"It's an HD remaster, not a port"
So you are calling running all the textures through a filter for Grandia I ,an "HD remaster" ?
Not even the menu portraits are spared from the filter. (With glitches at the edges of those too)
Using an upscaling filter as a basis is fine because it can shave off a lot of work. But it's *never* good enough on it's own to be shippable. You have to actually take the time and put some human work in to clean it up.
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/doing-an-hd-remake-the-right-way/
*The dithering used on original textures is still clearly visible.
*The Audio encoding could clearly use work. They have much higher quality versions available to use from soundtrack CDs if they wanted enough to do some work to use them. I don't remember if the sample rate of Grandia I's soundtrack is primarily to blame for the muffled mix on the original release (Probably as it was for every version of II), but just having a 44.1khz source makes a huge difference. The encoding though in Grandia I here sounds better than GII's horrible compression, low sample rate mess as shown.
And just for reference, Grandia II has some of GI's music present in the game files. For shits and giggles when I made my GII PC Music mod I replaced some of those songs too.
Here's the battle theme from my encode
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DCzJmxv49YU-JoQiaqFKFoqY739tgNC5/view?usp=sharing
Compare it to the footage here. Notice how much the high-end of the mix is missing. Listen to the Hi-hats.
*There are audio playback glitches during the intro. Not surprised.
*There is scaling errors on the sprites as the camera pans in and out. (Part of the character sprites clip together)
*The only real tangible hand made upgrades are the perspective correct texturing/depth buffer, higher rendering resolution and the high resolution bitmap font (Which stands out against all the upscaled assets)
If this isn't "Just a port" these things should all be fixed. If all the game data is left out in the open without being encrypted like GII Anniversary Edition was on PC I will be very tempted to work on the textures and music files myself. Much like GIIAE.
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On to Grandia II,
*The title screen is stretched. Not native widescreen. Ugh.
There are still alignment glitches with low res UI assets and a crazy mixture of higher res UI assets and low res assets. The exact opposite of Grandia I.
*In the menu the text is low res but the icons are new higher res ones. But during gameplay, Portraits are still the same low res ones used originally. During battle they use ugly smeared upscaled portraits.
But , THEN, during battles some text is a mixture of high res and low res. Consistency? What's that.
*They are still using the ultra low quality audio from the PC AE. And somehow they made it sound worse even.... ok folks. JUST for reference, compare the song played at the beginning of the Grandia II gameplay footage (linked above, the town gameplay) here to this encode I made for the AE PC release.
https://instaud.io/3O5e
There's literally no reason for the audio to be even worse than the last version of the game, space can't possibly be a real reason since it's a digital download only. And a max 500Kbs .OGG encode of the music for Grandia II only weighs in at 1.2GB for the entire soundtrack.
For anyone curious, here's how the existing AE on PC looks with a fan mod for higher quality UI assets.
(Notice it's still a mixture of low res and higher res. Something they had a great opportunity to do better here)
It will be interesting to see how they handle spells as they are FMVs and are only 4:3. I'm guessing they will stretch them. I hope there's still a 4:3 option.
It's still not clear as to whether they fixed all of the audio glitches present in the AE port and the screwed up event animation/text/audio sync.
For the unaware, Grandia II has most of it's audio split up in to lots of small little files. And they are supposed to play back sequentially, seamless so the user is never aware. As the audio is often timed to cutscene animation and text. The AE port wasn't able to port this properly, and so events will be out of sync. Animations complete too soon before audio finishes, audio doesn't play seamlessly in some instances, it will cut from one file in an audible 'pop' sound,etc.
The two biggest early examples are the opening cutscene with the music timed precisely to animation. And the church early on when you meet Elena the first time and she is supposed to stop singing before starting to talk.
They have claimed to be fixing this in a press release but we'll see.
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I have tried emailing Sickhead games and previously GungHo.
If anyone has contact with anybody working at either of these companies , please contact me though a PM.
I made a mod for Anniversary Edition (2014) on PC for Grandia II that replaces 90% of the music with higher quality 500Kbs 44.1Khz OGG encodes sourced from the soundtrack CDs. And I would love to give those files to Sickhead/GungHo to use for Grandia II. As it sounds like they have made the audio encoding even worse (Multi generational compression?). If they haven't changed the audio subsystem from that port and it still uses the same assets. It's literally a copy-paste fix.
Example audio files
https://instaud.io/3Ig1
https://instaud.io/3Ig3
(Notice the spectrograph showing the missing information just from the sample rate difference. This is real information lost)
