1999. Am I the only one who struggles with this new, fangled definition of the word "drop"?
- gilrain 11mo ago
  It’s a natural extension of the older term. “A [whatever] dropped right in front of me” conveys the original and new meanings just fine. “A [whatever] was dropped in Japan. Where is [whatever]?” “In Japan, for one.”
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    I thought it was from some music subculture. I first encountered it in the context of albums, around the early or mid 2010s. I think it’s kinda lame in its escaped-containment form, and am surprised it’s been one of those things that stuck around as long as it has, but would place it low on my list of language gripes, personally.
- garciansmith 11mo ago
  I feel like I heard it used in that way since at least the '90s.
- ThrowawayR2 11mo ago
  Try thinking of it in the sense of "airdrop", which is not a new usage of the word "drop".
triwats 11mo ago
My sister picked this up from a random supermarket in 1998/1999, and I sank 100s of hours into watching her play it through. She does this thing where she wants to start games over and over again from the start, play them for a bunch of hours, then start it again. The soundtrack and the challenge of beating the game at that age was wonderful. I beat it a few years ago for the first time all the way through again. Really enjoyed it, but never played the sequel. I find a lot of modern games unisnpiring. Too much focus is on creating a general great game, rather than focusing on story / mechanics. Thanks for the post!
- lukan 11mo ago
  I only know the second part of grandia, but it is great! (There does not seem a story connection, though)
  - Izkata 11mo ago
    There's a fan theory that Grandia II is a prequel to Grandia set in the far, far, far distant past. I think the main basis is from one of the final scenes in Grandia II, involving two people with wings - possibly be very first Icarians (Grandia's ancient nonhuman civilization).
- qingcharles 11mo ago
  The soundtrack to Grandia lives rent free in my head. I've not heard it in 20 years but I can still play it back.
  - triwats 11mo ago
    Happily found out on Monday that it is available on Spotify!!111 Sent it to said sister. Strange how something can exit your life then re-enter it heavily in the same week (soundtrack, and now HN).
    - qingcharles 11mo ago
      Thank you! I think I had this on CD decades ago that I found in a comic book store. I just went and found the whole soundtrack online. I found this cool live orchestra version too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4fUdY1PGhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4fUdY1PGhY
AdmiralAsshat 11mo ago
The site appears to be a Sega Saturn fansite, so obviously they have a slight bent towards playing it on the Saturn. But for anyone else who's interested in trying the game, the PS1 version was fine, and is more readily available on modern consoles.
- grimgrin 11mo ago
  in that vein, https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/grandia-hd-collection-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/grandia-hd-collec...
  - qingcharles 11mo ago
    It's bad though, isn't it? I saw some videos saying they did a really low effort job on it.
    - grimgrin 11mo ago
      maybe, but the blog post mentions it, sorta: "Additionally, the first Grandia was recently remade for modern consoles with the release of the Grandia HD Collection."
- wffurr 11mo ago
  They really didn't cover at all why this game is better specifically on Saturn than PS1 or any modern remake / emulator.
  - zoeysmithe 11mo ago
    Shrug, if I blog about the joys of driving down route 66 in a '57 Chevy, I really dont have any obligation to give equal time to what its like in a '57 Packard. Its a Saturn fan site, so its just going to be Saturn-centric.
    - wffurr 11mo ago
      You could spend a little time singing the praises of your '57 Chevy and what makes it particularly joyful to you.
devinprater 11mo ago
Thank goodness for emulation. With OCR, and now AI screenshot descriptions, I can know what menu I'm in, what menu option is selected, dialog on the screen, stuff like that. Case and point, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the Playstation 2. On original hardware, I had no idea what I was getting when I'd finish a battle in story mode. Now, with NetherSX2 on my phone, after a battle, I can have TalkBack describe the screen, listen to the description of what I won, press B to exit the description, press A to advance the game screen, read the next thing I won, and so on. Of course, the app has to have an accessibility element that TalkBack can grab onto to describe, so ironically, Retroarch doesn't work for this, and either does Lemuroid, but I mean it's a start, and hopefully one day TalkBack can grab the entire screen for a screenshot without needing an element onscreen to latch onto.
- anthk 11mo ago
  Dragon Ball it's one of these games where for the blind it's much better to be played in a MUD (and some of them describe scenes in an incredible way) that you will get almost the same as a sighted reader with the manga. Parries, locks, grabs, ki beam exchanges, magical techniques... everything it's there.
- KolibriFly 11mo ago
  Emulation isn't just about convenience or preservation, it can literally unlock experiences for people who were previously shut out
rootsudo 11mo ago
I find it a bit of a course - Grandia, released on sega saturn, remastered due to the saturn failure. Grandia 2, released on Dreamcast, released on PS2 due to Dreamcast failure. Same issues for the remakes, the ps2 works great but when compared to the dreamcast there is obvious music/graphics artifacts.
jerf 11mo ago
I haven't played the first one but I played Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I think it's still my favorite battle system in a JRPG to date. Not only does it have the obvious details you can see on a YouTube playthrough, but higher-end play with it also requires managing positioning, which is easy to miss as an option at all in the menus, or to think it has no purpose. A low-level challenge run would probably be a lot of fun. Unfortunately in my casual playthrough I accidentally broke the combat system and by the end of the game nothing was a challenge; as with many other games there are "resistances" and "vulnerabilities" but also as with most non-Shin Megami Tensei games of the era, they aren't really strong enough or frequent enough to matter. I just pumped all my upgrades into Fire upgrades until eventually my routine end-game battle was one character to wipe all the enemies in one move, move to next battle. You could easily pump an elemental bonus enough to overwhelm the resistances the enemies had. More resistances and immunities distributed around would have helped prevent a degenerate strategy. And of all the battle systems to have a degenerate strategy for, this one hurts the most because it is otherwise so good. (Sadly, Grandia III was never completed. It was released... but it was never completed. The game as shipped has visible gaping holes in it, which is sad because what is there was quite good.)
- thrownaway85 11mo ago
  Im probably a fool for posting this but this thread and these responses warm my heart. It's good to see so many people were affected by this era of gaming from Sega the same way that I was. The battle system in the later SMT games, especially after 3 is one of the best turn based systems I've ever played. It was a refinement of FFXs in so many ways. It encouraged you to "break" it as it were. Then there's games like Grandia 2... And Shenmue. God, I love Shenmue these days. The first one is brilliant in so many ways I didn't recognize when I played it when it came out. Absolutely wonderful game. The track that plays when Ryo and Guizhang fight the Mad Angels at the dock, "Earth and Sea", takes me back. For me, it's the most perfect Christmas game that Sega ever made
- jajuuka 11mo ago
  My first experience with Grandia was Grandia II as well but on PS2. I ended up getting the PC version as well, which at the time was fairly novel to see JRPG's on PC. Grandia II is still one of my nostalgic favorites. As you mentioned the typical turn based combat with positioning was a fun addition that could change your combat experience each time. Was like an evolution of the Chrono Trigger combat system.
haolez 11mo ago
I think Grandia was the biggest case in my life of a game that starts slow and finishes in a very high note. Crazy experience. Some unique story traits. It probably didn't age well, but I have fond memories :)
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KolibriFly 11mo ago
А strong reminder of why emulation and fan translation efforts matter. Without them, this version of Grandia would remain lost to time
drooopy 11mo ago
Grandia's battle system is the best turn based battle system in a jrpg, ever. Also Grandia >> Final Fantasy VII
jeppester 11mo ago
I got my hands on Grandia because one of my friends' younger brother thought it was Digimon and begged their mom to buy it. Being 10 years old or so and not knowing much English yet (being Danes), we were pretty clueless about how to progress, but eventually we succeeded and got pretty far into the game. The game is about a great adventure, but for us it was also an adventure into the English language and a new type of game that we'd never tried before. I miss those experiences! Later I went back to it and completed it in my teens. The timing of this article is a bit fun since I'm currently playing it for the third time with my son, translating it on the go. It's awesome to see my "friends" also becoming his friends, and the game is holding up quite well and keeping him interested. Apart from the charming characters, the visual variety is really good with each town having it's own style. There's also hardly a boring moment (admittedly using fast forward for the battles, which otherwise otherwise a bit repetitive later on), there's a new story beat every half hour or so to keep everything fresh. The combat is also quite good, although easy if you have a bit of slightest experience with these kinds of games.
kbenson 11mo ago
This point is driven home by Justin’s insatiable desire to uncover the mystery of his Spirit Stone, and the ancient Angelou civilization. My mind immediately jumped to the idea that this is a play on words for the ancient Maya civilizations, and Maya Angelou. Apparently I wasn't the only one.[1] 1: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/197483-grandia/53620555 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/197483-grandia/53620555
tmtvl 11mo ago
Grandia 2 on the PS2 was a lot of fun, it displaced Legend of Dragoon for my favourite battle system in a jRPG. Vagrant Story and Parasite Eve are also pretty neat, but I prefer Grandia 2 and Legend of Dragoon's party-based systems over the single character-based systems of those two.
test6554 11mo ago
The “nostalgia” of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
chromehearts 11mo ago
I never heard of the game but the visuals look so good. It reminds me a bit of Octopath Traveller

184 points by tosh 11mo ago

I am determined to play this on Saturn at some point. I had the Playstation version as a kid and I didn't notice any of the flaws, it was just a brilliant game with a much more interesting and fun battle system than Final Fantasy. But now I see all the mismatched textures which have been ported right up to the modern HD "remasters". Great to see that there's an English patch. Christmas is coming up..

tosh 11mo ago
It would be great to have the saturn version + translation as well as the improved movie sequences maybe there is a way to port them using the saturns mpeg add-on (?) otoh probably fine to watch them on youtube in parallel

TavsiE9s 11mo ago

I've tried so many times to play the classic JRPGs only to be met by loooooooong cutscenes before even allowing me to control the characters. Grandia is unfortunately no exception: 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes.

jamesbelchamber 11mo ago
This is very frustrating, but I'm not sure it's a problem only with classic JRPGs - recently I sat down to play Bayonetta 3 and it had a similar problem (along with.. others). FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes?
- ozbonus 11mo ago
  Most of the Final Fantasy games have been like that, which is why I've (most of the time) been a fan since since FF4/2. I can't remember how many times I've been turned off by a game when it starts with the protagonist being woken up by his mom, followed by endless wandering around town.
- FieryMechanic 11mo ago
  It the same with Spiderman: Miles Morales. There are some cut scenes you cannot skip. Worse they they are cut scenes that don't actually affect the main story arc. This makes replays painful as the story isn't particular interesting and in some places actually quite nauseating to watch (Miles is constantly conflicted on very straight forward things), but the game play itself is quite fun. I've looked for a mod for this game where you can skip all cut-scenes but it doesn't seem to exist.
- kokada 11mo ago
  > FF7 really had this nailed - flashy, mysterious cut-scene to first battle in, what, 3 minutes? Except when you use the Knights of the Round summon, then you go grab a coffee while waiting for the animation to finish :).
jeppester 11mo ago
Play the game in an emulator that has a shortcut for fast-forward. It makes a world of difference when it comes to "enduring" overly long cut-scenes, load screens, repeated spell animations, endless combat encounters, etc. I wish modern games would have the same feature!
- TavsiE9s 11mo ago
  Fair point, I was playing on MiSTER.
nottorp 11mo ago
> 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly Mmm played any Kojima games? :)
- FieryMechanic 11mo ago
  You can typically skip most dialogue and cut-scenes in the MGS games. Also quite a number of the cut-scenes are interactive and can actually help you in game play (codec numbers are show, clues etc). MGS-4 though is has ridiculous cutscene length.
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    MGS4 would be like 10% shorter if you had a mod that just cut every line in a cutscene that’s someone repeating someone else’s previous line, but as a question.
    - FieryMechanic 11mo ago
      I never finished it. So I wouldn't know.
- TavsiE9s 11mo ago
  Nope, MGS was big on Playstation when I was growing up and the whole stealth gameplay does not appeal to me.
  - ethagnawl 11mo ago
    I haven't seriously tried playing it again since it came out but it didn't appeal to me either and my friends all thought I'd lost it. I also remember the clerk at Electronics Boutique being gobsmacked when I wanted to return it. I do generally find stealthiness to be engaging and great fun _as a component of game play_ but as the main draw and, especially, from the jump I just found it to be frustrating and annoying. Maybe I'd feel different these days, though. I'll try it again some day.
kouteiheika 11mo ago
> 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes. Genuinely curious - if you don't care about the story then why play an RPG? When you're speedrunning - sure, skip all of the cutscenes, but when you're playing casually - why would you want to do that?
- opan 11mo ago
  I agree with your take here that he should care about the cut scenes/story if bothering to play, but this has gotten especially bad in newer games where they try to shove you right into the game before you can tweak settings. I never played through Bravely Default on 3DS because the opening scene used the English dub instead of the original audio, and I had to skip it to access the settings and change languages, then there was no way to rewatch that opening scene. I've similarly avoided their other games like Octopath Traveler as I suspect they have the same issue. It seems like an accessibility issue. I don't think they should ever stop you from getting to the settings first thing. I am not entertained by them trying to be overly cinematic. I don't think it would kill them to wait until you hit "start new game".
- xandrius 11mo ago
  I could ask you a similar question: why play an RPG if you don't care about playing? Go watch a movie. The point of many posters, I imagine, is that there is too much non-playing parts all at once, it's not strictly about them not being skippable. This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.
  - ThrowawayR2 11mo ago
    Unlike a movie, when done well, the combat/grinding add to player engagement because it places the player in direct charge of the characters' growth from a nobody to a legend. You can't get that from a movie.
  - JoshTriplett 11mo ago
    > This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save. Some games have started to get this right, either by making cutscenes you've seen skippable, or by just automatically skipping straight to the battle if you've already been through it once. I suspect one reason it didn't happen on older games was the need to explicitly save, rather than autosaving.
FieryMechanic 11mo ago
It often gets worse. I stopped playing Final Fantasy X (on the PS2) because there was a boss battle where there was a 10 minute un-skippable cutscene between each stage of the battle and if you died you had to re-watch each one.
- TavsiE9s 11mo ago
  I think at that point I'd call it and mark that one as "finished it".
  - FieryMechanic 11mo ago
    I don't think I will ever play a JRPG again. In fact it was the last one. These days I want my games to be actual games.
    - bigstrat2003 11mo ago
      Look, complaining about unskippable cutscenes is one thing. Everyone has that complaint about FFX, I even know what boss you're talking about because it's so infamous. But saying that JRPGs aren't "actual games" is ridiculous. They are games, whether or not you personally enjoy them.
      - FieryMechanic 11mo ago
        I am not saying they aren't games. What I am saying is that I enjoy stuff now that has basically no plot and let's me get on with the game. Half of Final Fantasy X (and I think a little later they released a movie both for Final Fantasy VII and the standalone movie the Spirit Within) was Square showing off how good their CGI animation was, which at the time was very good. CGI cut scenes went from "this is a cool thing I see between levels" on the PS1 to "this is a tedious interruption".
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  FFX’s balance is awful if you go straight from point to point and don’t take some long grinding breaks. You’ll hit exactly the kinds of boss-walls you mention, and yeah, the cutscene placement is simply abusive. Last couple plays I’ve used zig-zag approach when traveling through random encounter zones, effectively ~doubling distance traveled, and encounters. Stretches those out, but removes most of the separate, dedicated grinding. (Not defending the game design that makes this necessary, mind you)
erfgh 11mo ago
JRPGs are like movies that you can interact with. If you don't enjoy the cutscenes then it will be a drag. I did play FFVII when it came out and I was extremely impressed and couldn't get enough of it. But I could never get into other JRPGs later.
lanfeust6 11mo ago
Yes, and for as much as that's an annoyance, games are far worse now. This has infected everything AAA, not just JRPGs. See: the God of War reboot, Tomb Raider, etc. Narrative is one thing, but at least with 90s JRPGs you could go through dialog on the field screen at your own pace, generally. It doesn't take long to get to the action.

spondyl 11mo ago

I was just about to go to bed and what a surprise seeing Grandia trending #1 on Hacker News of all places. For myself, Grandia is one of those games that was part of my childhood so despite having flaws, it transcends ratings in a sense. It was the first game I ever got on the first home console I ever had, the PlayStation 1. I would only have been about 9 or 10(?) (31 now) and the intro to the game is burned into my mind because I never had a memory card for quite some time so I'd replay the opening hour or two over and over until it was time for dinner or bed. Eventually I got a memory card and my next entry was Digimon World 2003 and I wonder to what extent that lead to me being interested in computers generally and ultimately becoming a developer as a day job. To this day, I've still yet to finish Grandia. I picked up the HD Collection on Switch and I'm about halfway. Every time I go on vacation (or particularly during the Christmas holidays), I'll progress a bit. There's no real rush though in that once it's over, it's over. I don't really tend to replay titles, particularly long RPGs. It's also kind of weird actually seeing the rest of the game too. For the longest time, I had no idea where the story was going. I've still mostly managed to avoid spoilers as well so I conceptually don't know where the story ends up which is nice, given years of reading Wikipedia synopsis only to regret it later. > A total joy… but one that demands an intense time commitment. A player Justin’s age surely has the time I found this part funny because I was Justin's age when I first played Grandia and never found the time then let alone now

triwats 11mo ago
Nice comment! How is the HD collection? Hmm, I think the flaws are what generally make games. I played thousands of hours on a bunch of Quake 3 engine games (Q3:A, RTCW, ET)... If you moved your mouse in a certain way you would go faster, and as a result there were a class of players that were speed demons. These flaws are often ground out now, and I think that limits community-driven creativity. Especially since most games are impossible to mod now. Eventually we found ways to limit this (limit fps in competitive configs as an e.g.) to prevent those with the best PCs have an unfair advantage.
- vikingerik 11mo ago
  I agree, on where the flaws often make the games. My example of that was Heroes of Might and Magic 2 vs 3. 3 is the legendary one that everybody remembers, but I actually liked 2 better. Sure, 3 is far superior for balance and AI and content... but for me, the unbalance of 2 was its charm. Trying to win with the underpowered knight castle, or against a far superior force with tactics like the blind spell that the AI wouldn't counter... that was the fun of the more primitive Heroes 2 and wasn't quite the same in the more developed 3. Less development in a game can actually make for more fun factor.

robin_reala 11mo ago

Worth pointing out that a Grandia 1 & 2 HD bundle came out earlier this year: https://www.grandiahd.com/ https://www.grandiahd.com/

qingcharles 11mo ago
Are they garbage? All the videos I've seen say the remasters are dogshit and ruin the game :(
- robin_reala 11mo ago
  Honestly, I’ve not tried them. PS Store has the unremastered Grandia 1 available, which is what I’ve been playing.
- butlike 11mo ago
  Just got it last night (after reading this post). I'm 2 hours into Grandia 1 and having fun FWIW. Never really heard of Grandia before this though, so YMMV. Bought on Switch
- yesb 11mo ago
  They're fine but they did basically the bare minimum effort to release them. Some people hate the blur effect they put on the sprites in the first game. There are patches to remove it for the PC version but not the consoles

Marazan 11mo ago

Grandia is a beautiful game. Both visually and from a story telling perspective. A simple, sweet coming of age tale told without cynicism. Justin, Sue and Feena feel like old friends.

robin_reala 11mo ago

Site’s currently down, here’s a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20251209110317/https://www.segasaturnshiro.com/2025/11/27/the-joy-of-playing-grandia-on-sega-saturn/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251209110317/https://www.segas...

sentrysapper 11mo ago

looks like the host is getting too many requests, anyone know of a mirror?

nticompass 11mo ago

I never played the 1st Grandia, but I had Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I absolutely loved that game. I'll admit that I was never the best with (J)RPGs and never played it for that long per-session as a kid, but I did eventually finish it. Though, it did take many years to finally get to the end and finish the game, but I enjoyed it! (I also enjoyed Evolution 2: Far Off Promise).

hnthrowaway0328 11mo ago

Oh I rememeber in one of the games, one of the girls would say ganba ganba something at the end of each battle. I didn't understand it back then but I loved it.

pnut 11mo ago

I read that as "playing Grandma" and thought that was a pretty clever game concept.

komali2 11mo ago

I've been getting more and more into retro gaming lately, and something that really made it click for me is leveraging shaders (or overlays) to simulate period-accurate displays. For a Sega Saturn, that'd be some kind of CRT. The art direction in these games are designed to take advantage of the quirks of the CRT, and often look significantly better on a CRT. Noodle just did a decent video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI I strongly recommend anyone getting into retro gaming, try some CRT shaders (or lcd ones for portables)!

Forgeties79 11mo ago
Or get a CRT if you live in a populous area, have the space, and a strong back! It’s gotten harder since Covid when they were seemingly everywhere, but if you’re lucky you’ll find a good curbed unit. Gave my buddy a 24” trinitron recently I just couldn’t keep around anymore and he is having a blast playing his PS2 on it with component cables. FFX really sings as do racing games. That being said there are a lot of emulators and little pieces of hardware now that simulate it really well, which is a very viable option, especially when space is at a premium (or if your poor pet hates the whine of a CRT like my dog did ha)
- komali2 11mo ago
  Hah, I wish I had the space for this and original hardware! For me it's hard to justify the space and cost when I can just have all the videogames ever made on a couple SSDs and run them on emulators. Then again, I seem to have accidentally started a small GB/GBA cart collection...
  - Forgeties79 11mo ago
    it would be a terrible shame if you learned about all the various ways you can mod a gameboy

throwaway613745 11mo ago

I almost always try to play on original hardware on an appropriate display (CRT) whenever I can. The deluge of remasters and remakes we've been getting can be nice - but I find a lot of the time that they can be hit or miss. They often feel like they've lost a lot of the magic created when the developers of the era had to work with the limitations of the hardware of the era. Pixel art on those old CRT's vs pixel art on new games with modern displays is a good example, when working on those old CRTs you just had to create your art in a specific way that just doesn't look good when you slap it onto a modern OLED display. Even the modern pixel art that's designed FOR the new displays just doesn't quite capture the same feel. I recently played Panzer Dragoon Saga on original Saturn hardware and I have to say that was one of the most profound experiences playing an RPG I've had in my life and playing it on the Saturn itself was a big part of it. It doesn't help that some of the porting studios sometimes just do shoddy work. Aspyr, for one, can be hit or miss. The Deus Ex remake that's coming out, from what I've seen, is particularly egregious. Just based on the footage I've seen the artistry of the game is completely ruined. On the flipside - Nightdive doesn't miss. They're the only ones that I will buy their remasters without researching the port quality because they just "get it". The Nightdive remasters of Turok, System Shock, Rise of the Triad, Blood and even some of the more niche ones like Powerslave and Killing time have all been fantastic. Even their full remake of the original System Shock is phenomenal.

garciansmith 11mo ago
Panzer Dragoon Saga is a great game: some cool gameplay elements that later games didn't really ever seem to pick up to my knowledge. Really tight too, not long and grindy like so many JRPGs in the '90s. The solitary main character means it skips a lot of the RPG-with-several-party-members tropes too. It's too bad it never got a rerelease of some sort to make it more accessible to people (plus it was stupidly rare even when it was released; Sega even put out baffling magazine ads about how hard it was to actually buy), though as you point out so many of those are terrible anyhow. Definitely agree with you about CRTs. I wish I had the room for one. It's fun to use a MiSTer hooked up to one and a modern flatscreen at the same time to compare.
- 11mo ago

wicket 11mo ago

> Game Arts subsequently ported Grandia to the PlayStation, dropping it in Japan in the summer of 1999. When I grew up, "dropping" something meant "excluding" it; you might drop a player from a team or a feature from a product to exclude it. It turns out that Grandia did actually release in Japan for the PlayStation in 1999. Am I the only one who struggles with this new, fangled definition of the word "drop"?

gilrain 11mo ago
It’s a natural extension of the older term. “A [whatever] dropped right in front of me” conveys the original and new meanings just fine. “A [whatever] was dropped in Japan. Where is [whatever]?” “In Japan, for one.”
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  I thought it was from some music subculture. I first encountered it in the context of albums, around the early or mid 2010s. I think it’s kinda lame in its escaped-containment form, and am surprised it’s been one of those things that stuck around as long as it has, but would place it low on my list of language gripes, personally.
garciansmith 11mo ago
I feel like I heard it used in that way since at least the '90s.
ThrowawayR2 11mo ago
Try thinking of it in the sense of "airdrop", which is not a new usage of the word "drop".

triwats 11mo ago

My sister picked this up from a random supermarket in 1998/1999, and I sank 100s of hours into watching her play it through. She does this thing where she wants to start games over and over again from the start, play them for a bunch of hours, then start it again. The soundtrack and the challenge of beating the game at that age was wonderful. I beat it a few years ago for the first time all the way through again. Really enjoyed it, but never played the sequel. I find a lot of modern games unisnpiring. Too much focus is on creating a general great game, rather than focusing on story / mechanics. Thanks for the post!

lukan 11mo ago
I only know the second part of grandia, but it is great! (There does not seem a story connection, though)
- Izkata 11mo ago
  There's a fan theory that Grandia II is a prequel to Grandia set in the far, far, far distant past. I think the main basis is from one of the final scenes in Grandia II, involving two people with wings - possibly be very first Icarians (Grandia's ancient nonhuman civilization).
qingcharles 11mo ago
The soundtrack to Grandia lives rent free in my head. I've not heard it in 20 years but I can still play it back.
- triwats 11mo ago
  Happily found out on Monday that it is available on Spotify!!111 Sent it to said sister. Strange how something can exit your life then re-enter it heavily in the same week (soundtrack, and now HN).
  - qingcharles 11mo ago
    Thank you! I think I had this on CD decades ago that I found in a comic book store. I just went and found the whole soundtrack online. I found this cool live orchestra version too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4fUdY1PGhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4fUdY1PGhY

AdmiralAsshat 11mo ago

The site appears to be a Sega Saturn fansite, so obviously they have a slight bent towards playing it on the Saturn. But for anyone else who's interested in trying the game, the PS1 version was fine, and is more readily available on modern consoles.

grimgrin 11mo ago
in that vein, https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/grandia-hd-collection-switch/ https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/grandia-hd-collec...
- qingcharles 11mo ago
  It's bad though, isn't it? I saw some videos saying they did a really low effort job on it.
  - grimgrin 11mo ago
    maybe, but the blog post mentions it, sorta: "Additionally, the first Grandia was recently remade for modern consoles with the release of the Grandia HD Collection."
wffurr 11mo ago
They really didn't cover at all why this game is better specifically on Saturn than PS1 or any modern remake / emulator.
- zoeysmithe 11mo ago
  Shrug, if I blog about the joys of driving down route 66 in a '57 Chevy, I really dont have any obligation to give equal time to what its like in a '57 Packard. Its a Saturn fan site, so its just going to be Saturn-centric.
  - wffurr 11mo ago
    You could spend a little time singing the praises of your '57 Chevy and what makes it particularly joyful to you.

devinprater 11mo ago

Thank goodness for emulation. With OCR, and now AI screenshot descriptions, I can know what menu I'm in, what menu option is selected, dialog on the screen, stuff like that. Case and point, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the Playstation 2. On original hardware, I had no idea what I was getting when I'd finish a battle in story mode. Now, with NetherSX2 on my phone, after a battle, I can have TalkBack describe the screen, listen to the description of what I won, press B to exit the description, press A to advance the game screen, read the next thing I won, and so on. Of course, the app has to have an accessibility element that TalkBack can grab onto to describe, so ironically, Retroarch doesn't work for this, and either does Lemuroid, but I mean it's a start, and hopefully one day TalkBack can grab the entire screen for a screenshot without needing an element onscreen to latch onto.

anthk 11mo ago
Dragon Ball it's one of these games where for the blind it's much better to be played in a MUD (and some of them describe scenes in an incredible way) that you will get almost the same as a sighted reader with the manga. Parries, locks, grabs, ki beam exchanges, magical techniques... everything it's there.
KolibriFly 11mo ago
Emulation isn't just about convenience or preservation, it can literally unlock experiences for people who were previously shut out

rootsudo 11mo ago

I find it a bit of a course - Grandia, released on sega saturn, remastered due to the saturn failure. Grandia 2, released on Dreamcast, released on PS2 due to Dreamcast failure. Same issues for the remakes, the ps2 works great but when compared to the dreamcast there is obvious music/graphics artifacts.

jerf 11mo ago

I haven't played the first one but I played Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I think it's still my favorite battle system in a JRPG to date. Not only does it have the obvious details you can see on a YouTube playthrough, but higher-end play with it also requires managing positioning, which is easy to miss as an option at all in the menus, or to think it has no purpose. A low-level challenge run would probably be a lot of fun. Unfortunately in my casual playthrough I accidentally broke the combat system and by the end of the game nothing was a challenge; as with many other games there are "resistances" and "vulnerabilities" but also as with most non-Shin Megami Tensei games of the era, they aren't really strong enough or frequent enough to matter. I just pumped all my upgrades into Fire upgrades until eventually my routine end-game battle was one character to wipe all the enemies in one move, move to next battle. You could easily pump an elemental bonus enough to overwhelm the resistances the enemies had. More resistances and immunities distributed around would have helped prevent a degenerate strategy. And of all the battle systems to have a degenerate strategy for, this one hurts the most because it is otherwise so good. (Sadly, Grandia III was never completed. It was released... but it was never completed. The game as shipped has visible gaping holes in it, which is sad because what is there was quite good.)

thrownaway85 11mo ago
Im probably a fool for posting this but this thread and these responses warm my heart. It's good to see so many people were affected by this era of gaming from Sega the same way that I was. The battle system in the later SMT games, especially after 3 is one of the best turn based systems I've ever played. It was a refinement of FFXs in so many ways. It encouraged you to "break" it as it were. Then there's games like Grandia 2... And Shenmue. God, I love Shenmue these days. The first one is brilliant in so many ways I didn't recognize when I played it when it came out. Absolutely wonderful game. The track that plays when Ryo and Guizhang fight the Mad Angels at the dock, "Earth and Sea", takes me back. For me, it's the most perfect Christmas game that Sega ever made
jajuuka 11mo ago
My first experience with Grandia was Grandia II as well but on PS2. I ended up getting the PC version as well, which at the time was fairly novel to see JRPG's on PC. Grandia II is still one of my nostalgic favorites. As you mentioned the typical turn based combat with positioning was a fun addition that could change your combat experience each time. Was like an evolution of the Chrono Trigger combat system.

haolez 11mo ago

I think Grandia was the biggest case in my life of a game that starts slow and finishes in a very high note. Crazy experience. Some unique story traits. It probably didn't age well, but I have fond memories :)

deleted 11mo ago

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KolibriFly 11mo ago

А strong reminder of why emulation and fan translation efforts matter. Without them, this version of Grandia would remain lost to time

drooopy 11mo ago

Grandia's battle system is the best turn based battle system in a jrpg, ever. Also Grandia >> Final Fantasy VII

jeppester 11mo ago

I got my hands on Grandia because one of my friends' younger brother thought it was Digimon and begged their mom to buy it. Being 10 years old or so and not knowing much English yet (being Danes), we were pretty clueless about how to progress, but eventually we succeeded and got pretty far into the game. The game is about a great adventure, but for us it was also an adventure into the English language and a new type of game that we'd never tried before. I miss those experiences! Later I went back to it and completed it in my teens. The timing of this article is a bit fun since I'm currently playing it for the third time with my son, translating it on the go. It's awesome to see my "friends" also becoming his friends, and the game is holding up quite well and keeping him interested. Apart from the charming characters, the visual variety is really good with each town having it's own style. There's also hardly a boring moment (admittedly using fast forward for the battles, which otherwise otherwise a bit repetitive later on), there's a new story beat every half hour or so to keep everything fresh. The combat is also quite good, although easy if you have a bit of slightest experience with these kinds of games.

kbenson 11mo ago

This point is driven home by Justin’s insatiable desire to uncover the mystery of his Spirit Stone, and the ancient Angelou civilization. My mind immediately jumped to the idea that this is a play on words for the ancient Maya civilizations, and Maya Angelou. Apparently I wasn't the only one.[1] 1: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/197483-grandia/53620555 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/197483-grandia/53620555

tmtvl 11mo ago

Grandia 2 on the PS2 was a lot of fun, it displaced Legend of Dragoon for my favourite battle system in a jRPG. Vagrant Story and Parasite Eve are also pretty neat, but I prefer Grandia 2 and Legend of Dragoon's party-based systems over the single character-based systems of those two.

test6554 11mo ago

The “nostalgia” of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn

chromehearts 11mo ago

I never heard of the game but the visuals look so good. It reminds me a bit of Octopath Traveller