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[Tsubaki]

Here's an unpublished excerpt of a writeup I've done on GX. I refuse to review games until I've played them to completion, hence it's still in a draft stage. But it illustrates exactly what I'm feeling.

I would love to hear counterarguments to this because I am a Grandia whore, and I've tried to play Grandia Xtreme twice. The first time, I had to borrow a jPS2 to do it. I got fed up with the game and gave the system back. The second time, I now own a jPS2 and decided to commit myself to the game since there is a small but dedicated following to the game. If there are merits to the game I am missing, please mention them.

But as great as these systems are in improving Grandia's gameplay, it's the overall design decisions that bog the game down. There will be times where you will need to leave the dungeon in order to save. And as I said, all the enemies respawn when you go back to where you left off. So you're constantly fighting over and over again. To make matters worse, some bosses are unfair in that if you have the right equipment, you'll do fine. But if you don't, you'll only last a couple of turns. You'll probably know what to do the next time, but that means going through the dungeon again (or Geo Point, if you saved) and fighting an hour or three's worth of battles again.

To top it all off is what I believe is a game-breaking flaw. Consider this: You can choose your party. Evann has to stay constant, but you can choose 3 of the remaining 8. The problem is, your members do not gain experience if they are not in your current party. So you have to constantly switch members in order to balance your party. Your enemies are scaled to be at a level around your highest party member. Well, since Evann is always in your party, he is easily 10 levels above your other party members. That means that although he can fight normal enemies ok, your other members are struggling. Some of them can only hit enemies for 1 point of damage. Sure it keeps the game challenging at all times, but battles end up taking a long time to fight. But when you consider that bosses can also slaughter your underleveled party members, it forces you to level grind. But wait, even the weakest enemies take 5 minutes to fight, and give you minimal experience... and if you eventually level your underpowered members, Evann ends up leveling in the midst of it as well, which makes the enemies more powerful and the whole cycle repeats. Absolutely tedious.

And that's what Grandia Xtreme did. It turned what would otherwise be a great system against the player. I had to take months of break in between sessions because the boredom of going through the same dungeons over and over, as well as the irritation of fighting the same enemies over and over pushed me over into the brink of insanity.

In addition, what I do not understand is why GA/Enix couldn't implement a quicksave in dungeons. That would alleviate some frustration because we don't always have 2-4 hour chunks of time to dedicate to a game.

I am not saying that GX is all bad. The battle system is slightly tweaked and improved from the previous two. The mana egg system is much more interesting than Grandia 2's. And the skill system gives you much more control over customization than the previous two games as well. But it's the tediousness of leveling up/going through the same LONG (uninspired) dungeons/etc that thoroughly negate any positives it has.

What did people enjoy, or not enjoy about it?

 

[ezekial45]

I love Grandia. GX is actually my favorite next too GII (Never played the first). I've beaten the game once and now i have to beat the 2nd part (100 floor dungeon). I'm not really that big on dungeon crawlers, but the battle system is what still keeps me interested.

 

[MoxManiac]

I dunno, I found the game challenging but I never had to grind at all and never had problems taking down bosses. The game is certainly harder than others in the series, but i'd still put the overall difficulty somewhere in the middle. BTW you don't need to swap out characters at all. I kept the same four (Evann/Brandoll/The blonde chick/the effiminate green haired elf dude) throughout the game with zero problems. I might have used 1 or 2 others when forced to, but other than that, same party.

 

[Dragona Akehi]

The biggest problem with Xtreme is the lack of camera control on the right stick.

For ****'s sake GameArts the PSX port of Grandia had that!

 

[demi]

The game is garbage, you can't really defend that.

 

[DeathCabCute]

Game is teh lame. Though I never get tired of the grandia fighting system.

 

[Brandon F]

I've tried a few times myself and kept getting detracted by the Xtreme cutscenes. Just awful stuff that stretches on into oblivion between dungeons.

The save thing is lame too, but the dungeons and combat are at least interesting.

Reminds me that I still need to play GIII, or maybe not...

 

[Tsubaki]

I dunno, I found the game challenging but I never had to grind at all and never had problems taking down bosses. The game is certainly harder than others in the series, but i'd still put the overall difficulty somewhere in the middle. BTW you don't need to swap out characters at all. I kept the same four (Evann/Brandoll/The blonde chick/the effiminate green haired elf dude) throughout the game with zero problems. I might have used 1 or 2 others when forced to, but other than that, same party.

See, but that's exactly the thing. There are games that bite you in the butt if you do that (keep same party entire game).

Shining Force III Scenario 1 is like that. The final battle you end up in two different fights simultaneously, where you send one party here and another party there. If you had only focused on a single party of members, you simply could not win that fight and probably needed to restart from the beginning of the game. I did.

So ever since that experience, whenever there's a choice of party members, I try to keep my party balanced. Call it paranoia or what, but I feel you simply got lucky that GX allowed you to play with a single party throughout. There are many games out there, other than Shining Force III, that penalize you severely for that.

And to clarify, grinding in GX only exists because if you try to balance your exp among all party members, Evann levels up much faster than your other people, thus making battles tougher for your other people.