Grandia Xtreme

"Strictly for fans only!"

And when I say fans, I don't mean fans of the Grandia series in general; I mean hardcore die-hard fans of the Grandia battle system. That means you're not looking for story, you're not looking for characters and you certainly don't expect anything approaching Grandia 1's soundtrack in this game. If that is what matters to you, you're in for a treat. Everybody else, stay far, far away from this game.

Apart from the batle system, I can't think of a single thing that this game did right. I pity the fans that bought this after Grandia 2, expecting more of the same. The thing is, if they were going to go ahead and make a gaiden dungeon-crawler, logic suggests that they should have put in enough effort to make it the best one ever. They already had an advantage in the awesome, awesome Grandia battle system, a system awesome enough save even a game like Grandia 3 from the pits of review hell it so richly deserved.

Characters
What Game Arts should have done with this game, therefore, is not to bother trying to put in a story or any sort of character development. Because quite frankly they did a terrible, half-hearted job of everything, and it shows. The protagonist Evann, quite apart from being cursed with THE worst hairstyle in the history of RPG heroes, is also the most boring and irritating character in the entire series so far. He has no reason for anything he does. In fact being a hero goes directly against his stated intentions, but the player is forced to play with him and watch him complain again and again about all the things that he is clearly doing of his own free will. As for the other characters, most of them have little or no back story at all and are clearly just there so you can form a party. Why not go ahead and cut out all the back stories, then? It all amounts to the same thing in the end, since they have absolutely no relevance to the plot.

Plot
The plot is terrible, so why do they have to talk so much? They should just have been self-aware and gone old-school NES style. “The world is in danger. Collect the 4 relics and save the world!” Then throw you down there with 3 companions and leave you to it. That's what the game boils down to anyway, so why drag things out? It's not like Grandia games are known for the originality of their stories anyway.

But no, Game Arts insists on a story. The result is, you clear one dungeon and you're “rewarded” with a long cutscene full of slooooowly crawling text and horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE voice-acting. Remember how bad the VAs were in Grandia 1? These are even WORSE! And they just won't stop talking! My final solution was to reach for the remote and mute the TV whenever a cutscene came up, to preserve my rapidly-fraying nerves.

I want to fight! I want to fight!! I don't want to spend 20 minutes (and I'm not kidding) listening to characters talking about how evil so-and-so is, when I knew it all along, and they knew it all along, so we all knew it all along so why do we have to go over it again?

Graphics
Grandia 2 had better graphics, and that's saying something! Remember the blocky limbs and features of N64's Ocarina of Time? Yeah, like that, in a game published in 2002 on PS2. And just like in OoT, the characters in Grandia Xtreme have only 1 facial expression: perpetually mad. Dialogue is carried out by way of little squares of text with a character portrait, and the expressions on the character portrait do change. This leads to the peculiar situation where Evann will be saying something goofy (like he always does) and his little portrait has a dumb grin on its face but the “real” Evann behind him is scowling like the cat drank his milk. Ooookayyy…Moving on.

Battles
As I said at the start, the Grandia series has one of the best turn-based battle systems in all RPGland. If you've played a Grandia before, you know (and love) the drill. There's a time (IP) gauge with icons representing your party and the enemy. When a character gets to the COM (command) mark, you input a command. When he gets to the ACT mark, he executes it. Attacks can set you back on the IP gauge or, if the right attack hits between COM and ACT, cancel your move altogether. Additionally each character has several special moves that can be used both to inflict extra damage and to cancel enemy moves. Other special moves can heal the whole part or raise everyone's attack, very useful indeed. As you use the moves they level up, and once they reach a certain level you unlock flashy and more powerful new moves. You also have magic in the form of mana eggs, each with a set amount of MP. You can combine different eggs to give you new ones with even more dangerous/helpful properties, a must if you're to get anywhere quickly. Then there are Skill Books, which you equip skills on, e.g. Counter, Guard, more HP, etc. The skills level up as you fight different enemies, and some maxed out skills are very, very useful indeed. All in all it's a great system, very interesting indeed. If I was rating this particular game purely on the battle system alone, I'd give it a solid 8/10, it's that much fun. Grandia III has the best incarnation of the battle system, but Xtreme is a close second.

Unfortunately there's a big catch. You have to do that all fighting in the same 8 or so dungeons over and over again. Skills and items are mostly random drops from enemies and certain dungeon rooms, so it's not a question of refusing to fight. Grandia Xtreme has a system where all the dungeons get a difficulty boost after some events in the storyline. This happens 3 times in the game, meaning if you want to get the best items and mana eggs – and if you want to avoid getting slaughtered by the bosses - you're going to be playing each dungeon at least 3 times over, most likely more. The exact same dungeons. Three bloody times. Would it have killed them to have just made 24 lovely, well-designed dungeons instead? And to populate them with a variety of monsters instead of the same 15 designs lifted straight from Grandia 2? It's hard to put in words exactly how tedious it is to fight the same bloody little green caterpillars and little blue jellyfish and little brown spiders and little grey trolls over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Ughhhh…

More Cons
1. There is only one save point in the entire game. ONLY ONE. If you want to save, you have to warp back from the dungeons to town, save and then warp out again. To make things worse, most dungeons only have 1 or two warp points at most, spaced very widely apart (they call them Geo Gates, but I know a warp point when I see one). To put it bluntly, this is not a game for the casual gamer. You have to devote at least an hour to each session, or risk having to turn the game off before you can save.

2. Since the game is called “Xtreme,” the writers obviously thought it would be fabulous to have the characters use “extreme” language from time to time. You know, calling people S-O-Bs, and using b-words and h-words and other words that would get my review rejected by GameFAQs if I were “xtreme” enough to type them here. As you can guess, this does absolutely nothing to improve the game in any way.

3. Equipping Mana Eggs and Skill Books has to be done in town, and only in town. That's right, you spend 2 hours grinding a dungeon, run out of uses on your Aqua Egg and ooh how lucky, the next chest has a new one. Nope, sorry, no can do. You've gotta get out of the dungeon first before you can equip it, too bad. Better pray you don't get killed before you get to the next Geo Gate.

4. Which reminds me, your inventory is severely limited. You can only have 30 items in your pack at a time, excluding stackables (10 of every item). You steal a fantastic new axe from an enemy and can't pick it up because your pack is full. What the ---*xtreme language deleted*---!? It's realistic, I'll give you that, but who needs realism in a world of mana eggs and warp points?

Final Thoughts
Game Arts, if you ever decide to give the idea of a Grandia dungeon-crawler another shot, here's what you should do in nutshell. Cut out the voice acting, you never do it right. Cut out the story too. And pump all that money into the designing proper dungeons and enemies and beefing up the battle system, because that's the only real advantage Grandia has over the other 200000 RPGs out there. Grandia Xtreme just doesn't cut it, neither as an RPG nor as a dungeon crawler. Save your money for something better.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/08

Game Release: Grandia Xtreme (US, 09/30/02)