grandia hd collection

grandia hd collection is the remasterd port for the first two grandia games. 

Like in the final fantasy games, each entry takes place in its own seperate world. 

The active real time battle system was pretty fun. 

In grandia 2 you use skill points to unlock new skills in grandia 1 its keep attacking with a certain weapon to boost stats. 

The story itself is pretty much another average run of the mil story seen and done countless times before also with a side of forced in melodrama too here and there despite its supposed lighthearted nature. 

The characters range from average and forgettable to insufferable and annoying. 

Lilly Justins mother is pretty much no different to the mothers of assasniation classroom your lie in april and a silent voice and its honestly amazing how we went from that cancerous era of cancerous anime to now maria no dazai and do you love your mom and her 2 hit multi target attacks and spy x family now. 

Also Justin is pretty impulsive and thinks before he acts way too many times throuhgout the game. 

The epliogue of the game its borderline gainax like shit with so many undeveloped plotpoints over what really happened next with other party members being dusted away for only for focus on justin feena and sue and not the other party members too. 

Ryudoo in Grandia 2 is basically just another carbon copy of the nowadays infamous squal from ff8 to put it simply. Theres pretty much nothing about him at all i like he’s just so whiny and cringey he pretty much comes off as the typical user on predit snarky obnoxious hypocritical holier than thou pretenious loser to put it simply.  

The dialogue and script and comedy its just incredibly bad and i never thought a t rated game of all things would censor alcohol as “coffee”.  

Its also really bizzare that grandia 3 wasn’t ported over either probably due to legal reasons with square being the publisher of that game and not even the Japan only spin off of grandia wasn’t included either. 

The art of the game was good but the same couldn’t be said for hte blurry visuals and also oddly poorly resoluted graphics in its hd conversion. The 3d graphics for grandia 2 its generally ok but I've seen better on games like skies of arcadia or ff7. 

The navigation on where to go next was kind of flimsy and inaccurate too and you have to have dinner at Justins house the seagull to get a reminder on what to do next which is pretty archaic even by 90s jrpg standards. After that you got to have a good memory to remember what to do next if you are in a inn. 

At least recovery and saving is free there. 

In grandia 2 the compass is somewhat more accurate and gives you a general guide on where to go next to an extent. 

Even square enix remasters back then, were pretty up to par like Chrono Trigger on the ds having all the content of the ps1 port. 

Don't expect skip/fast forward stuff or any kind of easier accessibility stuff for the game its pretty much just a mostly straight forward port from older console to new gen. 

The game did had some technical hiccups when it came out, but for the most part lot of it was patched but even still this you can tell needed some fixing before it was out fully. 

The dungeons in the game could be hit or miss, some you may find yourself having to use gamefaqs for help others like in grandia 2 its pretty straight forward for the most part at least. 

Just the option to change between Japanese and English. 

The music for the games was pretty good. 

Overall it was an average at best port of an average at best series. 

It gets 3 out of 5 stars. 

At the very very bottom of the least option, at least i could say i was able to play this game long with baten kaitos and lunar in my lifetime can’t really be said the same for earthbound einhandler or racing lagoon or many other jp only vns and jrpgs from the 90s and 2000s but at least i did got to get around to this thankfully.